Last night I was talking with a friend about, well, various things, including work and government. He pointed out that leaders can fall into roughly two camps: those who surround themselves with smart, hardworking people who will be better than they are at certain things, and those who surround themselves with people who will make them feel smart ( ( Read more... )

misia has asked some questions about people's sex ed, and for a Valentine's Day gift: she'd like people to donate to Scarleteen, a not-for-profit, independent sexuality and sexual health resource for teens (or, as Bitch PhD points out, for anyone-they don't discriminate ( Read more... )

I've been metaquoted:

Context: sabotabby asked whether wasabi-lime mustard goes well with pear-and-brie sandwiches (we haven't tested this yet), and how people first learned about sex. I responded (in comments):

[M]y poor seventh-grade Catholic school teacher sent the boys to the library and informed us that the Ministry of Education said we had to have ( Read more... )

I have got to stop reading Pandagon at lunch. I wind up taking far too long to draft lengthy comments on tangential points.

Case in point, a comment that I'm really quite proud of, inspired by this comment from a thread on The identity politics of atheism. So I'm re-posting the comment here, prettied up and slightly edited.

( Cut for zingerella holding forth. (But isn't that what you came here for?) )

Snippets that I've been saving until I could think of something intelligent to say about them. Lacking in intelligent things to say, I offer them with minimal commentary and no apology.

For human_loser
What makes book-to-screen adaptations work.

... for an aspiring film-maker seeking a profitable project, there are no guarantees from talent-spotting in the ( Read more... )

Like, Bitch Ph.D, I'm extremely impressed with this feature in Glamour magazine (and as the Bitch says, the image and ad alongside the article may be NSFW):

Glamour, has found that on issues ranging from STDs to birth control, some radical conservative activists have used fudged and sometimes flatly false data to persuade the government to promote ( Read more... )