Men got Viagra, which gave them the ability to have sex whenever they wanted (though if they could do it for more than four hours they should see a doctor) and then, suddenly, it was annoying pathological that women didn’t want or weren’t as sexually responsive as men were.

And suddenly, wouldn’t you know it, 43% of women had some sort of sexual dysfunction.

That’s not hyperbole. The actual number was 43%. Left handed people make up 10% of the population. Redheads make up 2% of the world’s population. Gay people are 10% of the world’s population. None of those groups are deemed fixable (unless you’re a crazy person). If a number is nearly half of a group then it’s normal. You can’t fix normal. Because it’s freakin’ normal.

But the men could take a pill to be eighteen again and men have been taught that ‘real men’ can go all night (no one asks what real men’s sexual partners want, apparently). So they take the pill so they can be real men again. Then they tell 43% of their wives and girlfriends something is wrong with them and to take a pill or use a patch or a cream or have surgery to bring them up to par, too.

Pills and patches and creams and surgeries bring money in so the medical establishment said, ‘Well h’okay! We’ll get right on that!’

[Now, I fully believe that medicine can be a wonderful thing. Vaccines have saved the world millions of times over and anti-depressants have literally saved my life and migraine medication has given me the ability to actually have a life. Drugs can be enormously useful when used to treat actual problems.]

Orgasm Inc is about the pathologization of the perfectly natural female sexual response. At the start of Liz Canner’s documentary there are five products trying to get approval in the US including pills, a patch and a cream.We follow the stories of some of the drugs, including the one that was most successful, as its pushers, I mean makers, attempt to get it approved.

We also meet a woman who has an experimental new surgery on her spine that’s highly dangerous but is supposed to allow a person to reach climax by using a remote control-like device. She can have orgasms, just not through intercourse with her husband. You know, like nearly every other woman on planet Earth. We follow the woman through the entire process of her spinal surgery; before, during the testing phase and the final result.

Canner also goes to a medical convention where she meets someone (a woman, which just…what) who advocates labioplasty. (This is a word my computer’s spell check doesn’t recognize and I refuse to add to my dictionary because it shouldn’t be a word.) The woman wasn’t comfortable showing before and after pictures of satisfied clients to the camera, but Canner saw them and said, ‘They look like little girls.’ The other woman’s response, ‘Oh yeah, I hadn’t noticed that before, but they do.’

This other person was a woman. A HUMAN WOMAN.

Finally, we meet a woman who had vaginal rejuvenation surgery in an effort to orgasm more easily. And we find out how that went for her.

On the upside there are also women’s health advocates who actually know how women’s bodies work as they age and explain what parts of the anatomy receive the most pleasure and which receive little to none. I wonder how many of these women would feel the need to consult doctors if the men in their lives talked to these advocates.

Orgasm Inc gets a 5/5 because more women should see this. Strike that, ALL women over 18 should see this. So should men over 18. Forty-three percent is normal. Bodies change, desires change. Pills can’t ‘fix’ what isn’t broken.

Learn about your bodies, ladies. Learn about ladies’ bodies, men and don’t expect them to work the way yours do. If you want to be with someone whose body works like yours then sleep with dudes. If you love the ladies then you have to love the ladies.

This post brought to you by the sounds RAWR and Big Feminist Feelings.

Carl Panzram was arrested for murder and confessed to an impressive number of crimes including thousands of robberies, larcenies, arson, 22 murders and over 1,000 instances of sodomy on males. This was in 1928, when that level of depravity was simply unheard of. How could anyone be that evil?

This documentary is partially about Panzram himself, but it’s largely about the penal system, and its failings. Panzram got his start with the U.S. justice system very early on when he was sent to the Minnesota State Training School when he was twelve, where beatings to the point of bruises and blood were the rule of the day. He ran away on more than one occasion and was always punished with much vigour upon being caught.

Several experts weighed in-one of whom was Katherine Ramsland , a professor of forensics psychology. She pointed out that often serial killers will blame their behaviour on other people-Panzram blamed his poor treatment by his parents. Ramsland points out Panzram had several siblings who all turned out all right, intimating that their childhood could not have been so bad. Perhaps she wasn’t taking into account his brain trauma, which is a key part of the triumvirate of causes of sociopathy. (The other two being extreme abuse and mental illness.) Or that he was severely beaten and humiliated at school, which his siblings weren’t? Or that the siblings of serial killers don’t generally turn out to be serial killers themselves.

One of the other people consulted was artist Joe Coleman , who is something of an expert on the man, having done an intricate painting about his life. Coleman’s pieces are always painted with a paintbrush with one hair. His contribution to the film was a highlight.

A large portion of the documentary is about Panzram’s memoirs, which were written with the help of a guard in one particular prison. The guard brought pencils and paper and would take them away again once he had filled the pages. If either had been found out they both would had been in trouble. One more than the other, though, obviously.

One of the most striking (and disheartening) features is how little the penal system has changed in the decades since his imprisonment and death. People are put into a dehumanizing system and are then expected to behave like model citizens. Panzram’s thoughts on this are particularly eloquent.

Carl Panzram: The Spirit of Hatred and Vengeance was an interesting enough documentary about one of the U.S.’s first well-known and most brutal serial killers and the way the criminal justice system has (not) changed. I’d rate it 7/10.

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician in L.A. who is interested in bring death back into everyday life. To this end, she has a website, The Order of the Good Death, which includes a video series called Ask a Mortician where anyone with access to an internet connection can ask questions about Mortuary Science. There’s also a Facebook page and a Twitter account .

Madam Doughty is very personable and hilarious. And she has a Siamese cat that is quite enjoyable to watch.

The intro music reminds me of the incidental music of The Worst Witch . Whether or not that was intentional, it’s a plus. Big super plus.

Thus far there are twenty-two videos and I recommend all of them. But here are a few of my favourites.

To the Morbid Kids: It Gets Better!

Episode Three , which involves tattoos and Tibetan Sky Burial, but is not embeddable, for some reason.

Behold! An episode including Mary Roach!

This one is about decomposition! Using puppets!

This one covers different types of body disposal.

Exploding Caskets! KABOOM!

Donating your body to science (with grave robbers !)

The obligatory, but still very informative, Halloween episode:

And last but absolutely NOT least, she has an excellent video about how to talk about death with kids.

Bonus: She also did a very fun interview with Jeff Probst on his show:

So there you go. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and like her page and follow her Twitter and RSS her blog or whatever because she is funny and smart and she talks about dead things in funny and smart ways, for example this essay about why you should not take burial advice from country music songs.

Stephen Fry’s 100 Greatest Gadgets is a completely subjective list of gadgets Fry loves. How much you enjoy this will hinge heavily on how much you enjoy Stephen Fry and hilarious writing.

If there’s something fundamentally wrong with you and you dislike Fry or dry humour, you won’t find this amusing in the slightest.

It’s only a couple hours long, so each gadget gets very little time (which involves when it was invented and other factoids) yet every one made me laugh out loud. There are also comments from British presenters, actors, comedians, etc, that are equally hysterical.

The complete list can be found here .

Goths and Absinthe make a natural pair. The green drink has ornate, silver accoutrements, a ritual, is a misunderstood, underground beverage associated with European artists and so on. It’s Slytherin green, for crying out loud.

I tried the U.S. (i.e. non-wormwood)* version a few years ago and, as I’m not an enormous fan of anise, it didn’t do much for me. The ritual aspect and little spoon were the best parts and if I have the opportunity, I will try the real thing.

This is an intro to say that I was interested in Absinthe due to its cache, but I didn’t know a great deal about it, prior to watching the imaginatively documentary titled Absinthe: A Documentary .

After watching it, I came away knowing quite a bit more about the history of the drink. My favourite factoid was that it was probably developed by a woman and, pah!, that’s no good. Women, what do they know? So the recipe was purchased and made famous by a man. This is why there is dispute over where it originated-France or Switzerland.

Prior to watching the documentary, I knew that Absinthe wasn’t as insanity-inducing as people made it out to be for reasons found in number four on this list. So when brewers in the film began waxing poetical about how it made them feel I wondered how much of it was what they wanted to feel or thought they were supposed to be feeling. Some sort of placebo effect. Like giving a twelve year old a mint, telling them it’s ecstasy and watching them get ‘high’.

One of the people interviewed in the documentary is Ted Breaux, Wikipedia quotes him as saying, ‘the alleged secondary effects of absinthe may be caused by the fact that some of the herbal compounds in the drink act as stimulants, while others act as sedatives, creating an overall lucid effect of awakening.’ Which sounds like drinking strong coffee and alcohol simultaneously, so you’re very awake but also inebriated. I tried not-nearly diluted enough Kapali once and thought I was losing my mind, so if that’s what strong Absinthe is like then I can see where the reputation comes from.

Absinthe: a Documentary covers the history, the culture, the mystique and allure, the process of making Absinthe all over Europe, everything the average person interested in the drink could want to know. And it manages to do it in an incredibly dry way. (That’s not a beverage pun, it’s really a freakin’ dry documentary.) It held my interest enough to watch the entire thing, but I would not recommend it to someone who wasn’t already interested in Absinthe-it’s not the sort of thing you’d show to a friend to help explain why you find it fascinating.

I give it 3/5. It is a good primer for the already interested.

Bonus content!

In this video (which Reznor hates, btw) Trent starts preparing a glass of Absinthe around the 1.50 mark. Once he drinks a bit there’s a breakdown and the palette goes from blues to harsh green to signify the madness that supposedly accompanies drinking Absinthe.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t include this:

Manny winds up drinking it straight-no water or sugar. Blerg.

*Correction, the U.S. version has always had wormwood, please see this post for more information about common myths surrounding absinthe.

You know who is a happy fellow? Fred Phelps. That guy is the epitome of Christian love and compassion.

He’d never think of saying something like: ‘God doesn’t love everybody! Don’t give me that crap!’

And Fall from Grace shows him in all his glory as a beacon of gentler times to come.

[The beginning of this post brought to you by Sarcasm(tm).]

Seriously, the best parts of this are the interviews with the children in the family/church and the interviews with the two children of Mr Phelps who ran away from home. They give some interesting insights into his personality.

Oh, and the groups of people who get together to foil the Phelps’ attempts to make jackasses of themselves at funerals (the bikers who form a line between them and the mourners and rev their engines to drown out the shouting, for example) bring a tear of joy to my eye.
The biggest surprise for me was learning that Mr Phelps was about to turn 50 at the filming. I thought he was closer to 80.

Being angry and hateful all the time ages you like a mofo, people!

I recently watched a documentary about Anton LaVey and the Church of Satan that was filmed in the late ’60s. It’s heavy on the hype and drama with which LaVey surrounded himself, but it also shows how progressive the C o S was from the beginning. They talk about how they accept a wide-range of lifestyles and life philosophies. ‘Acceptance’ is the key word, here. They don’t believe in ‘tolerance’ because who wants to be tolerated?

For a group so demonized and reviled, they don’t actively despise anyone that doesn’t wish them physical harm.

Other groups that profess unconditional love for their fellow man tend not to practise what they preach, but Satanists are straightforward about their policies. You respect them, they respect you. You’re free to think what you’d like and live your life the way that’s natural for you.

Satanists have great respect for people that are true to themselves in the face of towering opposition. If Christianity speaks to you then be that, but allow other people to be true to themselves, as well.

Truth is truth no matter whose mouth it comes from. The truth is that the world would be a better place if people were allowed to be true to themselves.

Last night I watched the documentary The God Who Wasn’t There, which was made by a former fundamentalist Christian who realised that the Jesus story was extremely similar to other myths going back at least as far back as 2,400 years before the common era.

Wow. At least come up with a new story, people.

I don’t get why people need a person to look up to. The Bible was written by humans so, clearly, we don’t need a supernatural force to tell us to not be jerks to one another. Why can’t people recognise how much better life is if one doesn’t behave abominably to one’s fellow man and go with it?Why does there have to be a supernatural element? People have invented gods for millenia. Why don’t they trust themselves enough to make the correct decisions?

My hypothesis is that it gives your stance more weight. ‘It’s not me saying this, it’s this omnipotent being.’ It’s the ultimate, ‘My dad can beat up your dad,’ argument. ‘Well, if you disagree with me then you’re going to Hell.’ It’s nice to feel that those who dare to hold an opinion than you are going to be punished for not bowing to your superiority. Atheists don’t get to have that. We have no eternal punishment for those who disagree with us.

You also get to be special. Because you have some higher knowledge than the people who say, ‘There’s no scientific corroboration of any god’s existence.’ Those wacky, logical people.