Animated Harold: it's cartoon time!

Let's talk about. . .FEMALE VIAGRA!

 
What You Need To Know About ‘Female Viagra’

INFOGRAPHIC  August 20, 2015

VOL 51 ISSUE 33   Health · Science & Technology · Science ·Medication · Women


The FDA recently approved the sale of Flibanserin, a pink pill intended for women diagnosed with low sex drive; critics have questioned the pill’s effectiveness, while advocates are praising the move toward supporting both men and women with these sexual issues. Here are some of the most common questions about Flibanserin:

Q: How does Flibanserin work?
A: Women simply take the pill daily for four to eight weeks, feel no increase in happiness or desire, and then discontinue using it.

Q: Is it safe?
A: No. The female libido is a cloven-hoofed beast that must be caged.

Q: Where can I get Flibanserin?
A: From any doctor in possession of clipboards and pens with the Sprout Pharmaceuticals logo.

Q: What are the possible side effects?
A: Trial participants reported feelings of being duped, ripped off, and lied to.

Q: What are some of the proposed brand names?
A: Pink Lightning; Libido Juice; Corsoffren.

Q: How long does it take for Flibanserin to work?
A: Results vary depending on how gullible patient is.

Q: How much does it cost?
A: $29.99, but if you order now only $13.99, plus you’ll get 10 free jars of Orgasmo-Boom Skin Butter, all with free shipping and handling.

Q: Why was the drug rejected twice before?
A: Doesn’t matter now! It’s approved, baby!

Q: I’m a woman in my mid-50s in a loving relationship, but do not feel like engaging in sexual intercourse. Sometimes I feel as if my husband does not communicate how he truly feels about me or my body, and I have a hard time discussing this with him. Will this pill solve that?
A: Yes.

Q: Are there other alternatives for women?
A: Physicians have found equal efficacy in raising libido from reading The Cowboy’s Touch, Going Cowboy Crazy, or To Kiss A Texan.

Q: Will insurance cover Flibanserin?
A: Hold on there, little dreamer! Let’s work on basic contraception first.

P. S. Though there are eight links to the original article under the title, I want you to be sure where this gem comes from. In other words, I didn't write it, folks. Wish I had.

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Josh Duggar: let's read that first draft!

Thus, the abject, Jimmy-Swaggart-esque apology written by Josh Duggar's lawyers, before yet another lawyer edited the thing. Red-pencilled are the remarks that might be considered "litigious". In other words, too close to the truth.

Needless to say, Josh's little escapades led to TLC cancelling (after long and ratings-conscious deliberation) the wildly-popular paean to assembly-line babymaking in the Fundamentalist realm, 19 Kids and Counting.

So what will Josh do now? I think he ought to drag his sorry ass to jail for some serious time, but that won't happen. He'll twist things around so that if WE don't forgive him, there will be something wrong with us. We'll be choosing to hold bitterness in our hearts rather than surrender the whole icky mess to the Lord God Almighty and his sidekick, J. Christ.

But it's more likely TLC will choose to build another reality show around Josh. Shall we call it 19 Sins and Counting? 

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Kittenzilla 1 and 2: The Return

Facebook hacks: or, why it is so depressing to be a blogger

Well, first of all nobody buys your books anyway, even though you forced yourself to start a blog to promote the book. Which everyone told you you HAD to do.

It's all a  popularity contest based on views and followers, meaning 98% of bloggers will beat you every time.

The only really enjoyable thing is writing the posts, which is considered the least important.

But no. THAT is not the thing that pisses me off today.

At the top of my Facebook page, a yellow bar appeared today that I cannot get rid of. This yellow bar has a little triangle with an exclamation point inside it, and it wants me to give my phone number to Facebook "to help secure your account AND MORE." The "and more" is never explained.

I do not want to give my phone number to Facebook. At all. EVER. No matter how many reassurances they give me that it will be kept private, it won't be. Things are being hacked all the time, daily, things which, incredibly, are even more important than Facebook.

This post is a sad little thing. I wrote a nice fat juicily angry one backed up with lots of articles from The Guardian, etc., saying that I was right and should NEVER give my phone number to Facebook, no matter how much Facebook tells us it's all right.

Facebook telling us it's all right is supposed to make it all right, or at least make us THINK it's all right.It isn't. All right.

Phone numbers and a lot of other personal information is for sale on the Internet, and Facebook, or, sorry, no, somebody PRETENDING to be Facebook, might be selling it even as we speak. This information is being tossed to advertisers like herrings to hungry sea lions.

That's still not the worst thing. This yellow bar won't go away and is still sitting at the top of my Facebook page and has no "no" option, though it appears to. It has a "dead" x that does nothing in the corner, giving you the illusion you have a choice and can turn it down if you want to. You can't. You can't even click it away so you don't have to look at the stupid mocking piss-yellow thing any more.

But it gets even worse. In trying to write a blog post about that yellow bar and the evil it represented, that selfsame yellow bar (incredibly) transferred itself to the top of my blog home page. It was greyed out so I couldn't get rid of it or do anything with it. At all. I know it was the Facebook yellow bar because it had the Facebook "head" symbol on the left side, but no lettering on it. Then Internet Explorer told me I didn't even have a blog any more, that it had been completely wiped. I clicked around and managed to accidentally delete the post I've been working on all day. It's gone. But the grey/yellow bar is gone, too.

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED HERE?????

Like a virus, that unwanted "invitation" to give my phone number to Facebook jumped to my blog home page and destroyed a post about me NOT wanting to give them my phone number.

From the Deep Web (a sort of Twilight Zone of creepy cyberstories) to the Cloud, which may or may not actually be suspended in the sky, the internet just gets scarier. Soon it will develop consciousness, like HAL in the movie 2001, and spew astronauts out in space with no oxygen supply.

Meantime my magnificent post about Facebook's attempt to hijack and pirate my privacy has disappeared. Hey, I'M not saying Facebook had anything to do with this. But it's possible their little ghouls read my mind, or my blog, and decided to wipe the whole thing clean.

Or not. But FUCK how I hate having to reconstruct a post which I KNOW will never be as good as the original.

POST-BLOG GLOB: So here's what they told me! Facebook's "response" to my query about their request for my phone number:

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback. We’re constantly trying to improve Facebook, so it's important that we hear from the people who use it. Unfortunately, we can’t respond to your emails individually, but we are paying attention to them. We appreciate you taking the time to write to us.

If you're having any problems with your account, please visit the Help Center (http://www.facebook.com/help) where you'll find information about Facebook as well as the answers to many of your questions.

Thanks again for your feedback,
The Facebook Team

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"Why didn't this catch on??"

Why, why,why, you may ask yourselves,WHY didn't these brilliantly innovative inventions catch on? Why do we not see them today as we stroll down the street? Why must they be consigned to the dusty halls of Pinterest? It is difficult to imagine why the Turkey Wagon didn't catch on. Keeping two turkeys is so much cheaper than a pony, though their sense of direction might be erratic.

Are these sound amplification devices? Small strap-on mobile cannons? Some bizarre sort of plumbing system involving attaching people's heads together? Or merely a strange precursor to the Mickey Mouse Club?

The whole trouble with Pinterest and all those Top Ten Most Horrible sites is that they don't give you any background, and if they do it's either wrong or just a wild-ass guess. So I might as well make my own wild-ass guess and say this is a bottom-pincher which can stretch out to a full capacity of twelve miles. The figure operating it is a pervert.

The Isolator, The Isolator! I found so many pictures of The Isolator, and I still do not know what The Isolator is or might have been. Looks like something Michael Jackson might have used, or perhaps the end of a giant twinkie. A tank of some unknown gas, purported to be oxygen, rests on the desk.

This is beautiful, even though I do not understand it. I don't know if this was an experimental prototype, or if Isolators roamed the streets back in the 1920s.

This would, in fact, be very isolating. Small children might run screaming. I am trying to figure out what all those gizmos are on Hugo's desk. Perhaps they are merely props to make all this look terribly scientific and distract you from the fact that this headgear is bloody useless.

THE ISOLATOR!

This woman is encased in something called the Swimming Machine. She appears to be strapped or perhaps bolted in, while her girl friend cranks the crank that makes the something-or-other, the contraption, the Swimming Machine, force her arms and legs into gyrations approximating swimming. I like this, but I don't like to think what might happen when the tide comes in.

This is the precursor to those bloody videos where a dog is supposed to be eating dinner, and you know it's all faked because a dog NEVER does that with a fork and spoon. This dog seems to be holding a rifle.

That square thing at the top, first of all, has a face. Are you one of these people who sees faces in everything? It's a malevolent being with dials for eyes and a pressure-gauge for a nose, and like the gas meters of my childhood it terrifies me. The guy is boiling his feet off for reasons we don't know, or trying to keep busy or keep his hands off himself, and his feet off himself too. Victorians.

This is even better. It's the Schnee Bath, in which a man bathes his Schnee while two fetching nurses look on. The fact he needs two medical attendants while undergoing the Schnee Bath is alarming. Wires appear to be running from that ominous-looking box straight into the buckets of bath water. This guy's going to do a Thomas Merton any time, and they'll have to peel him off the ceiling.

People like to strap things on their head. You see it all the time. This thing looks like it could explode at any minute. It's a fire-extinguisher, actually, like in the horrible old Victorian school I went to, the one that had a sign on it that said DO NOT TOUCH. People were literal enough back then, and so afraid of authority, that if the entire school were in a conflagration, no one would have touched that fire extinguisher because it had a sign on it that said DO NOT TOUCH. And I would be dead and not writing this.

Look carefully at the blobby thing on top of the woman's head. It's the back view of an alien, with its long skinny arms and legs wrapped around her face. It is eating her brain, but she has not noticed it yet because she is high on the fumes from the fire extinguisher.

If I had to work at a typewriter again, I think I'd wear one of these so I could scream as loud as I could and no one would hear me. If things got really bad, I could mentally control the various weapons appending from the helmet. I could fire death-rays at someone. The long tube coming out of the fellow's mouth is a vacuum cleaner hose. He's having a conversation with his buddy in the next room. My brother and I used to do that all the time, and also roll marbles and send the hamster on a little journey.

This is trick photography. This thing actually sits on the ground and does nothing.

Who needs eyeballs, when you can have implants? These fit neatly in each eye socket and completely eliminate the use of the eye. Think they're not attractive? Guess again. Available in a variety of styles and colours, 

Ice cream wagon? No. Portable oven? Hmm. The woman is wearing a gas mask, and there's this little vent-ish looking thing - . No. There could not be a baby in there.

This is one of the more unfortunate artifacts from Nazi Germany, in which infants were indoctrinated with piped-in speeches by Adolf Hitler before they could crawl. The comely Fraulein is reading Mein Kampf, also adapted into a child's first reader (Fun with Adolf and Eva).

This is obviously something that turns, right? Turns around? In a circle? Then why is the guy's head plugged into it the way it is? His head would be wrapped around this thing in about two seconds and he would be ground up into hamburger by all those gears at the bottom.  A learning device designed by Hieronymus Bosch, probably meant to punish sinners.

"You had me at hello"

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Gif of cat in bowler hat playing piano.

Alive and gay and dying in Connecticut

The young man was beautiful. Simply beautiful. Sandy red hair, just a light gold-dusting of freckles, and a graceful body he carried in a sort of princely manner. This belied the fact that he had already attempted suicide four times.

His parents hustled him to a psychiatrist, which is what you did when your child went off the rails. Nobody talked about it, but everyone knew he had to go. It was torture for him because it reminded him of the fact that he could not seem to get his life together, though he was already twenty-three.

The waiting room smelled almost as bad as a dentist’s, though at least he couldn’t hear the sound of drills. He had half-expected wails and screams, like in The Snake Pit, but so far there were none. This was 1956, after all, and he suspected such scenarios were out of date.

“Nigel.” The nurse or receptionist or nun or whatever-she-was announced his name. His number was up. He was reminded of the Negro spiritual, “There’s a man goin’ round takin’ names”. Someone had taken his name already.

The psychiatrist sat behind a huge, monolithic desk, and Nigel was just as glad, because he only had to look at half of him. He was not required to lie on a couch, although a couch was provided.

“Nigel.” The psychiatrist, Dr. March, had all the requisite diplomas on the wall. A spider appended from one of them. He opened a folder which had already been prepared for him. What could be in it?

“Your parents believe you’d benefit from some counselling, psychoanalysis perhaps.” He peered at Nigel over glasses that slid down his nose.

“I guess they think so.”

“Well, what do YOU think?”

“I’m not sure. I think I could do without it.”

“So just what sort of problems are you having?” Dr. March probably knew.

“Oh, a few problems at the university – post-graduate, you know – “

“Your parents tell me you want to go to Europe.”

“Well, see, it’s my last chance to have a few adventures before I – “

“Before you what?”

He was stumped by that one.

“Before you take up a respectable life. So you want to sow your wild oats.”

He wasn’t familiar with the expression. “Yes, sir. I mean, yes, doctor. I think so.”

“What do you plan to do in Europe?”

“I’d like to get a motorbike – “

“Motorbike?”

“Yes. It’s a – “

“I know what a motorbike is. I am curious as to why you would want to get one.”

“Can get around faster, that’s all.”

“Get around.”

“See the sights.”

“What sort of sights are you interested in?”

“Oh, Paris, Rome, that sort of – “

“What sort of companions might you have on this trip? Have you thought about that?”

“Companions.”

“This is what your parents are so concerned about. The people whose company you keep.”

This was such a convoluted way of putting it that Nigel was momentarily confused.

“Oh. You mean – like, fellow travellers and – “

“Yes. Fellow travellers.”

“Oh well. I wouldn’t know that until I got there.” Nigel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He had to use the washroom, but wouldn’t ask, didn’t want to show that kind of weakness on the first appointment.

“Just where do you think you might meet these fellow travellers? Your parents have been concerned about the company you have been keeping.”

There was that novelist at the university, a dazzler really, and Nigel had been so in love with him that his teeth ached. And the prof, simply brilliant, but even worse because he was so completely unattainable. There had also been a couple of covert meetings in bars, their locations by necessity conveyed in a sort of secret code.

“I’ve got friends. I mean – “

“What sort of friends?”

“We have similar interests.”

“Nigel, I will not beat about the bush here. Your parents have sent you here because they have seen evidence that you might possibly have homosexual tendencies. This is a serious mental disorder which should be addressed while you are still in your young manhood, so that there is a greater chance it can be arrested.”

“Arrested.”

“Yes. Though we used to believe it could be eradicated, the measures required were drastic, often involving castration and the use of hormones. This was, of course, only used in criminal cases.”

Nigel could feel his balls contract. He was pushed against the wall. Don’t be a homosexual, don’t.

“Thus a trip to Europe is not a desirable possibility at this moment, when you are just beginning to experience this impulse and might be tempted to act upon it.”

“I haven’t acted upon it,” he lied, putting a sweet expression on his face, an expression that had been plastered on there for a long time.

“Good! Good! That is a very good sign, and indicates you are motivated to resist your feelings and thus take the first steps toward mental health.”

If his reaction to his lie was “good, good!”, then obviously his reaction to the truth would be “bad, bad!” or some variation thereof.

“But doctor, you know, I know some people who – that is, they’ve made the adjustment – “

“These people live outside of society. They are on the fringes of acceptability.”

“I know a poet. Met him through somebody at the university.”

“Exactly right.”

“His name is Allen. Allen Ginsberg. He wrote this poem that – “

“Exactly right! One must contemplate the level of income one can expect from a poem.”

“It’s called Howl.”

“Strange name for a poem. Not exactly Wordsworth, is it?”

“No.” He shifted in his chair, his need to void his bladder really bad now, but he had to hold out.

“Your parents believe it would be in your best interests to spend the summer with your grandparents in Connecticut. Lots of odd jobs you can do there. Meet people your own age, that sort of thing.”

Young men? Nigel thought. No, he couldn’t mean that.

“I’m not much interested in Connecticut, doctor.”

“It’s not a question of what you are interested in, Nigel. Quite the opposite. Your parents believe, and my professional opinion is in agreement, that your priority should be suppressing these alarming impulses you have been having before they rise up and assume a life of their own.”

“And this will happen in Connecticut.”

“More likely there than buzzing around on a motorcycle in Paris and Rome.”

“So I’ll end up marrying a nice girl?”

“There’s a greater chance of it, if we start now. We’ve had lots of success stories. Men have learned to quell these impulses and keep them under control for a lifetime.”

“But what sort of effort does it take?”

“Effort? Of course it takes effort. It takes ongoing effort to overcome any major psychiatric disorder. Most men have controlled it through constant vigilance.”

“Vigilance.” Sounded like a very romantic term. Lying next to a woman he didn’t love, sneaking out after she had gone to sleep.

“I am going to put you on some medication to help calm you and get these impulses under control. It is only then that we can begin this work, which I warn you will be long and difficult.”

“What about Connecticut? Will I be ready for Connecticut?”

The doctor, dense as he was, picked up the merest thread of sarcasm, even satire, and didn’t like it.

“Connecticut will be dealt with when the time is right.”

Right. He had the prescription now, and a plan. He realized that it was necessary, if one was to be successful, to commit suicide twice.

Slash your wrists, then hang yourself.

Take the pills, then jump off the bridge.

Shoot yourself in the head just as the train bears down on the tracks.

He could mix and match any way he wanted. It was the only safe way to do it, guaranteeing success. You would never pull through.

It would solve the problem neatly and elegantly. You can’t know poets like that, for heaven’s sake, and get married and pretend. The possibilities were too horrendous.

He wanted to make his parents sorry. But his parents would not be sorry. They would be full of pity and reassured only that their son had been intractably mentally ill, and that there was nothing anyone could have done.

He jumped on the bus, walked to the back, juggling possibilities. Take pills, jump off, shoot yourself. Slash, hang, train. It was like a Chinese restaurant, elegantly simple, one from column a, one from column b.

All he had to do was pick two.

"You had me at hello"

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