The new pick-up line: “I have a very large MRI device…”

A team of neuroscientists has made the coolest nerd porn film ever. They gave 16 women vibrators and asked them to bring themselves to orgasm while they made a movie…of their brains, using an MRI scanner. It’s going to premiere at the Society for Neuroscience meetings.

While it sounds like they have some interesting results — there is a consistent, wide-spread pattern of brain activity during orgasm, and specific areas are known to fire up — the article is not going to do a lot for Professor Barry Komisaruk’s reputation. The interviewer asked a few too many trivial questions.

“In women, orgasm produces a very extensive response across the brain and body,” said Barry Komisaruk, professor of psychology at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who oversaw the research.

“In one experiment we asked women to self-stimulate and then raise their hands each time they orgasmed. Some women raised their hands several times each session, often just a few seconds apart,” Professor Komisaruk said. “So the evidence is that woman tend to have longer orgasms and can experience several of them.”

So…the women in Professor Komisaruk’s life have never had a satisfactory sexual experience with him, so he needed a multi-million dollar machine to figure this out? I’m glad he finally learned this!

(I joke—I’m sure there are interesting neurological results, this article just highlighted the obvious, as if it were news.)

The War on Christmas continues!

I guess I’m not the only person in the world to get ranty emails from devout Christians. I was sent a copy of the message below which was originally sent to a store (name hidden to protect the guilty) which was selling a copy of the hideous leg lamp from the movie, A Christmas Story.

i-81a007951135afebe3b118a648e04bb8-leglamp.jpeg

To ‘Your Retail Store’:

Today I went into your store, and I was appalled and disgusted that you blasphemed Almighty God Jesus Christ and His Most Holy Nativity Christmas by selling from your store shelves a filthy pornographic lamp that said “Christmas” Story on it. REMOVE THAT PIECE OF FILTHY, PORNOGRAPHIC BLASPHEMY FROM YOUR STORESHELVES AT ONCE! Christmas is the Most Holy and Sacred Birthday of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ of the Most Holy Perpetual Virgin Mary. It is MOST SACRED! How dare you blaspheme Jesus Christ with a filthy, disgusting, pornographic product by daring to put the Holy Name of Christ in Christmas on your filthy disgusting product! REMOVE THAT FILTHY, DISGUSTING, PORNOGRAPHIC, BLASPHEMOUS PRODUCT FROM YOUR SHELVES AT ONCE! Repent! And go to confession AT ONCE, and get down on your knees and beg Almighty God Jesus Christ to forgive you for your filthy pornograph blasphemy of the Sacred and Holy Name of Christmas, which is the Holy Nativity of the One and Only God, the Messiah, Jesus Christ. Almighty God will not let go unpunished those who blaspheme His Holy Son, or His Holy Nativity Christmas. It is Most Holy and Sacred, and you must always treat it in a Holy and Sacred manner.

I will NEVER shop in your stores again. And as long as you continue to sell that blasphemous filth of yours, I will encourage others to not to shop at ‘Your Retail Store’ because of your anti-Christ blasphemies, and will promote a BOYCOTT of ‘Your Retail Store’.

In Deepest Adoration, Reverence and Respect for Almighty God Jesus Christ and his most Sacred Nativity Christmas.

P.S.: No e-mails from you will be received. Remove those filthy blasphemies from your shelves, as I fully intend to implement what I have stated.
(*Do not contact me about this inquiry.)
Category: Customer service
Type: Other service
Sub Type: Other

It makes me wonder if good Catholics tend to wear out the caps lock and shift keys on their keyboards at a faster rate than sane people.

I applaud Language Log’s bold new policy

Bravo! A blog about language gets, as you might expect, a few fairly repetitive responses to common issues, and Language Log gets lots of unimaginative comments about ending a sentence with a preposition…and they’ve reached the limits of their patience.

Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two dopey comment types and deleting them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them.

I realize that it is unusual for a popular science blog to launch upon a policy of killing its own readers. That is why I thought an explicit warning should go up on the site first. This is that warning.

Since there is now a precedent, I will happily follow suit. I have a few peeves of my own that I think will have to be treated with the death penalty to all offenders.

  • The man waiting for rescue from a flood “joke”. No, I will not repeat it. And remember, if you try to repeat it in the comments, it is now a killing offense. (If you really need to know what it is, it’s in my book.)

  • Any statement about how science is just another religion.

  • In any thread about the problems women face in our culture, any man who starts crying about his poor butchered foreskin will join it in the biological waste disposal.

  • Any claim that atheists ignore the ‘sophisticated’ claims of theists without telling us exactly what those brilliant neglected arguments are.

There will certainly be others added to this list, because I am capricious and vindictive.

Geoffrey Pullum has contracted out the termination job to two of his staffers, Luca and Enzo. I do not employ “people” with sufficient autonomy to have warranted names, but instead will be dispatching the faceless (literally) molluscan horde to take care of the condemned. A suggestion: if you receive a death sentence, head for the nearest seacoast and wait for the tentacles to arise; they’re savage, quick, and painless. Trying to hide in landlocked areas means you’ll be taken care of by the snails and slugs, which means execution by slow, painful radulation.