Hat tip: Daily Dish.

No sensible person would go see Sex in the City 2 after reading (or even hearing about) the appalling notices. But one good thing has come out of the sequel: this delicious review, by Lindy West in Seattle alternative arts and culture paper, The Stranger:

We’ve been thinking it for two long years. All of us. Gnawing our cheeks at night, clutching at sweaty sheets, our faces hollow and gray, our once-bright eyes dimmed by the pain of too many questions. Sometimes we cry out, en masse, to a faceless god and a cold, indifferent universe that holds its secrets close. What… rasps the death rattle of our collective sanity. What is the lubrication level of Samantha Jones’s 52-year-old vagina? Has the change of life dulled its sparkle? Do its aged and withered depths finally chafe from the endless pounding, pounding, pounding—cruel phallic penance demanded by the emotionally barren sexual compulsive from which it hangs? If I do not receive an update on the deep, gray caverns of Jones, I shall surely die!

Please don’t die. The answer is… fine. Samantha’s vagina is doing fine. She rubs yams on it, okay? She takes 48 vagina vitamins a day. It accepts unlimited male penises with the greatest of ease. Now let us never speak of it again.

Read on…

[Update] OK, OK, smarter people than I point out that it’s SATC.

On The Moth storytelling podcast, the great Lewis Lapham reminisces about his first job, covering Oakland City Hall for the San Francisco Examiner in an era when reporters wore hats. Featuring The Horny Photographer, The One-Legged Woman, and The Unencumbered Widow.

Hat tip: Silas.

Click image for larger view. Hat tip: Flowingdata.com.

Among the nuggets:

[T]his being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to “be sustainable, don’t buy sex,” the local sex workers’ union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate’s pass. The term “carbon dating” just took on an entirely new meaning.

On a more serious note, the Telegraph notes a number of recent setbacks to Climate Change abatement efforts, including the East Anglia University email scandal.

In Copenhagen there was a humbler note among some delegates. “If we fail, one reason could be our overconfidence,” said Simron Jit Singh, of the Institute of Social Ecology. “Because we are here, talking in a group of people who probably agree with each other, we can be blinded to the challenges of the other side. We feel that we are the good guys, the selfless saviours, and they are the bad guys.”

As Mr Singh suggests, the interesting question is perhaps not whether the climate changers have got the science right – they probably have – but whether they have got the pitch right. Some campaigners’ apocalyptic predictions and religious righteousness – funeral ceremonies for economic growth and the like – can be alienating, and may help explain why the wider public does not seem to share the urgency felt by those in Copenhagen this week.

In a rather perceptive recent comment, [British Energy Secretary Ed] Miliband said it was vital to give people a positive vision of a low-carbon future. “If Martin Luther King had come along and said ‘I have a nightmare,’ people would not have followed him,” he said.

Hat tip: Colin May.

“Up to two times more than a manual brush.”

Sex sells, the saying goes, but this ad appears to rest upon a sublter formula: Selling sex sells. Does Oral B really hope to sell a lot of disguised masturbatory aids, or is it hoping to build customer loyalty by presenting itself as sex-positive?

After one too many disappointments, Biblically named British writer Hephzibah Anderson swore off boinking for a year, then wrote an intriguing article about the experience. Moneyquote:

“Beware of any enterprise that requires new clothes,” Thoreau cautioned, but today I am shopping for a chaste wardrobe. The clothes I pick out are generous and tough, nothing flimsy or flyaway. In my newly chaste state, my instinct is to wrap up and hide away.

It may seem strange that, having made such a personal, private decision, I’m seeking to solidify it by altering my outward appearance, but for now it seems an apt uniform, unlikely to give anyone the wrong idea, myself included.

It’s only when you’ve sworn off sex you begin to notice that it is everywhere. It’s in the swing of a waiter’s hips, the tilt of a head, the gaze you know you shouldn’t hold. I make a date, feeling as if I need to test my vow in order to prove its existence. But the man sitting across from me isn’t Jake and, because of that, I’m not interested. At the end of the night I call a taxi, dropping my date at the nearest tube station with a peck on the cheek. Chastity will be easy, I think, and my heart sinks a little.

Ms. Anderson writes wittily and unprudishly; Her visage suggests abstinence was voluntary. There’s a book too.