Things are different at the convent. (H/T: Silas/ Presentation Sisters Convent, St. John's, NL.)...

09 August, 2013

Disturbing but brilliant, I should say. Here, Lena Dunham teams up with fashion designer pal Rachel Antonoff to produce a short "nature documentary" about best friends, starring Dunham's sister, and narrated by Adam Driver.* [Video link] [For some reason, the embed code for this video resists resizing, but you can click the 'view full screen' icon at the bottom.] * No money shot warning required....

13 March, 2013

Late last week, Halifax musician Robert Speirs fired off an angry email to three broadcast networks: Why did you divulge the names of the men accused of luring? What if they are innocent? Why do you want to try them by media and subject them to public humiliation, [and] so ruin their lives? Why do you display such unjustified hatred to people you do not know? Again, what if they are innocent? Your insistence on revealing the identities of the accused inspires any thinking person to wonder who are the true perverts. Shame on you! Speirs, who signed the note, "Disgusted," was referring to a sting...

03 March, 2013

Vancouver photographer Hana Pesut takes pictures of couples, then gets them to switch outfits and pose again. H/T: Kottke via Kristy.        ...

20 February, 2012

Last year, we published a snapshot of Contrarian's brain as he listened to Costas Halavrasos on Maritime Noon. Psychobiologist Barry R. Komisaruk of Rutger's University in New Jersey has done me one better, by releasing a stop motion animation showing sequential MRI brain scans of 54-year-old PhD student and sex therapist Nan Wise as she manually stimulated herself to orgasm. It is not known whether Wise was listening to Halavrasos at the time. The first portion of the video shows a sequence of 20 snapshot fMRI images, taken over a 12 minute period, during which Wise approached orgasm, achieved orgasm, and entered a refractory period. The...

15 November, 2011

  Remember the kerfuffle when the Province of Nova Scotia's official sex guide for seventh graders, called Sex? A Healthy Sexuality Resource, was unveiled in 2004? Some school boards refused to distribute the guide because, of course, knowledge encourages teen sex and ignorance prevent it. That's the guide's chaste cover, at right. Want to know how a sensible country does sex education? Check out this sex ed kit for kids of comparable age in a European country. From the outside, the kit looks like this: And inside:   The sensible country is Finland. Click here for a translation of the news story describing it. The paper...

31 October, 2011

Contrarian finds itself in the awkward position of having received 30,000+ hits for  a throwaway post about an MP who airbrushed* a modest trace of cleavage from her official Parliamentary photo. The two complaints I've received have  not dissuaded me from my initial judgment the story was both funny and peculiar enough to be worthy of posting. In the interests of equal time, though, here is an alternative view from Edmonton restaurateur and local food activist Jessie Radies: The only reason you find someone airbrushing their cleavage funny, is because you are not a women with cleavage. I've done exactly the same thing. Go for a...

27 September, 2011

The Globe and Mail says Scarborough-Rouge River MP Rathika Sitsabaiesan, 29, might be "the most compelling of the new crop of young NDP MPs." She's the first Tamil-Canadian MP, and so has become the de facto standard-bearer for thousands of Canadians who have felt defeated – militarily, in their country of birth, and politically, in their new home. As a 29-year-old woman from political cultures – both Canadian and Sri Lankan – in which older men make most of the decisions, she exudes the poise, organizing skills and confidence of an old-school political veteran. How awkward for Contrarian, then, to report alert reader...

20 September, 2011

Salon sex columnist Tracy Clark-Flory clucks disapprovingly at what she deems excessive media coverage of that award-winning New Mexico state trooper busted on security cam having sex on duty and in uniform with a woman splayed across the hood of her Honda. Contrarian takes a different view. You cannot spend as much time in newsrooms as we have without developing a grudging admiration for the comic extremes of tabloid chutzpah. We particularly admire the Hispanic-oriented, Chicago-based website Hispanically Speaking News for shining a spotlight on the small but curious dog that wandered in for a closer look at the steamy curbside quickie,...

04 September, 2011

Since the debate, we've kept an eye on searches for the five party leaders, using the Google Trends tool that famously notices 'flu outbreaks before the Centres for Disease control. (Previous examples here and here.) Extreme caution is required, but look what happened to Jack Layton yesterday. On its face, this means a lot of interest in Jack. I assume that's mainly a result of the found-in story, but a friend argues otherwise: [I]ndications from previous elections (check 2008) seem to suggest [it reflects] popularity as well, though I don't know why. It's quite a spike, though. It is quite a spike, and...

01 May, 2011
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