News That Makes Life Worth Living (Loving to Death Division)

 MOSCOW, March 20 -- A Southern Moscow couple evidently decided it would be fun to have sex in their car, and to ward off the chill of the Russian winter they turned on the engine. Alas, sometime during the act, they died of carbon monoxide poisoning, Reuters reported Wednesday. 
   The wire service quoted the Russian Interfax news agency as quoting an unnamed police source as saying that "a man and a woman retreated to their Volkswagen to have sex." The car was parked in a tiny garage. Sometime "during the act of closeness," according to the police source, the pair inhaled the gas and died. 
   One is boggled by all aspects of this story, not least this: sex in a Volkswagen? Really? 
   With their fact-light reporting, Interfax and Reuters have completely dropped the ball. The news services neglected to inform readers about the mechanics of sex in a VW, the color of the car, the age of the couple, the position the pair was in and whether or not one or both had achieved, well, lift-off before the blessed end arrived. These are the kinds of details that make or break a story. 
   It seems sad that we will never know. 

The Joys of Holy Matrimony (My Husband The Pimp Division)

ROCKFORD, Minn., March 20 -- A local man named Clinton Danner was arrested at a Chicago hotel Sunday after authorities learned he was prostituting his wife via Craigslist ads, the Associated Press reported Wednesday.
   His wife, whom the AP didn't name, told authorities that Mr. Danner would arrange the encounters, after the completion of which she was expected to deposit her earnings into his bank account. She said her husband told ther that if she failed to comply with his scheme, she would never see their young son again. 
   Mr. Danner, who is thirty-two, faces a felony charge of pandering. He is being held on a $150,000 bond.
   People like Mr. Danner are examples of why heterosexual marriage should come under strict review, and sooner rather than later. Obviously, some straights can't handle their allegedly beloved institution of matrimony. And yet they deem it prudent to legislatively "protect" it from same-gender couples who love and cherish each other. 
   Gays and lesbians pressing for the opportunity to marry need pay attention. 
   

Crime of the Century (Wagging the Dog Division)

ABERDEEN, Scotland, March 17 -- A twenty-eight-year old man has been fined nine hundred dollars for attempting to "assault" a female Scottish police officer with a dangerous weapon: his penis.
   Various British news outlets - the Sun, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mirror and BBC News, but not the Times, because that august broadsheet dasn't touch news of the common willie - reported today that the man, named Marium Varinauskas (photo, below), was arguing with his girlfriend when police were called to his Aberdeen apartment.
   When officers showed up, a Huffington Post roundup of the British press stories noted, he was "drunk and in his underpants." Colloquially, this means he was entirely shitfaced and nearly bare-assed nekkid.
   The HuffPo did not say, however -  nor, apparently, did the British press - what kind of "underpants" Mr. Varinauskas was wearing, so readers learned news neither of style, color, brand nor type: thong, bikini, briefs, boxer briefs, boxers, or other. This cannot be seen as anything other than an appalling oversight.
   An official told the court that Mr. V. (honestly, how many times does one need to type out "Varinauskas" in his ever-shortening lifetime?) stood over the police officer "exposing his penis and thrusting it in her face, forcing her to take evasive action to avoid getting struck." 
   It is unclear what "stood over" actually means. Mr. V. was, when deputies arrived, sitting on a couch. Presumably, as they were standing, they loomed  over him. When he stood, he'd have been eye-to-eye with them. 
   For him to have "stood over" the female officer, then, suggests that she was somehow below him, perhaps in a kneeling position, which would further explain why the potted Mr. V., who later confessed to having been in an alcoholic blackout, might have mistakenly thought it entirely correct and context appropriate  to "thrust" his member "in her face." 
   Alas, we will never know. 
   With classic Scottish understatement, a police department spokesman said, "This was a distasteful experience for the officer." 
    

Queer Notes From all Over (Underwear Occasions Bad Writing Division)

SYDNEY, Australia, March 5 - Reuters Life!, evidently a life-style offshoot of the Reuters news wire service, reports that underwear in a new, "eco-friendly" AussieBum line are composed of twenty-seven percent banana fiber, sixty-four percent cotton and nine percent lycra. 
   The two-graf Reuters Life! report, though alluring, is hazy. It notes that the banana fiber, made from bark weave found in banana plants, "makes the underwear not only lightweight, but also very absorbent...." This sounds promising, but what there is for the underwear to absorb Reuters Life! does not say.
   Lloyd Jones, an AussieBum functionary, noted that if the undies were to contain any more than twenty-percent of the banana fiber, "it might get a bit squishy." Mmmmm. 
   Jones added, according to Reuters Life!, that "wearers did not have to worry about real monkeys, because the underwear does not smell like a banana." 
   What it does smell like Jones did not say, perhaps because, in a monumental journalistic oversight, the Reuters Life! reporter, a woman by the name of Amy Pyett, failed to ask him. Or perhaps she did and her editor, a woman named Miral Fahmy, simply cut the information. Alas, we shall never know. 
   We also cannot know whether it was Ms. Fahmy or a nameless copy-editor who wrote the hed (headline),  but whoever it was should be disciplined severely. It read: "Aussie Underwear Has Gone Bananas."
   And Ms. Fahmy really shouldn't have let Ms. Pyett get away with this lede (first paragraph): "Australian underwear company AussieBum has been monkeying around and the result is a range of men's underwear made with bananas." 
   Not only is that factually wrong - the ingredient is banana bark weave, not bananas - but it is exemplary of the kind of writing that is driving readers away  from newspapers and leading, you see, to the collapse of the Fourth Estate. 
   Here, for curious readers, are some examples of AussieBum underwear. I don't know whether or not they're the banana-bark-weave ones, but who cares? The pictures are lovely. 
   

Chatroullete - The End of Days

   First of All is, in essence, fairly modern.

   Well, no, we are not. But we have our moments. Occasionally we dip into the slipstream of current technology to see what's what. (We have an iPhone. Does that count?) Of course, the gadgets rarely work: we are surrounded by an invisible force field which breaks all things tech/mechanical. But, well, one tries.  

   And so it was that, Friday night last, we decided to check out Chatroulette, the latest in alleged social networking sites.

   Chatroulette, it turns out, is the spawn of the Devil.

   Here’s how it works. When you arrive at the site, a window pops up. The large blank part in the center is for instant messaging. To the left of that, two black boxes sit one atop the other. You click a button marked "New Game” and enable your computer’s camera. Voila: the bottom box is now a screen all lit up with your pretty face. 

   Presently – it may only take a second – a person appears in the top screen. This is your "partner" for the moment. He (or she) is looking at his screen, where you’re appearing. If he doesn't like your looks, he clicks the "Next" button to delete you. Or you delete him (her). Eventually, someone else appears. 

   Most of the people we saw sat at computers. Some were solo, others in pairs, still others in groups. The majority were in their teens and twenties. (The site requires users to be sixteen, but evidences no apparent way of checking ages.)

   A red-headed young man was the first to appear on our screen. We began an instant-message conversation with him. We mentioned that we were new to Chatroulette, and asked how it worked. We suppose we were trying to figure out the site's social mores. 

   Dumb us. Social mores. Ha ha. He wrote back a sentence or two – and then disappeared. Someone replaced him. That person vanished. A third. Same thing. This repeated itself over and over. The speed with which people appeared and disappeared was dizzying. One felt like a human pinball, but without the joys of the game. 

   Now, one is of a certain age. (Fifty-three.) A young Chatrouletter seeing a fiftyish person on his or her screen is bound to move on: they’re likely much more interested in peer conversations, and understandably so. Our experience, then, may not have been representative. (By way of social experiment, next time we’ll have a cute friend in his early twenties be the screen presence. We'll see if people stick around for him.) 

   We settled, instead, into the role of anthropologist. It didn't take long to get that Chatroulette is not just for chat. Apologies to those with delicate sensibilities, but the truth must out. My "partner" screen variously filled with the torso of an unclothed man who was holding his erect, er, member; a close-up of another swelled member; and a leering, naked middle-aged man in flagrante delicto with a woman. 

   So Chatroulette exists in part (primarily? We don't know) so people can hook up and/or engage in webcam sex. More broadly, however, it offers people the opportunity to communicate with strangers in far parts of the known galaxy. 

   But what kind of communication? It's hard to say. Chatroulette creates a venue for fast-food relationships that aren’t even relationships. It's a social networking site about which there is nothing social. Even if a connection is established - a webcam conversation, an instant-message exchange - it, too, is tenuous: when one tires of one’s new companion, one simply moves on (or they do). 

   This, of course, absolves people of exhibiting the kind of courtesy that greases (that at one time greased?) the skids of daily human interaction. There’s nary a good-bye nor a thank-you before one is deleted (or deletes). It's brutal, cold, sad.

    Indeed, we found Chatroulette's implications for human interaction dispiriting beyond belief. It’s the ultimate in throw-away culture, but what's being thrown away isn't a material object. It's a person.

   The future is now, and it sucks. 


   (If you want to go mad, visit Chatroulette and see for yourself. I'd be happy to hear about your experiences. Indeed, with your permission I'll post them. Anonymously, of course.)