Category Archives: Sex

jet-set rednecks: incest, inheritance, and independence

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I'll just bet he does!Now, are they not a lovely couple, in a May/December way? But not so lovely when you realize it’s also in a child/progenitor way.

Say hi to Bruce McMahan, McMahan’s Furniture heir, former PaineWebber and Bear Stearns honcho and current (clock ticking) chief of McMahan Securities. She’s Linda Marie Hodge McMahan Schutt, PhD (Psych, natch; draw your own inferences), and executive vice president of marketing for Argent Funds Group LLC and McMahan Securities.

You’d think the Westminster Abbey nuptuals of such a pair would rate a brief mention in the Times, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong.

See, she’s his daughter.

And that, my friends, is the difference between the Times and the Village Voice. (via Fark)

In court papers, McMahan denies that he ever had a sexual affair with his daughter. But he doesn’t explain how his and Linda‘s DNA turned up on a vibrator that Linda‘s husband uncovered in her luggage. McMahan also hints that Linda may not be his biological daughter, despite a DNA test he paid for showing with 99.7 percent probability that he is her father…

Then, on September 13, as this article was being lovely wedding rings you've got there. Pretty stupid of you to photograph them, though.prepared for print, all five lawsuits were settled on undisclosed terms. As part of the settlement, a federal judge in San Diego sealed the files of the California lawsuit and took the rare step of wiping out any record that the lawsuit had ever existed.

Through McMahan‘s L.A. public relations firm, the parties sent a statement to New Times, describing the matter as a mere “family dispute,” and alluded to taking legal action if this newspaper published this article, which is drawn from the information in the court cases that McMahan has gone to such lengths to hide from public view.

If you’ve ever thought about reading Kathryn Harrison‘s The Kiss, I’d advise you to skip it and just check out this bizarre and twisted tale. It trumps Harrison‘s subsequently-repudiated memoir on every measure that counts: more laws broken, dodgy Dubai dollars, a posh wedding (Westminster! Abbey!), private spas, everyone involved seems to have had more marriages than Mickey Rooney and Elizabeth Taylor combined (with the exception of the blushing bride. She really was Daddy’s girl), incriminating videotape, a vast fortune, lawsuits galore, Eastern European mail order brides, and, if I may remind you, DNA-encrusted sex toys!

What’s not to like?

Yeah, there but for the grace of Dr. Smith, go these two

Only 89 shopping days till Christmas!

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So you might as well get some of those presents out of the way early. In case you’ve got any lonely and unpersonable men on your list, here’s the girl of their dreams, from eBay via Gawker: the Elizabeth Hurley fembot from Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.

But did you see the Star Trek with Harry Mudd?

Even though this version comes with a removable face (included!) and gun-mountable nipple ports, you can still exult in ample late-1990s Hurley cleavage. Only $1,500 on eBay, and no bids as of this writing. Get everyone in the book club to pitch in.

Update: Minimum bid is now $3,000. I guess even Fembots monitor their press!

scientists bring dead stem cells to life

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 stem cell diagram

I’m pretty firmly closety about most of my viewpoints on genetic ethics, because it saves me all kinds of heated arguments with people who are wildly passionate about the topic, but significantly stupider than I am, but it’s time to open that door a wee crack, methinks.

The Observer has reported that British scientists have succeeded in bringing dead stem cells back to life, appropriate for development into stem cell therapies.

Scientists working at a British laboratory have achieved one of the most controversial breakthroughs ever made in the field of stem cell science by taking cells from dead embryos and turning them into living tissue.

The technique could soon be used to create treatments for patients suffering from diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, the researchers say. The breakthrough has been hailed by many scientists and ethical experts because it could circumvent opposition to stem cell experiments.

‘This should get round opposition to stem cell science because live embryos will no longer need to be used in all experiments,’ said Professor Miodrag Stojkovic, the researcher who carried out the experiments at the Centre for Stem Cell Biology at Newcastle University last year…

Scientifically, this is a huge step. Ethically it looks like one, but it may actually be nothing more than playing the shell game with life and death.

My biggest problem with all therapies that use human tissue is that the profit motive in the States, among many other markets, provides positive incentive for what you might call “tissue development” (pregnancy/embroyo culture) as well as “donation,” (abortion/diversion of cultures) not to mention obfuscation on the part of agencies accepting such donations.

What the hell am I talking about?

As long as there’s a market for stem cells, there’s a potential profit motive for abortion or fertilizing eggs and then preventing them from growing into babies, simple as that. In some countries the sale of tissue or rebate of medical services to the individual might be an option. In some countries the doctor might just say “we’ll take it away” and turn it right over to a capitalist corporation in return for money, product, or services including lobbying.

We have seen this with the market in cadaver tissue; we’re all a little more skeptical and nervous about signing that “organ donation” card, rightly or wrongly. Nobody wants to be reincarnated as Paris Hilton’s new ass in twenty years.

As long as the tissue is worth something on the open market, medical decisions will be coloured by this, either on the part of the individual patient or on the part of the organizations providing services either to the patient or the doctor. And I just don’t think this is morally justifiable.

This, however, I can almost get behind. There’s no profit motive set against any kind of life in this situation.

Or is there?

neural stem cellsThe availability of dead cells, of course, depends upon the production of living embroyos just the same as the availability of live ones does. Now if using dead cells is legal and live ones illegal, the cash incentive effect comes to bear on the maintenance of those embroyos’ health; inversely.

I acknowledge that using the cells of a dead embroyo is a vast ethical improvement over using the cells of a live one, but now that it may be economically feasable to culture and then allow to die a large number of embroyos, is the potential for harm not that much greater, because it is going to become that much more widespread, with an apparent ethical Get Out of Jail Free card?

‘In theory if an embryo is obtained ethically and a stem cell can be derived after that embryo has died naturally, then that will remove all ethical objections as there is no destruction of a living organism,’ said Josephine Quintavalle, of Comment on Reproductive Ethics, a Catholic campaign group. ‘We do not have objections to the use of donated tissue and organs in other areas of medicine…’

George Daley, of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, said the paper’s approach raised scientific concerns. ‘If there was something wrong with the embryo that made it arrest, isn’t there something wrong with these cells? We don’t know.’

However, Stojkovic‘s work was given strong backing by Donald Landry, at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York, who called the work an important addition to the field. ‘Regardless of how you feel about personhood for embryos, if the embryo is dead, then the issue of personhood is resolved,’ Landry said.

‘This then reduces the ethics of human embryonic stem cell generation to the ethics of, say, organ donation. So now you’re really saying, “Can we take live cells from dead embryos the way we take live organs from dead patients?“‘

I just don’t think the people getting paid for the organ transplants should be connected with the people running the hospice; is that too much to ask?

Elmo scandal grows: A Two – Two, ah! ah! ah! – Two-Faced Snake

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From Scott Feschuk‘s book Searching for Michael Jackson’s Nose.

Does it say too much about me to mention that I spent 45 minutes searching for this on the internet before realizing the possibility that I’d come across it somewhere else? Like in a … what’s the word? Book, right? After all, I used to read stuff that existed in the physical as well as ethereal world. But that was many years ago…

Elmo needs an intervention

A Two – Two, Ah! Ah! Ah! – Two-Faced Snake

PRODUCER: Hey. Excuse me, you, with the feathers. Listen, we’re from A&E. We’re here to shoot some footage for a Biography special on Elmo. You know him?

BIG BIRD (sipping a latte): Sure, I know Elmo. Everyone on Sesame Street knows Elmo.

PRODUCER: Great. That’s great. Let us just get the camera set up here and we’ll ask you a few questions. Stories, anecdotes, fond memories – whatever you can come up with.

BIG BIRD: Oh, you don’t want to talk to me. Elmo and I used to be good pals, but he doesn’t hang out on the street much any more. I hardly ever see him these days.

PRODUCER: So talk about old times, when Elmo was first getting to be famous. [to camera operator] You ready? Okay, shoot.

BIG BIRD: All right. Well, that was when it all started to change, really. Elmo had always been a sweet little guy, even when he was starting to make it big. But then one year Bob McGrath took him to the Grammys, and Elmo was never the same.

PRODUCER: Got a bit of a big head, did he?

BIG BIRD: Well, not exactly. I think what happened is that at one of those after-parties, Bob introduced Elmo to P.Diddy, and they just hit it off. Dancing, laughing, partying. One minute Elmo‘s learning his alphabet and practicing his phonics, the next he’s chugging Cristal and calling Maria “bee-yatch.”

PRODUCER: Cut. That’s great, Bird, great. But we’re working more from the Elmo-is-adored-by-children-around-the-world angle.

BIG BIRD: Oh sure, he’s all tee-hee for the cameras. But yell “Cut!” these days and the kid’s got a voice like Harvey Fierstein and a temper like Sean Penn.

PRODUCER: Right. [Sees someone else is coming]Okay, thanks, Bird. Hey! Hey, blue guy. Over here. How about you? What do you make of Elmo‘s remarkable success?

COOKIE MONSTER: Me no want to talk about him.

PRODUCER: Come on, our viewers would appreciate it.

COOKIE MONSTER: Me say this. Me used to get all best cookies, real gourmet product. Now, budget all go to Elmo. Big trailer, masseuse, guest directors for his segments. Quentin Tarantino take forty-seven days to shoot balls-falling-out-of-closet gag. An then they make me do sketch with frickin’ Dutch windmill cookies. Dutch windmill cookies. [Pause] Dutch. Windmill. Cookies.

PRODUCER: Er, right… You two! Stop! What about you two fellows? What can you tell us about Elmo?

ERNIE: Well, I don’t know what you’ve heard, but he’s a good kid.

PRODUCER: Finally! Get the camera over here!

ERNIE: A lot of folks on Sesame Street are jealous, though. I mean, a guy like Grover has been paying his dues for decades – never bellyaching, not even when they stuffed him into a white disco suit for the cover of the Sesame Street Fever album – and he gets jack-all in the way of respect around here. But Elmo giggles and moults fof fifteen minutes every day and he’s got Emmys out the wazoo. It gets a little hard to take. Just yesterday, he shows up late for our rhyming-game segment. Eyes as red as his fur. And I’m not even going to tell you how he replied when I started the sketch by saying, “Pucker.”

BERT (nudging his way in): You know at the end of the show, there’s that bit where they say, “Sesame Street is brought to you by the letter F and the number five,” or something like that. Well, Elmo has a hissy fit one day – storms off the set! – when the producers won’t agree to change it to “Sesame Street is brought to you by Big Ol’ Hank’s Burger Hut and Tequila Bar.” They always comp Elmo down at Big Ol’ Hank’s. The rest of us can’t even run a friggin’ tab.

PRODUCER: CUt. [Sighs] Burn that tape.

ERNIE: I heard that’s why they gave him his own show a few years back – to keep him from bolting. Fox was after him to play the lead in a bawdy new sitcom opposite Tori Spelling and one of the California Raisins.

PRODUCER: Wel, um… thanks. Cripes. [Dejectedly] How about you, sir? Do you have a minute to tell our viewers what you think of Elmo?

COUNT VON COUNT: Yes, I have precisely one – one, ah! ah! ah! – one minute to spare. So let me tell you a story, Mr. Producer Man. I run a little sideline business on Sesame Street: a public service involving financial repercussions resulting from the outcomes of certain events of a sporting nature, if you catch my drift. [The producer stares ahead vacantly]  I’m a friggin’ bookie. Anyway, Elmo gets on the show, starts earning a little green. Next thing I know he’s knocking on my castle door. Kid got lucky at first, real lucky: he always bet that the baker guy with the cakes would wind up falling down those stairs. Clumsy oaf cost me a fortune! But then Elmo started wagering on hopscotch, on rock-paper-scissors – he was out of control, and his luck turned bad. Soon, the kid’s into me for five – five, ah! ah! ah! – for five large. But every time I go to collect, I get a face-full of fat furry enforcer, telling me to scram. You ask me, the kid’s a two – two, ah! ah! ah! – two-faced snake.

There is a pause.

PRODUCER: Screw this. Let’s hit the road. I say we try soemthing a little easier this afternoon, like getting Mia Farrow to say some nice things for the Woody Allen bio.

As the producer and his crew depart, they walk past the Sesame Street Four Seasons, where Elmo is in the hot tub shooting a segment for his show, Elmo’s World.

ELMO (wearing sunglasses and nursing a highball while bikinied Muppets peel grapes for him): Hi, kids! Elmo loves you! Today we’re going to learn all about “groupies.”

the B Team

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Remember the A Team? Of course you do! Now meet the B Team: Mr. T, Simon Cowell, the Olsen Twins, KFed, and Britney team up to solve the case of Nicole‘s stolen cellphone! Popozao, y’all!

from Defamer