My camera is broken so I’m short on pictures. I’ll post some random ones maybe in a bit. I’m going to New Orleans for Christmas tomorrow! Hopefully! It’s snowing like gangbusters right now! So maybe a little later than expected! Finishing my language core take home final! Attending the department curling event organized by my advisor in a bit! It’s a happy, white, sugar-fluff-coated day.

I think I may enjoy blizzards! I loved hurricanes as a kid. I think I may be an adrenaline junky though. I loved the anticipation of hurricanes. Sitting by the window, power out, flashlights ready, and this weird rushing windy rain outside… I’m looking forward to a whole new form of that excitement.

Speaking of adrenaline junkies, I found myself thinking about people with car crash fetishes this morning. I wonder if they actually exist, as is suggested by the 1996 feature film Crash. Intuitively, it makes sense, but it’s also the sort of thing I can see being straight rumor.

I saw a lot of people crash slowly and strangely in the snow this morning. (Okay… so two maybe doesn’t qualify as ‘a lot,’ but it’s two more slow-speed crashes than I’ve seen in the rest of my life, so I’m going to go ahead and stick with my original quantifier.) If car crash fetish people exist, I wonder if slow-speed car accidents do it for them, or if their excitement is correlated with speed.

I’m going to get a lot of traffic to this post for inclusion of the term ‘car crash fetish’, so if you’re someone with this fetish, I’d appreciate a quick e-mail to let me know your thoughts on this matter. Thank you.

Caffeine consumption caused female rats to seek more frequent sex, according to the results of a new study at Southwestern University.

Researchers gave 108 female rats moderate doses of caffeine and found that it shortened the amount of time it took the lady rats to return to the gentleman rats after a first frolic in the woodchips. The shortened time between romps indicates the lady rats were hornier than normal.

Unfortunately, the same effect is not expected to improve human ladies’ sex drives in most cases, researchers say.

“These rats had never had caffeine before,” study leader Fay Guarraci, an assistant professor of psychology at Southwestern University, told Live Science. “In humans, it might enhance the sexual experience only among people who are not habitual users.”

That means not you, Little Miss Triple Espresso.

The research is detailed in an already-released issue of Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behavior.

Link (via Live Science)

The German government has sanctioned the construction of a field-sized brothel next to the main soccer stadium in Berlin, according to concerned Catholics.

The U.S. Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) has accused the German government of allowing 40,000 young women to be taken to Deutschland from Central and Eastern Europe to “sexually service” men attending the World Cup football championship matches.

Prostitution is legal in Germany, and income from prostitution is taxed, although the rate of taxation is slightly higher than income is from more mainstream occupations. Every city has the legal right to ban prostitution in certain areas—Munich, for example, forbids street prostitution within city limits—however, it is virtually unregulated in Berlin.

From a statement released by C-FAM:

“Whatever their circumstances, each and every one of these young women is someone’s daughter, a child of God and deserves our protection. They do not deserve to be exploited and sentenced to a life of misery to satisfy the sexual appetites of soccer fans.”

C-FAM plans to collect signatures in opposition to the legalized World Cup prostitution to be delivered to the German government, the United Nations, the European Parliament and the governing body of the World Cup.

(You have to go through Google News to get to the article without being a paid subscriber, so the link below takes you to the Good News link. You can click your way in from there.)

Link

The June 2006 issue of Playboy magazine will feature a “Women of MySpace” pictorial starring nine twentysomethings chosen from more than 600 that submitted their nudie photos for consideration.

Five of the nine women featured hail from the great state of California, and three are from right here in Orange County, Calif. Are West Coast women hotter, more likely to use MySpace, or just more willing to get naked for cash?

The spread features Jessica Difeo, Carrie Vaughn and Jeska Vardinski of Orange County, Chantal Alexandria of Los Angeles and Betty Lipstick of San Francisco. It also features non-Californians, Ana Georgean of Chicago; Heather Lutz of Reading, Penn.; Brittany Fuchs of Annandale, Va.; and Heather Lynn of Davenport, Iowa. (All links go to models’ MySpace pages.)