It was indeed Betty Dodson, the author of Sex for One, who gave women permission to possess, love and experience the clitoris. Betty sometimes goes by the name Clitty Ann and does a little puppet routine with her pussy. Imagine this with her friendly Midwestern accent. She has been teaching about sex for quite a while, and she does it every day. You might almost think she was…sent here.

I believe that it will be some time before we collectively understand Betty’s contribution to society. Think of her as a sexual Fred Rogers, helping adults not be so frightened of the subject, and never making it political. Though she is not on public television (apropos of her subject, she is from the self-publishing tradition), many, many people have benefited from her work, and they know it.

Thanks to her, and I am speaking a literal historic truth, the tide of opinion has started to turn toward the legitimacy, beauty and erotic value of female masturbation. By extension, a bit of the fairy dust [i typed 'dues'] rubs off on the guys, who have learned a lot from Betty about women and who have taken this message as encouragement to get to know themselves. In the spirit of progress, let’s keep that positive vibe going.

Masturbation is the sexual common ground we all share; Betty wrote about this first. It reaches clear across the whole L G B T Q spectrum, and age, and culture, and gender, and how we do relationships. Betty was a pioneer at defying sexual categorization. She may well be the world’s first out masturbator, a gesture of her independence and love of a good time. She was one of the first out bisexuals, too. She feared no person’s judgment and created all her own definitions, breaking every sexual norm at a time when there were strict rules and when feminists didn’t talk about sex.

Continue Reading »

Huffington Post |В В Katherine Goldstein

In the midst of a staggering obesity epidemic in the US, KFC has doubled down on a high-calorie menu choice. KFC is now offering a “sandwich” which consists of bacon, two kinds of cheeses and sauce between two pieces of fried chicken. That’s right, fried chicken as a bun instead of bread.

According to Fox News, the “sandwich” is being test-marketed in only two areas so far, Rhode Island and Nebraska.

WATCH:

The item is not yet on the KFC website. We look forward to looking at the nutrition information once it appears.

UPDATE:

The Vancouver Sun has done an independent calorie analysis for the “Double Down” and has concluded the “sandwich” likely has 1228 calories.

But if our figures hold true, and KFC won’t confirm they don’t, the Double Down is more caloriffic than the Wendy’s Triple with Everything and Cheese (1700 mg sodium, 960 calories, 26 gms of fat), the Burger King Stacker Quad (1770 sodium, 1020 calories, 69 gms of fat), and compares closely to the fat, salt and calorie totals of three McDonalds Big Macs put together (3060 sodium, 1620 calories, 87 gms fat).

I visited my friend Dominick’s cafe this morning (Dominick’s Cafe at Dreamweavers), walked into the kitchen and discovered him explaining to his food prep staff how to wash grapes in dish detergent. “Not a lot, just a little,” he said, as he swished a few pounds of green and light purple grapes in a bowl of suds.

I asked whether this was about getting the pesticides off the grapes and he said it’s because people sneeze and cough all over them in the supermarket. All fruit that comes into the cafe is washed — including lemons and bananas. I laughed and said, “Virgo rising.” He is, with Pluto in the ascendant — very, very Virgo rising. (Dominick, who is a talented hobby astrologer and got the joke, has also been on a years-long campaign to get high fructose corn syrup out of the cafe, right down to the ketchup.)

This week we get a taste of Virgo-Pluto energy with an alignment that a reader pointed out in an email a few minutes ago. Mercury is now in late Virgo and is about to enter Libra, as part of its retrograde sequence that will unfold over the next six weeks. (Please see note at end about my Mercury Retrograde Report.)

Mercury therefore opposes the Aries Point or first degree of Aries. Mars for its part will ingress Cancer. Pluto is already standing in the first degree of Capricorn; so we have a Mercury-Mars-Pluto t-square right on the cardinal points. That one is going to ripple through the news, and it’s here to help us change our mind about something. Probably, knowing the human tendency to littleness, it will be about something small, but even that can be a good start and there is always the potential to make an actual decision or two. Venus will be in the first degree of Leo. That decision can be based on creative thought rather than sentiment or an emotional response.

Venus, Mars and Mercury (all of which are changing signs this week) and will be aspecting Pluto in early Capricorn. This has everything to do with sex and by sex I mean the honest awareness of sexuality and all its implications. Mercury is about communication. Every now and then the sky agrees with me: talking about sex, in actual depth, from a place of authenticity, is one of the best things we can do to help ourselves, improve our relationships and improve our world.

Wavers, I’m just wrapping up a Mercury Retrograde Report that sums up the forthcoming series of events and also offers a special 12-sign horoscope on the subject. We will have ordering information about that posted here tonight. If you’re on our Sample List you will receive an email later. The report will be half price for subscribers.

Virginia to me is the living essence of Virgo. She possesses wisdom that reveals how challenging her life has been, coupled with passionate faith and an intensity of mind that verges on intimidating.

Today is the first full day that the Sun is in Virgo. In German, the word for Virgo is Jungfrau — simply, young woman. We don’t know if she’s a virgin. Virginity itself is elusive; it’s more an idea than a reality, or at least we can say that it has many definitions. Unless she is pregnant, whether a young woman has or has not made love is something that she alone might be privy to.

Virgo, a mutable sign and an earth sign, is traditionally associated with grains, food store houses, and dairy: in essence, with food. Her time of year is the time of the harvest, so this would make sense. In modern astrology we associate Virgo with healing, mental activity, concepts, ideas, people who like to work and who work well, and with service professions such as teaching, nursing and alternative medicine.

The mythology of this sign is more complicated; the myths that surround the signs are often the oldest and most cryptic. Wikipedia sums up the chaos, or is it unity: “Who exactly Virgo was considered to represent is uncertain; in history, it has been associated with nearly every prominent goddess, including Ishtar, Isis, Cybele, and Athena, as well as with Mary the Mother of Jesus. Virgo may also feature, along with Ursa Major, and Ursa Minor, as part of the source of the myth of Callisto, either as Callisto herself, or as Hera. Persephone (who in some mythologies, notably the Eleusinian Mysteries, was considered to be a form of Demeter) is often mentioned as well, Virgo being visible mainly in the spring months when she was believed to have risen from the underworld.”

Today it’s Virginia.

By Carol van Strum and Jordan Merrell

They used to call us “autistic,” and before that they had other, even cruder names. They used to call this place Minnesota, and it was famous for snow. I have never seen snow, but I know this from old books. Now mahogany trees grow here, and vanilla orchids. And parrots.

That’s what I’m trying to tell about, the parrots. But first who are we. We are five that were six before, until Blue went to sleep and didn’t wake. It’s called death. I know this from old books. Blue was one of those who heard colors. We still sing sadness for her and now I write this because she started it. Blue said we were left here when civilization disappeared. Civilization was very noisy and we don’t know what happened to it. We were left because civilization did not understand us, Blue said.

Here is what the civil ones did not believe or understand. Which is that some of us uncivil ones, the ones they called autistic, could hear colors and see melodies and tune in to rhythms and harmonics the civil ones couldn’t see or hear or understand. But the birds could. We didn’t know this until the civil ones left us here. Blue said the civil ones probably forgot all about us in their rush to go somewhere else. And after all their machineries were gone or stopped, we could hear what the birds were saying and it was what we had heard awake and asleep. Blue said we should tell the song in writing like the old books. It is very hard to do this but Blue said it must be done.

The old books tell how the civil ones took many years and built many machineries to listen to hydrogen frequences for signals from civilizations in other galaxies many light years away. I like light years, the light sings on tracks of time. But with all their machineries the civil ones never heard or saw any signal from other worlds. That made them feel sad and lonely. The old books say that. I am sorry to know this, because if the civil ones had asked us we could have told them. But they said we were autistic and put us in Buildings and never asked us anything.

Continue Reading »

This week was the 10th anniversary of the first deep space pictures taken by NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the space agency celebrated by … well, taking another picture.

Cat’s Eye Nebula. Photo: NASA.

Actually, what NASA did was take two pictures — one with Chandra, and one with the Hubble Space Telescope — and merge them together to create this stunning image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula.

Chandra’s claim to fame is that its mirrors are 100 times more sensitive to X-ray emissions than previous telescopes. That’s opened up the galaxy in a whole new way to scientists pursuing X-ray astronomy, which isn’t effective from Earth’s surface because the planet’s atmosphere absorbs most X-rays.

For example, according to NASA, in this image of the Cat’s Eye Nebula, “[t]he intensity of the X-ray emission is correlated to the brightness of the orange coloring. The intensity of X-rays from the central star was unexpected, and this is the first time astronomers have seen such emissions from the central star of a planetary nebula.”

Chandra has already beaten original estimates of its useful life, which were initially 5 years, then 10, and now stand at 15. The next major X-ray observatory, a joint effort of NASA and the European and Japanese space agencies, won’t be launched until 2020.

Editor’s note. This Planet Waves article for the StarIQ.com is an Eric Francis classic from the summer ofВ  July 2000.

Mercury's Faults. Photo: NASA.

Lots has been written about Mercury retrograde, but as you probably guessed, most of it never made it to the printer. And this article will prove to be very difficult to create because my secretary’s called in sick, all of my astrology books except for two are packed in a storage locker in Seattle and the entire Internet is running at an average of eleven baud, fast enough to load a page in three days. Plus, I’m running late and I really don’t feel like doing this. But I can wing it. I’m a pro.

One thing I’ve never seen written about Mercury retrograde is that each one of these experiences is different, since the aspects to Mercury are different at any given time of year, and anyway, Mercury never stays the same for longer than it takes for two people to agree on any minor point. Also, the quality of a Mercury retrograde experience will be shaped by the way it slides, bangs, scratches or dances triumphantly around one’s natal configuration.

But whatever the causes or consequences, which astrologers only pretend to understand, some retrograde phases seem to turn computer hardware to toast, especially for people who don’t believe in astrology. Others eat only financial databases only while you’re backing them up. Others are mean just to Macintoshes (the PC was both invented and patented with Mercury retrograde, so you can’t tell the difference). One weird time, my telephone started acting like a microwave oven, and simultaneously the FedEx guy showed up with 100 pounds of organic yak butter. In fact, I had ordered 75 pounds.

Continue Reading »