Wednesday linkfest

After I do a long photo comic, like the one I posted on Monday (Bill Clinton agrees to campaign for Obama), it's hard to get back to normal posts. Unlike most of the garbage I post here, photo comics take a long time, and the hardest part is working out the text, not doing the voice bubbles, which can be done in an hour or two.

So I'm going to coast a little longer by giving you some links I've been accumulating for the past several weeks.

1. This is actually not a link, but I'm including it, anyway. The son of our friends, a good friend of my son, is in Taiwan, where he applied for a scooter license. Among the questions on the exam were these:

1. When a motorcyclist is not happy, usually he/she: (1) is emotionless (2) is not compassionate (3) is angry.

2. Time for honking, each time is: (1) within 2 seconds (2) within 1 second (3) within half a second.

3. Motorcyclist's clothing: (1) is free (2) slippers are ok (3) must be clean.

Then, there were a bunch of signs with Chinese on them, and he had to guess what they meant.

2. No linkfest would be complete without a link to a post about an incinerating toilet. Be sure to watch the video at the company's website. No butt hair was singed in the preparation of the video. Bonus: Also at InventorSpot: Russian scientist solves problem of smelly feet.

3. We all hate grammar ignoramuses, and some of us are annoyed by typos, but few of us engage in vandalism over them. (via How Appealing)

4. A reader at Instapundit creates a political ad about the meltdown at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

5. We'll have to take Obama's criticism of a McCain ad on comprehensive sex education for kindergarteners with a grain of salt.

6. Is Obama too tight with his teleprompter? (hat tip: fee simple)

7. A follow-up by Steven Plaut related to Soccer Dad's post below on Michelle Obama's "rabbi" relative.

8. A columnist at Haaretz is scared to death of Sarah Palin. But the Republican Jewish Coalition flips Congressman Robert Wexler's idiotic linking of Palin with Pat Buchanan and shows that Buchanan's views on Israel are like Obama's.

9. "Tryst turns into $50K robbery for RNC delegate." Plus, quotation of the day: "'As a single man, I was flattered by the attention of a beautiful woman who introduced herself to me. I used poor judgment. If there is any good that can come from this humiliation, it is to caution others that date rape happens to men, too,' he said."

Click here to read more . . .

A toast for the "cucumber people"

I've been mining the fracas over the sex-ed curriculum in Montgomery County for humor for about two years (see this, this and links collected here), and, frankly, I'm sick of the whole thing.

It was amusing for a while to refer to the proponents as the "cucumber people" for their insistence on showing an MTV-style instructional video in which a condom was placed on a cucumber. (It's now placed on a wooden phallus, by the way, following extended negotiations. "It's almost like it's intentionally boring," [Jim] Kennedy said in an interview Friday. But that does not mean it will put students to sleep. "They're putting a condom over a fake penis," he said. "They're going to watch that.")

But yesterday, the county Board approved the curriculum, with a last-minute change on teaching homosexuality that unsurprisingly ticked off the curriculum opponents. And, sadly for me, the whole matter is all just totally boring now.

Except for this amazing news for the "cucumber people": Pepsi is offering cucumber-flavored soda in Japan, and it's called "Pepsi Ice Cucumber."

So to all the proponents of the new sex-ed curriculum, I say: Drink a toast with "Pepsi Ice Cucumber." And when you're finished, you can slip a condom over that bottle.

Click here to read more . . .

Sex-ed curriculum moves forward

From today's Post: "Almost forgotten is the infamous 'cucumber video,' in which a youthful health educator unrolls a condom onto a cucumber." I know I haven't forgotten it, because I mined it for jokes for about a year and a half (see this and links collected here).

But the cucumber video is not my sex-ed topic for today.

Today, we deal with the other half of the disputed curriculum, the part covering homosexuality. When I last covered this topic, I argued that the curriculum had to be factual and scientific, and I noted:

If there's one thing you'd expect that everyone could agree upon, it's that anal sex, especially unprotected anal sex, poses a serious risk of transmission of HIV. What's very troubling is that a description of the new curriculum in the Post suggests that it omits any discussion of that risk. (The Post refers to it, delicately, as "potential health risks.") That anal sex is risky isn't religion; it isn't political correctness; it isn't opinion. It's objective fact. Teaching about homosexuality while refusing to tell kids about the risks involved in anal sex is simply insane.

From today's article in the Post, "Montgomery Starts Sex-Ed Pilot Program," there's no indication that the risk of HIV transmission is part of the pilot curriculum. Instead, the curriculum sounds as if it focuses on the touchy-feely:

The lessons, which require parental permission for students to take, are taught to two classes on alternating days and raise the topic of sexual orientation at grade 8 in a discussion that centers on tolerance, stereotyping and harassment. Grade 10 lessons define the terms in greater depth as part of a frank discussion about the search for sexual identity. These are the lessons that have stirred most of the rancor.

Now, I realize anal sex is a pretty raw subject to cover, but at least for most gay men, that subject is pretty central to life.

Tomorrow's Post is running an article "Sex-Ed Pilot Is Endorsed By Grasmick," which reports that the state superintendent has refused to stay the pilot program while the state Board of Education reaches a decision on a challenge filed by opponents of the program. So we can all look forward to more contention.

Followed by even more contention.

I wish we were still talking about condom videos.

Click here to read more . . .

The "shared chewing gum" people get the boot

I've spent a lot of time making fun of the "cucumber people" (later re-named the "wooden phallus people") for their views on the sex ed curriculum in Montgomery County. But maybe it's time to make fun of someone else.

Saturday's Washington Post carries a front-page article on a different facet of the sex ed curriculum: the facet that involves getting kids to share chewing gum. I am absolutely not making this up.

The Post article says:

It was a novel class exercise: Ask a room full of Montgomery County high school students to take turns chewing the same piece of gum.

To demonstrate how sexually transmitted diseases are spread, a visiting speaker invited students to share gum in health classes at four county high schools in December and last month. School officials said a total of about 100 students participated in the lessons, although some declined to chew the gum.

Education and health officials say the gum exercise was unsanitary and should not have happened. The speaker and the clinic, a pregnancy counseling center with a religious orientation, are no longer welcome in Montgomery schools, school officials said.

"It was fine for me, because my best friend and me did it first," said Julia Bellefleur, 15, a Damascus High School sophomore who participated in the exercise. "But it was kind of gross for everyone else. I was just glad I did it first."

Got that?

I've often noted the similarity between sex and chewing gum, haven't you? I mean, you can imagine the following conversation.

Husband: Babe, you're looking great tonight. Wanna . . . chew?

Wife: Not tonight, I've got a headache.

Husband:

Wife: And besides, your gum is always too soft.

And the Post article has another interesting element of the course: an exercise that involves Russian Roulette, only with laxatives.

Julia said the speaker also asked for volunteers to sample squares of chocolate, one of which, they were told, was actually a laxative. The point was to illustrate the uncertainty of knowing whether one has contracted an STD after a sexual encounter. Four boys volunteered, she said.

Naturally, I checked this story out with my daughter, who took health a couple of years ago at another county high school, which was not named in the article. She confirmed for me that they did the same thing in her class.

The Post notes that the instructor was a representative of a religious pregnancy counseling organization -- people who really should be mature enough to know better -- and says: "One part of the site quotes extensively from the Bible and offers a test 'to see if you're going to Heaven.'" To spare you the trouble of finding this test, I've linked it here.

In case you were wondering, I flunked.

Extra: Here's how the exercise should work, though from a different perspective.

UPDATE: The shared chewing gum demonstration was used for 9 years. That gum must have been awfully moldy.

UPDATE (2/15): Marc Fisher gets it wrong. The problem is not "outsourcing" of sex-ed teaching, nor is the solution leaving it to the "professionals." The professionals are the people who wanted the condom-on-the-cucumber video and who wrote the outrageous anti-religious teacher guide on homosexuality, which the district court invalidated a couple of years ago. Here, the problem is not that a religious group had a "hidden agenda" and should be banned. The problem is simply that this religious group conducted a misguided exercise, about which it didn't inform the schools adequately, and it properly got the boot.

Click here to read more . . .