The Humor Code

By Joel Warner

The writer E. B. White famously remarked that “analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies.” If that’s true, an amphibian genocide took place in San Antonio this past January. Academics from around the world gathered there for the first-ever comedy symposium cosponsored by the Mind Science Foundation.

The goal wasn’t to tell jokes but to assess exactly what a joke is, how it works, and what this thing called “funny” really is, in a neurological, sociological, and psychological sense. As Sean Guillory, a Dartmouth College neuroscience grad student who organized the event, says, “It’s the first time a roomful of empirical humor researchers have ever gotten together!”

The first speaker at the podium, University of Western Ontario professor Rod Martin, began with a lament over the lack of comedy scholarship. He pointed out that you could fill a library with analyses of subjects like mental illness or aggression. Meanwhile, the 1,700-plus-page Handbook of Social Psychology—the preeminent reference work in its field—mentions humor once.

The crux of Martin’s argument involves semantics. It takes issue with the imperfect terminology we use to describe the emotional state that humor triggers. Standardizing language would help humor studies earn the respect of related fields, like aggression research. Martin exhorted his audience to adopt his preferred word for the “pleasurable feeling, joy, gaiety of mind” that humor elicits. Happiness, elation, and even hilarity don’t quite fit, to his mind. The best word, he said, is mirth.

For those curious about the physiology of humor, Helmut Karl Lackner of the Medical University of Graz, Austria, presented his research on the relationship between humor, stress, and respiration. By tracking breathing cycles and heart rates, he has determined that social anxiety makes things less funny. (Fittingly, he seemed nervous as he read his paper in halting English.) Nina Strohminger, a researcher at the University of Michigan, explained how she’s been exposing test subjects to unpleasant odors. She extolled the virtues of a spray called Liquid Ass, which can be purchased at fine novelty stores everywhere. (Her conclusion: Farts make everything funnier.) The audience members take the subject of amusement very seriously, yet they couldn’t help but chuckle at this.
Other speakers peppered their talks with multivariate ANOVAs and mesolimbic reward systems. Some presented research on whether people with Asperger’s syndrome get jokes and how to determine the social consequences of put-downs. But as the sessions wound on, no one had addressed the underlying mechanism of comedy: What, exactly, makes things funny?

That question was the core of Peter McGraw’s lecture. A lanky 41-year-old professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder, McGraw thinks he has found the answer, and it starts with a tickle. “Who here doesn’t like to be tickled?”

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WikiLeaks World

by Caitlin Dickson

The New York Times prominently features "The Guantanamo Files," a synthesis of "700 classified military documents" obtained by WikiLeaks, about the Cuba prison's current and former inmates. It's the latest blockbuster data cache to be trumpeted by the paper. And though the paper has had a complicated relationship with the secret-sharing site run by Julian Assange since the two partnered up for a post-Thanksgiving barrage of "State's Secrets" last year, the paper has become increasingly reliant on its documents.

By our count, on 63 days so far this year the paper's reporters have relied on WikiLeaks documents as sources for their stories. Since April 25th is the 115th day of the year, that's over half of all their issues this year. And just to be clear, we didn't count stories that merely mentioned WikiLeaks or Julian Assange or Bradley Manning, only the ones that used documents from the site as a reporting source.

It now seems routine for WikiLeaks to serve as a source when it comes to American diplomacy, especially regarding the Middle East. Sometimes these stories are billed as revelations from WikiLeaks' cache, such as the March 2 story by James Risen on the Qaddafi sons' bitter business battles which was headlined, "2 Qaddafis Fought Over Business, Cables Show." But often the WikiLeak-ed documents are used as a stand-in for an American diplomatic spokesperson, source or expert. A typical example is the recent feature on Muammar Qaddafi's illegitimate means of acquiring wealth. The seventh paragraph of the front-page story reads:

The government not only exploited corporations eager to do business, but willing governments as well. Libya’s banks apparently collected lucrative fees by helping Iran launder huge sums of money in recent years in violation of international sanctions on Tehran, according to another cable from Tripoli included in a batch of classified documents obtained by WikiLeaks. In 2009, the cable said, American diplomats warned Libyan officials that its dealings with Iran were jeopardizing Libya’s enhanced world standing for the sake of “potential short-term business gains.”

And it's not just Libya. Times readers have learned about Cairo's top military officials wrestling for control of post-Mubarak Egypt, Pakistan's nuclear might, and American diplomats' role in selling Boeing jetliners to foreign leaders all thanks to WikiLeaks.

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Conspiracy Theory

How did the president get into those Ivy league schools?

- "The dean looked over Barack's transcript and college boards and then suggested in a kindly way that he apply to some less competitive colleges in addition to Columbia."

- "There were no class rankings at his high school, but Barack never made honor roll even one term, unlike 110 boys in his class."

- "His SAT scores were 566 for the verbal part and 640 for math. Those were far below the median scores for students admitted to his class at Columbia: 668 verbal and 718 math."

- "At Columbia, Barack Obama distinguished himself primarily as a hard partier, and he managed to be detained by police twice during his university years: once for stealing a Christmas wreath as a fraternity prank and once for trying to tear down the goalposts during a football game at Princeton."

- "Obama's transcript at Columbia shows that he was a solid C student. Although a history major, he sampled widely in the social sciences and did poorly in political science and economics while achieving some of his best grades (the equivalent of a B+) in philosophy and anthropology. The transcript indicates that in Obama's freshman year, the only year for which rankings were available, he was in the twenty-first percentile of his class—meaning that four-fifths of the students were above him. Yet at the same time that he was earning Cs at Columbia, Obama displayed a formidable intelligence in another way. At his induction into the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity, he and others were asked to name all fifty-four pledges in the room. Most were were able to name only five or six. When it was Obama's turn, he named every single one. Later he rose to become president of DKE, and he was also tapped into Skull and Bones, an elite secret society to which his father had also belonged."

And then he somehow got into Harvard for graduate school.

Drinking With The Stars

Just for the record, if it were me out there appearing in a different town every night, I’d be incredibly specific about what I wanted waiting for me backstage. There’s not much more fearful in life than strangers trying to be fancy. It leads to all kinds of gussied-up crap, like those selections of “special” crackers that are like biting into particle board when, really, a box of Cheez-Its would be just fine. You dispatch an errand-running gofer to buy wine for a visiting star and there’s no telling what kind of swill-in-a-novelty-collector-bottle you’re likely to end up with.

Considering that, a survey of the contract riders at Smoking Gun shows a remarkable tolerance when it comes to ordering wine to be served in dressing rooms. For the most part, traveling musicians seem willing to settle for just about anything.

Desperately perky and highly professional gal-who-knows-what-she-wants Kathie Lee Gifford wants two bottles of white wine, and she doesn’t care what kind it is — just have it chilled and waiting for her when she arrives. Ludacris wants a bottle of white Zinfandel. Lady Gaga requires “two bottles of white wine with wine opener — Kendall-Jackson or Robert Mondavi preferred.” Sting wants “good quality” Champagne, “full-bodied” red wine, and Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay. Shania Twain wants one bottle of Pinot Grigio and two bottles of Kendall-Jackson Cabernet. Relic-of-a-regrettable-era Cher goes the other way, specifying “No Kendall-Jackson” be placed in either her dressing or contractually required wig room. Beck — who, like Cher, finds one name sufficient — takes no varietal chances, specifying Merlot, Cabernet or Pinot Noir only. Kelly Clarkson wants four bottles of “GOOD” red wine, and suggests “Jordan, Zinfandel, Malbec, Merlot”. Amy Winehouse (pictured above) specifies “rioja,” apparently not realizing it is a place and thus should be capitalized. Wayne Newton asks for both Louis Jadot Beaujolais Villages and Stag’s Leap Merlot. Also, pretzels.

Eric Clapton is a wine and cheese man, but seems to care more about the cheese than the wine. His rider asks for two non-specific bottles of red wine and a “small cheese board” which the guitar god will use to serve cheese he brings himself. Kelly Pickler, on the other hand, requires cheese but not wine. Barenaked Ladies requires neither cheese nor wine, but is apparently bringing a little something from home because they want wine glasses and a corkscrew.

Sky High Fly Buy

by  Olivia Solon

Two booksellers using Amazon's algorithmic pricing to ensure they were generating marginally more revenue than their main competitor ended up pushing the price of a book on evolutionary biology -- Peter Lawrence's The Making of a Fly -- to $23,698,655.93.

The book, which was published in 1992, is out of print but is commonly used as a reference text by fly experts. A post doc student working in Michael Eisen's lab at UC Berkeley first discovered the pricing glitch when looking to buy a copy. As documented on Eisen's blog, it was discovered that Amazon had 17 copies for sale -- 15 used from $35.54 and two new from $1,730,045.91 (one from seller  profnath at that price and a second from bordeebook at $2,198,177.95).

This was assumed to be a mistake, but when Eisen returned to the page the next day, he noticed the price had gone up, with both copies on offer for around $2.8 million. By the end of the day, profnath had raised its price again to $3,536,674.57. He worked out that once a day, profnath set its price to be 0.9983 times the price of the copy offered by bordeebook (keen to undercut its competitor), meanwhile the prices of bordeebook were rising at 1.270589 times the price offered by profnath.

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What's Left of the Left

Paul Krugman’s lonely crusade.

by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

If you are looking not only for clues into Barack Obama’s character but for a definition of what his presidency will mean to the country, then the speech on fiscal policy that he delivered at George Washington University the Wednesday before last is the most significant one he has ever given. It is, in its own way, an astonishing document, alive with the themes that undergirded his Philadelphia speech on race and his Nobel Prize acceptance, on the tragic enmeshment of American limitations and American strength. Obama was responding mostly to the Republican budget plan, and he understood exactly what its author, Representative Paul Ryan, had in his sights: “This vision,” Obama said, “is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America.”

And yet, having defined the fight so starkly, Obama delivered a plea for compromise. He ended a stirring defense of the welfare state by explaining his plans to gut it. Then he said that even this proposed $2 trillion cut in government spending was only a starting point for negotiation: “I don’t expect the details in any final agreement to look exactly like the approach I laid out today,” he said. “This is a democracy; that’s not how things work.” There were notes of deference, and passivity: If Obama believed that his vision of society was at stake, why place it so squarely on the partisan bargaining table—or why not at least begin with a stronger gambit? This was, at any rate, the point of view of one particular strain of liberal reaction, whose position was summed up with poignant resignation by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “I could live with this as an end result,” he wrote. “If this becomes the left pole, and the center is halfway between this and Ryan, then no.”

For the first two years of the Obama administration, Krugman has been building, in his columns and on his blog, not just a critique of this presidency but something grander and more expansively detailed, something closer to an alternate architecture for what Obamaism might be. The project has remade Krugman’s public image, as if he had spent years becoming a chemically isolate form of himself—first a moderate, then an anti-Bush partisan, and now the leading exponent of a kind of liberal purism against which the compromises of the White House might be judged. Krugman’s counterfactual Obama would have provided far more stimulus money and would have nationalized Citigroup and Bank of America. He would have written off Republicans and worked only with Democrats to fashion a health-care reform bill that included a so-called public option. The president of Krugman’s dreams would have made his singular long-term goal the preservation of the welfare state and the middle-class society it was designed to create.

This purism is not a role Krugman is altogether comfortable with, but it is one he has sought: His blog is titled The Conscience of a Liberal. He uses it as a kind of workroom for his column, and it is now, according to Technorati, the most popular single-author blog online—a more statistically rigorous counterpart to Rachel Maddow’s show and the Huffington Post. The comment section has become a repository for a certain form of liberal anguish, and a community unto itself: “His campaign promised a better, more equitable America. Those who believed him feel betrayed,” wrote one commenter in regard to a recent column titled “The President Is Missing.”And another: “Come on, Professor Krugman, will you lead the people out?”

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Do Secretaries Have a Future?

by  Lynne Peril

THE 1950s and ’60s brought many new things to American offices, including the Xerox machine, word processing and — perhaps less famously — the first National Secretaries Day, in 1952. Secretaries of that era envisioned a rosy future, and many saw their jobs as a ticket to a better life.

In 1961, the trade magazine Today’s Secretary predicted that, 50 years hence, the “secretary of the future” would start her workday at noon and take monthlong vacations thanks to the “electronic computer.” According to another optimistic assessment, secretaries (transported through office hallways “via trackless plastic bubble”) would be in ever-higher demand because of what was vaguely referred to as “business expansion.”

But nearly 60 years later, on the date now promoted as Administrative Professionals Day, we’re living through the end of a recession in which around two million administrative and clerical workers lost their jobs after bosses discovered they could handle their calendars and travel arrangements online and rendered their assistants expendable. Clearly, while the secretary hasn’t joined the office boy and the iceman in the elephant’s graveyard of outmoded occupations, technological advancements haven’t panned out quite the way those midcentury futurists imagined. There are satisfactions to the job, to be sure, but for many secretaries, it remains often taxing, sometimes humiliating and increasingly precarious.

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Odd Couples

Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein

Marlon Brando and Charlie Chaplin

Alice Cooper and Salvadore Dali

Muhammad Ali and Bill Cosby

Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates

Hugh Hefner and Doris Day

William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy

Teddy Roosevelt and Moose

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Digital Peasants

The digital peasants are getting restless. The first signs of unrest are evident in the stirrings of the bloggers filing a suit against the Huffington Post and its parent AOL, which acquired the publication in February for $315 million. The same writers who were happy to contribute for free before the sale are now accusing the publication of turning them into “modern-day slaves on Arianna Huffington's plantation." The suit claims that about 9,000 people wrote for the Huffington Post on an unpaid basis, and it argues that their writings helped contribute about a third of the sale value of the site. These bloggers weren’t paid a single penny in the sale—the money went mostly to Huffington and a few investors.

Whether the bloggers have a case or not remains to be seen. The suit, however, brings to the fore tensions inherent in a new kind of production that is emerging today—what we might call “social production.” This kind of work involves micro-contributions from large networks of people who often receive “payment” in the form of fun, peer recognition, and a sense of belonging—that is, in social rather than monetary currencies. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Flickr, and many other stalwarts of today’s digital economy are enablers and beneficiaries of such production. They couldn’t possibly exist without the content of social producers, without their unpaid, albeit fun, labor. It is we who create Facebook profiles and post to them, we who share our thoughts on Twitter, we who upload our pictures to Flickr, we who post our medical data on PatientsLikeMe—it is we who are the new producers. Without us making these daily micro-contributions, none of these platforms could persist and grow and create value at the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But the Huffington case brings us face-to-face with the reality that we, as social producers, are all becoming digital peasants. By turn, we are the heroic commoners feeding revolutions in the Middle East and, at the same time, “modern serfs” working on Mark Zuckerberg’s and other digital plantations.

John James Audubon: America's Rare Bird

by  Richard Rhodes

The handsome, excitable 18-year-old Frenchman who would become John James Audubon had already lived his way through two names when he landed in New York from Nantes, France, in August 1803. His father, Jean, a canny ship’s captain with Pennsylvania property, had sent his only son off to America to escape conscription in the Napoleonic Wars. Jean Audubon owned a plantation near Valley Forge called Mill Grove, and the tenant who farmed it had reported a vein of lead ore. John James was supposed to evaluate the tenant’s report, learn what he could of plantation management, and eventually—since the French and Haitian revolutions had significantly diminished the Audubon fortune—make a life for himself.

He did that and much, much more. He married an extraordinary woman, opened a string of general stores on the Kentucky frontier and built a great steam mill on the Ohio River. He explored the American wilderness from GalvestonBay to Newfoundland, hunted with Cherokee and Osage, rafted the Ohio and the Mississippi. Throughout his travels, he identified, studied and drew almost 500 species of American birds. Singlehandedly, Audubon raised the equivalent of millions of dollars to publish a great, four-volume work of art and science, The Birds of America. He wrote five volumes of “bird biographies” chock-full of narratives of pioneer life and won fame enough to dine with presidents. He became a national icon—“the American Woodsman,” a name he gave himself. The record he left of the American wilderness is unsurpassed in its breadth and originality of observation; the Audubon Society, when it was initially founded in 1886, decades after his death, was right to invoke his authority. He was one of only two Americans elected Fellows of the Royal Society of London, the preeminent scientific organization of its day, prior to the American Civil War; the other was Benjamin Franklin.

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Shrimp and Mango Tacos

by Martha Rose Schulma, NY Times

This sweet and pungent combination of mango, shrimp, chilies and cumin is as quick to put together as a stir-fry. Indeed, if you don’t have corn tortillas on hand, serve the shrimp with rice.

2 tablespoons canola oil
1 pound medium or small shrimp, peeled and deveined
2 garlic cloves, sliced
2 teaspoons cumin seeds, lightly toasted and ground
2 Serrano or bird chilies, or 1 large jalapeño, minced
1 large mango, peeled, seeded and finely chopped
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
4 to 5 tablespoons lime juice
8 corn tortillas

1. Heat a large, heavy skillet or wok over medium-high heat, and add the canola oil. When the oil is hot, add the shrimp, salt to taste and the garlic. Sauté, stirring or shaking the pan, until the shrimp begins to color, about two minutes. Add the cumin, and continue to cook until the shrimp is pink and opaque, about three minutes. Add the chilies, mango and cilantro, and stir together for one minute. Stir in the lime juice, and remove from the heat. Taste and adjust seasonings.

2. Wrap the tortillas in a heavy kitchen towel, and place in a steamer basket over 1 inch of boiling water. Cover the pot, and steam for one minute. Turn off the heat, and allow to sit for 15 minutes without uncovering. Alternatively, wrap the tortillas in a towel, and heat in the microwave for one minute.

Warm the shrimp briefly in the pan. Place 2 tortillas on each plate, top with the shrimp, fold over the tortillas and serve with rice.

Yield: Serves four.

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It's Not a Secret

[ed.  This is not uncommon.  When I worked in a bookstore (quite a while ago), we used to tear the covers off a couple hundred unsold paperbacks and magazines each week.  It was a cheaper way to document returns to the distribution agency, and the contents got shredded.  What a waste.]

A regular Victoria's Secret shopper, Marie Wolf brought an unworn pair of "Pink" brand sweatpants back to the store at Westshore Plaza a few weeks ago, and planned to buy something else. The clerk happily gave her a refund, then took a pair of scissors and started cutting the pants in half.

"I was shocked, because, mind you, these were $70 sweatpants, and there's nothing wrong with them," Wolf said. "The clerk just said, 'I know, but it's our policy.' "

Outraged, Wolf confronted a store manager, then called the parent company and found, indeed, Victoria's Secret does cut up some returned items so they can't be resold — even if they're in fine condition.

Apparently, the clerk's only mistake, Wolf said, was to cut up the clothes in front of customers, and not in a back room out of sight.

"I asked about donating them to Salvation Army, what about Goodwill, what about all the people who lost everything in the tsunami?" Wolf said. "I told them I won't ever shop with them anymore, and neither will anyone in my family."

Officials with Victoria's Secret owner Limited Brands declined to comment on the record about their return policy and procedures, though calls to local stores confirmed the practice. And they're not the only big retailer that destroys some items that customers return.

Winter Coat

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Bad Education

by  Malcolm Harris

The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting.

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy,  then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.

What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?

During the expansion of the housing bubble, lenders felt protected because they could repackage risky loans as mortgage-backed securities, which sold briskly to a pious market that believed housing prices could only increase. By combining slices of regionally diverse loans and theoretically spreading the risk of default, lenders were able to convince independent rating agencies that the resulting financial products were safe bets. They weren’t. But since this wouldn’t be America if you couldn’t monetize your children’s futures, the education sector still has its equivalent: the Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or, as they’re known in the industry, SLABS).

SLABS were invented by then-semi-public Sallie Mae in the early ’90s, and their trading grew as part of the larger asset-backed security wave that peaked in 2007. In 1990, there were $75.6 million of these securities in circulation; at their apex, the total stood at $2.67 trillion. The number of SLABS traded on the market grew from $200,000  in 1991 to near $250 billion by the fourth quarter of 2010. But while trading in securities backed by credit cards, auto loans, and home equity is down 50 percent or more across the board, SLABS have not suffered the same sort of drop. SLABS are still considered safe investments—the kind financial advisors market to pension funds and the elderly.

Time Flies

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Hacker Typer

[ed.  Want to show off in front of your co-workers and look like one of those the brainy computer geeks you see in the movies?  Here's your chance.  Just click on the "Hack!" prompt at this site or the image below and start typing.  Gee, I'm feeling smarter already.]

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There's Always a Catch

Due to the increasing obsession with quick solutions to excess fat mass, liposuction has become one of the most popular cosmetic procedures.

And as far as simply removing large volumes of subcutaneous fat from one’s body, it just may be the most effective method – certainly, far superior to diet/exercise or bariatric surgery.

But there are a few catches.

As I have previously discussed, in contrast to losing weight via lifestyle modification or bariatric surgery, liposuction does not make an obese person healthier.  In fact, the removal of benign subcutaneous fat stores may actually make you worse off in terms of metabolic health.

Also, as I suggested in an earlier post, there was some very preliminary evidence suggesting that after the removal of fat from the buttocks, thighs, and abdomen, women see a compensatory increase in the fat deposition in other places – namely, their breasts. A 2-for-1 deal, if you will.

However, a hot-off-the-press study by Hernandez and colleagues suggests something less ideal than this scenario. Indeed, the authors found that a year after liposuction was performed the fat initially removed is basically all replaced, but not necessarily where you’d want it to go.

In My Life

by Shine Jacob

To Jawaharlal Nehru, it was a symbol of independent India. C Rajagopalachari considered it a masterpiece of Swadeshi manufacturing. For the country’s industry, it was a perfect launch pad. But for a slice of what is soon going to be history, this might be the last chance. Godrej — the last manufacturer of typewriters in the world — has just 500 machines left for sale.

“We stopped production in 2009 and were the last company in the world to manufacture office typewriters. Currently, the company has only 500 machines left. The machines are of Godrej Prima, the last typewriter brand from our company, and will be sold at a maximum retail price of Rs 12,000,” said Milind Dukle, general manager-operations, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company.

When the company started making typewriters, the whole nation considered it the first step to an industrialised India.

During its golden age in the 1990s, the company used to produce 50,000 machines every year, while the total output in India was about 150,000.

“From the early 2000 onwards, computers started dominating. All the manufacturers of office typewriters stopped production, except us. Till 2009, we used to produce 10,000 to 12,000 machines a year,” said Dukle.

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Terrorist Watch List

This item in the Guardian's coverage of the latest Wikileaks dump is not the first time I've heard that the Casio F-91W digital watch is thought to be "the sign of al-Qaida," and "a contributing factor to continued detention of prisoners by the analysts stationed at Guantánamo Bay."

But like so much revealed by Wikileaks, when stuff like this is proven out in the State Department's own pen, the absurdity levels really spike:

Briefing documents used to train staff in assessing the threat level of new detainees advise that possession of the F-91W - available online for as little as £4 - suggests the wearer has been trained in bomb making by al-Qaida in Afghanistan.

The report states: "The Casio was known to be given to the students at al-Qaida bomb-making training courses in Afghanistan at which the students received instruction in the preparation of timing devices using the watch.

Don't forget, folks, that you too can own the Casio F91W, the wristwatch considered by America's crack anti-terrorist experts as a sure sign of terrorist affiliations. Just $12! They are also available in a range of classic terrorist colors such as lavender and pumpkin. (Don't worry if they're sold out: you can always go on the terrorist watch list.)


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When Nature Calls

[ed.  Beware:  high ewww factor; but seriously, this would impose severe restrictions on your independence and quality of life.  What a terrible affliction to have.] 

by Cedar Burnett

You never quite forget the first time you crap yourself. Sure, there are the preambles -- the day you barely made it, running down the hall looking like a middle school boy hiding his erection, the many pairs of lightly soiled underwear thrown out in random bathrooms, and the spares you now carry in your purse. But nothing can really prepare you for the real deal. Once you cross that line, there’s no turning back.

I was about a month into my stressful new job selling radio ads when it happened. I spent my days making demoralizing cold calls that ended in rejection, and my nights trying to forget. The best way I knew to forget involved gorging on delicious food. Specifically Indian food. And donuts.

High on sugar and fat, my friend Jordan, my husband, John, and I set out for a postprandial walk from the donut emporium. We made it several blocks when it became clear something had gone horribly awry in my intestinal track.

"Get the car!" I squeaked to my companions, feeling the pressure mount in my guts and heat course through my body. "Get the car NOW!"

One look at my sweating, bug-eyed face was all the encouragement they needed.

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