To be frank, I could never say no to a skank. I’ve known many virgins. As lovers they stank. I’m not one to rue the wine I once drank; For most of my fun there’ve been skanks to thank. &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp Loose-limbed, leering, slinky and lank -- &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp I prize the bad pupil who’s courting a spank. &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp No thought how dank the dungeon, how ripe or rank, &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp When I ask why not — -- — ...

I'm up to my eyeballs in conferences with students (for which I must read and comment on their essays), interviews with job candidates, teaching, etc. etc. In the free moments when I'm eating lunch at my desk, I read stuff online, and this NYTimes article about professional coaches for online daters in the “Your Money” section of the Business section was briefly on the most e-mailed list. (Judging by my reading habits, I'd have to ...

Everyone has done it. Later, after high school, or marriage, that waiting becomes, for most academics, associated strongly with the job market. The associations remain: sometime in the late 1990s at one of those “how to handle the job market” sessions offered by the director of graduate studies in my PhD program, a student asked the DGS how to handle the fact of sitting around in mid-December waiting to hear whether one will be in...

Last month, I turned 30. A few months prior, I ended a serious relationship. Understandably, I was a little afraid. What if I never got married and had kids? I have never been a kid-person, but would I regret reaching the end of my life and never having had that experience? A friend of mine who has a child told me, “The older you get, the more you realize you’re not that different from other people.” Meaning, I would probably regret it. Most p...

While I am not a huge advocate, I do occasionally listen to Air America radio. Many of the shows are bit ranty, the one worth checking out is Al Franken’s, which can involve fairly extended discussions with lefty (but not far lefty) pundits and major bloggers. One of the things that is really unpleasant about listening to the station is the same thing that is unpleasant about listen to any radio station, namely the ads.

On our way home from Beijing yesterday my girlfriend picked up a fashion magazine at a street stand to peruse on the bus ride back to Tianjin. As I glanced at the cover of the magazine what struck me were the two words “Party Queen” there amidst the rest of the Chinese. Even the name of Jennifer Lopez, who found here way onto the cover and into the magazine, was in Chinese while these two words were the only English to be found. ...

A couple of years ago I picked up a copy of The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right in the 25 cent bin of a used bookstore. The book has sat in the “educational” section of my home library––shelved alongside German for Business and my copy of Strunk & White––for as long. This weekend I got curious and finally cracked the spine. Wanting to see how the other half lives, I also bor...

So a few weeks ago when I claimed I was reading Paris Hilton is a Fool I actually wasn't really reading it, just planning to. But now I actually have read it. I'm not sure it's worth $1.99; it's only nine pages long, the tone is fairly pedantic, and I'm not getting a lot of emotional traction out of deciding whether Paris Hilton is actually a fool or not (not sure comparing her to the dictionary definiton gets me anywhere). But, there is this ...

From an AP story on a book manuscript being written by Sgt. Erik R. Saar, who worked as an Arabic translator at the US camp in Guantanamo Bay. Saar's book will report that female "civilian contractors" were used to sexually molest detainees, including one case in which a female interrogator rubbed her breasts on a detainee's back. Muslim men, the AP adds, consider it taboo to have close contact with women who aren't their wives. Here's Saar: I...

Read and weep as Genevieve Wood of the conservative Family Research Council refuses to admit that masturbation does not cause pregnancy, then suggests that masturbating can lead to STDs. CARVILLE: But you can't get pregnant through masturbation, can you? WOOD: Well, hold on. Well, hold on. Look, everything in that report that Waxman put out there is taken out of context. CARVILLE: Right. WOOD: I have spoken to people who have talked to all th...