DILDOS OR ROSES?

Whether you’re spending Valentine’s Day with your favorite lover or the old ball and chain, or possibly better than either — your imagination — you could sit there on the holiday and look at a dozen long-stemmed roses, or you could have an orgasm, or a dozen, with the Wilde one, a dildo named for Oscar Wilde, who said, “To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”

Dildos have been around since the Stone Age, but have come a long way. (read more…)

(This is the first article I wrote for TheBlot magazine, Wall St., New York.  It was published on Sept. 27, 2013.)

According to Cornell University Law School, there aren’t any laws in the US prohibiting cannibalism (the nonconsensual consumption of people).

In July (2013), Tyree Lincoln Smith (Fla.) was found not guilty for gorging on a vagrant. Then on Sept. 9, three Superior Court judges committed Smith to 60 years in a Connecticut psychiatric hospital. They feared he’d eat more humans if left free to roam.

Unlike Tyree Lincoln Smith, or serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer — whose flesh fetish landed him in prison — many cannibal cases are cases of survival.

Every time I fly over the Andes Mountains I look at the icy peaks piercing through the clouds and imagine the infamous 1972 plane crash survivors eating their frozen rugby teammates to stay alive.

Would I eat people? Of course I’d eat people.

But last month I tucked into alpaca steak and was overwhelmed by the maleness of the alpaca meat. My little alpaca had that masculine essence of a big buck killed by a car instead of a bullet.

Would the meat of a human male killed in a plane crash have the overpowering rankness of roadkill buck? Maybe women would taste better. And what is that man taste — is it hormonal?

I knew the perfect expert to ask, so I fired off a Facebook message to Paula Lee, PhD, at University of Chicago, author of the new book “Deer Hunting in Paris; a Memoir of God, Guns & Game Meat” and, on a more serious note, author of “Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse.” (read more…)

I wrote an article for The Blot magazine about the death threats that Curio Theatre Company received for a production of Romeo and Juliet because they’d cast two women as the young lovers. My article ended up winning the most viewed article of the month at the magazine (and I got a bonus cheque for that) but I received some serious flack for writing the story too. I had a sleepless couple nights.

“It’s the Painted Desert, right to the horizon,” Hamish panted in the lead of our peloton of five mountain bikes roaring down the empty Arizona road.

Phaseolus Vulgaris—Costa Rican Mr. Bean: A cyclist was overtaking me on the up-hill through the jungle. A grown man on a child’s bicycle with banana seat, monkey bars, no gears and no oil on the chain, was passing my fancy new mountain bike. The Costa Rican local in a pristine white dress shirt, ball-breaking white jeans (that would have been the envy of a matador), and black leather dress shoes, was unconcerned that his knees were hitting his ears. He casually smoked, one hand lightly on the monkey bars and the other flamboyantly holding his cigarette. He left me in a cloud of extra-strength no filter as he squeaked and rattled by. He crested the hill in a puff of smoke and was gone.

Children from the nearby village laughed at me. It was humiliating. How did he do that? I was fit. Maybe it was like an episode of Costa Rican Mr Bean, which meant Señor Pinto would be on the other side of the hill, lying in the foliage, having a heart attack from faking lack-of-effort on the incline.