Y'all might or might not remember that my first post for this site was about Plan B. Plan B is birth control, not an abortifacient (if you have any doubts, go read that post), it's a fucking lifesaver if you've ever had a condom break, gotten lazy with the birth control, or (god forbid) been raped, and basically it belongs in your medicine cabinet.

Light Rail Coyote is an admirable grad student who somehow also works for the Academy for Educational Development and is therefore a better model for engaged academia than yours truly ever has been. In any case, she wrote me to ask if I'd ask you all to please take a brief survey about your use of Plan B if you've used it in the last year and are between the ages of 18-44.

Needless to say, the survey is entirely confidential. You can skip questions you don't want to answer, or if none of the available options is correct. (And there's a comments section towards the end.)

A little more about the AED and the survey itself:

Plus when you're done you can enter a drawing to win a $150 Target gift certificate.

(By the way, if you have a Target card and haven't signed up to have them give X% of your purchases to some local school, please do. If you don't have a kid, just pick a random school, preferably the poorest one in town.)

You're welcome, of course, to also post the survey link on your own blog, along with a handy-dandy little button, which is available here. The survey runs through March 31, 2008.



Bitch_PhD reminds everyone to keep Plan B in their medicine cabinet--just in case.

At the risk of sounding divisive, I must start out by saying this is a news story for guys. Y-chromosome-havers. Bros. Dudes. Hombres. Hommes. Other words that could also be the names of gay male porno mags.

Not to say that the ladies can’t read this, I mean, if you’re really easily entertained or are trying to catch all of my glaring grammatical errors, Pokemon-style. It just might not have the same visceral impact on you as it does us guy-type-folk.

Fellas, how many times has this happened to you?

You’re sitting around your apartment, or dorm room, or dimly-lit basement that really is a good deal creepier than you think it is so maybe your recent dry spell isn’t because you’re “too nice of a guy”, or super-secret supervillain-style lair nestled inside the heart of an active and quite evil volcano, or some combination thereof. You’re playing Halo 3 or reading Dostoevsky or “logging on” to “the Internet” and “blogging” or huffing glue or krumpin’ or watching a Steven Segal movie or writing a poem about the girl who broke your heart using a combination of eyeliner and your sweet, sensitive tears as ink or whatever the fuck it is you kids do these days.

You may perhaps be in the nude. Because it’s more comfortable, or maybe because you enjoy startling delivery people. Perhaps not.

Eventually, you notice your testicles. They might be itchy, for example. You could be proactively checking for pre-cancerous lumps. Or masturbating. You may have recently nailed them to a board, and the wood grain is chafing your thighs. You may have lost one or more of them in a tragic farmyard or industrial accident and are now writing a very angry email to the author of this article about his callous attitude towards victims of testicular trauma.

You may take a moment to marvel at how your testicles provide you with sperm, testosterone and a searing reminder of the inherent fragility of the male body when you’re punched in them. This third benefit of having testicles is also known as “comedy gold” and must, by law, be featured in every PG-13 rated summer comedy.

Then you get a bit wistful and wonder if there isn’t perhaps a way your balls could be even more awesome.

Well, cheer up, since modern science has come to your rescue.

Here in New York City (which as well all know has been on the forefront of testicle research since at least the 1960s) scientists recently announced that they have been able to identify and extract from the testicles of mice the specific “progenitor” cells that eventually turn into mouse sperm cells once the scientists stop staring and poking at mouse junk and give the mice some privacy.

“Big deal,” you may say, “ Anyone with a syringe and way too much time on their hands can drain themselves some mouse balls.”

What makes these experiments with mouse testicles scientific, as opposed to just a really awkward day at the pet store, is that the scientists involved were then able to easily coax these progenitor cells into becoming “multi-potent” stem cells.

Stem cells, for those of you just now joining us from the 18th Century, are basically the impressionable youngsters of the biological cellular family. Most of the cells in the human body are a lot like me, cranky and old and set in their ways. If or when they get around to replicating, they usually only make duplicates of themselves. This isn’t a bad thing, since you normally don’t want the dead skin cells on your arms to be replaced with spleen cells, or cancer.

Stem cells, on the other hand, are open to all kinds of new experiences, and really just want to fit in. So when they’re not making out with other stem cells at parties or doing drugs because all the cool stem cells are doing them, they’re easily influenced into changing into other types of cells. Theoretically this means that stem cells can be used to replace cells in the human body, such as those found in the brain and spinal cord, that have been damaged due to disease or injury.

Scientists have been using two types of stem cells in their research. “Adult” stem cells are harvested from umbilical cord blood, connective tissue, and from creepy little glowing-eyed girls that lurk in underwater Objectivist dystopias. “Embryonic” stem cells are harvested from human embryos that are still in the very earliest stages of development (a process with destroys the embryo) or are created from the tears Jesus sheds after homosexual Satanists murder innocent tiny snowflake babies in the name of the false God they call “science”. Embryonic stem cells can change into a wider variety of cells than adult stem cells can, but research on adult stem cells both avoids pissing off anti-abortion activists and can be fully federally funded.

This explains why scientists spend more time playing with mouse testicles than heading down the local in-vitro fertilization clinic and saying, “Hey, since you’re about to destroy all those unwanted frozen embryos anyway, do you mind if we use them to maybe try and cure Multiple Sclerosis?”

While there are many possible advantages to harvesting stem cells from your own balls, such as a reduced risk of your body rejecting the transplanted stem cells, there are still a few bumps in the road to full testicular awesomeness.

Even if scientists are able to replicate their mouse-based findings in humans, some scientists have other concerns. As one British stem cell researcher phrased it:

Way to underestimate Americans, dude. All you’d need to do is film the procedure and advertise it as an open casting call for a Jackass: The Movie sequel. You’d have guys lined up around the block eagerly waiting their turn to have a huge needle jammed into their nutmeat.

Personally, I’d like to have federal law amended so that anyone in Congress or the White House voting against funding embryonic stem cell research has to have their balls harvested for the good of America.

Of course, then you might wind up having to tell people who’ve just been cured of Alzheimer’s that they have George W. Bush’s testicles to thank.

Now that's what I'd call a very painful procedure.

Humans have sex. Lots of it.

We give it many names; intercourse, coitus, "making love," fucking, boinking, and so on. According to the Kinsey Institute, 54% of men think about doin' the nasty everyday or several times a day, while only 19% of women give nookie the same amount of thought.

But why do we make whoopee? University of Texas researchers spent five years on a study to answer that very question, and discovered over 200 reasons for the No-Pants Dance.

Some others on the bottom of the list include "I wanted to punish myself," "I wanted to get a job," and, I shit you not, "I wanted to feel closer to God."

Speaking of conservative Christians, "I wanted to have a child" also ranked poorly.. Because they don't have sex. Jesus rides a stork and drops the baby in the cabbage patch. That's how it goes, right?

The top ten reasons for sex (men and women) are as follows:

Now all we need is a study titled "Why They Don't Call the Next Morning."

"Why Humans Have Sex"

thefreak wonders why "Couldn't Pay for the Pizza" didn't make the list.