1. Three out of ten men would abstain from sex for life for a million pounds. Perhaps they're misunderstanding the meaning of the word "pounds?" (Additionally, one must admit that such a claim is fairly easy to make on this end, and fairly easy to break once the cheque clears. A million pounds [how the fuck do you make the pound symbol on a Mac?] pretty much buys you Shanghai's entire red-light district.)

2. Womens' sex drive drops 40% once they feel that they have "secured" their partner. I've been referring to this article a lot in the past few months so I thought it only fair that I actually post the thing. I've also been doing a lot of thinking lately about what I think is becoming a post-marital society, i.e. the way social and economic structures shift once marriage is no longer really "necessary" in the traditional sense. Now that we (in the West, anyway) can all hold down jobs and raise children in pretty much any combination of family structure we want, what place does marriage hold - besides being representative of a kind of unattainable ideal of romantic love? And given that procreative strength has always sat with the women and has only been occasionally dressed up as somehow belonging to hererosexual marriage, I would think the coming century is going to completely flip the norm on what makes a couple a couple.

While we're on the subject of large, large things, Al Gore was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize on the exact same day that the scientific community announced climate change to be unstoppable and that we're just going to have to live with the fact that the nature of weather on earth is going to change radically for centuries to come (provided we live at all). I feel an enormous amount of affection for Al Gore, probably solely to keep my brain from having to deal with the other thing, which is... well. I'm glad beyond words that this is finally something that makes the papers on a daily basis rather than a dirty little secret being kept out of the public eye by the worst kind of governmental vagrants. But it doesn't make it any easier to wrap the head or the heart around.