live long enough to find the good one. protect yourself.

(click image to play – 03:00)
Everyone I’ve shown Wilfrid Brimo’s French public service cartoon on STD protection who has taken time to respond has done so with enthusiasm and usually with warmth. No French is required to enjoy it: the tagline is “Live long enough to find the good one. Protect yourself,” bracketing the name of the ad’s producer, AIDES (not AIDS in French, but “helpers”; they claim to be the oldest French organization devoted to combating HIV/AIDS). Here’s an English-end-titled version. The same production team also made a similarly structured predecessor to this film, aimed at young women.

credits (pdf)

on choosing between the presumptions of the professionally religious (east vs. west)

You may have read or heard about Buddhist monks in Cambodia being forbidden to watch the World Cup, or if they did, to maintain detachment and show no enthusiasm, on pain of expulsion from their monasteries; a somewhat more tolerant pronouncement was made in Thailand.

Well, gosh darn it if that didn’t get me to thinking, and what follows from thinking but a limerick, right? *clears throat*

Whether watching football like a stick
in the mud, or believing a dick,
if unused, is an odd
sort of pipeline to God,
I believe I would rather not pick.

Yeah, yeah, I know, celibacy is practiced and valued in both traditions, but I think it’s only in Roman Catholicism that male professional (if corrupt) celibacy is regarded as a prerequisite for passing on divinity to the unenlightened, not to mention dictating (of all things!) their sexual behavior.

By the way, recent attention on the part of Buddhist heirarchs to the behavior of their charges during the World Cup may have been prompted in part by the warm reception given Khyentse Norbu’s film The Cup.

check the local domestic dress code before making pancakes for your boyfriend’s son

Caren MacDonald testifies at her trial on felony charges of interfering with custody and a misdemeanor charge of violating a restraining order, following her abduction of her son from the custody of his father:

[T]he mother charged with snatching her 11-year-old son and fleeing the country told a judge Monday that she feared her gay ex-husband was trying to ”turn” their son gay….

[Caren] MacDonald…described for the jury how her son told her about a man in his father’s home cooking pancakes for breakfast while wearing pajamas.

At first, her son liked [his] father’s lover, Carlos Diaz, MacDonald testified. But she said that later, her son told her that he hated Diaz and that Diaz had massaged him on his buttocks several times…

[A] courtroom guardian for the boy in 2001 recommended that Diaz not have contact with the boy — but also suggested that the the boy spend more time with his father than with his mother.

Investigators could not substantiate her allegations, and…[c]ustody decisions continued to go in the boy’s father’s favor. A court-appointed psychologist described Caren MacDonald as ”mentally undone, delusional, bipolar, just about every mental illness in the book,” she said skeptically on the stand.

Ultimately, the judge ordered her to have no physical contact with her son….

The boy…testified last week that his mother forced him to lie about being molested because she felt it was unfair that he lived with his dad. He said the only touching involved a shoulder rub he asked for from his dad’s partner.

reported by Amy Sherman in the Miami Herald