Mixtapes for Hookers

I didn’t have enough links on Sunday for a wrap-up. But boy is there a lot to talk about now!  Sorry about that!

Romance novels can be written by smart women!  This article made me want to try my hand at it, too, even though, you know, I’m a man and don’t really read romance novels.

AAG responds to a letter by a guy concerned about the ethics of watching porn.  Nothing new to people that read about this all the time, but pretty interesting anyway.  I like the idea that some people think of it as performance art.  [via Debauched Domestic Diva]

Drake, the Degrassi star/rapper/general annoyance, is (thankfully) doing his part to revive the jimmy-wrapping era of hip-hop. [via Idolator]

Punk.  It’s a lot like social media, you know?

A Russian woman can lift 14kg with her vagina muscles.  That’s one of those articles that make me wonder about how, exactly, the newspapers got wind of the story.

FiveThirtyEight mentions Sarah Palin’s resignation, commenters start hurling insults.

Bitch Magazine continues to be really juvenile and irritating.  Now they’re offended because Paris Hilton hired Middle Eastern cultural experts before she started filming her new TV show in Dubai, as though that’s a bad thing.  Also they don’t like that she wore a bikini to go swimming.  Which, since Dubai is 82% foreigners, is actually both legal and fairly ordinary common (and probably got the OK from her cultural advisors.)  [via Natalia Antonova]

Australian writer Margo Lanagan’s new Tender Morsels is causing a big to-do in Britain .  The updated version of Snow White and Rose Red, which is actually intended for children, includes a gang-rape scene, a detailed description of a miscarriage, and in its very first paragraph has a sex scene between a witch and a dwarf. [via Bookslut]
UPDATE: The second I hit send The Book Bench also posted about this. Apparently the book’s been out in the US since October and nobody here paid it any mind at all.

At some point in my complaining about stupid 3oh!3 and their stupid name, I remembered early nineties r&b girl group Y?N-Vee, who weren’t really any good either but who at least didn’t make Helen Keller jokes in their songs.  Though the chorus to their song Satisfaction did have a really awkward line about how “it melts in your mouth and not in your hands.”

Kerry Washington will be playing a cracked-out transsexual hooker in Life Is Hot In Cracktown, and it may or may not be the first time a black biological female actress plays a trans character on film. (On TV it’s happened a bunch of times before, oddly, at least according to the comments on that post.) [via Clay Cane]

Studio 360 came up with some ideas for a new Gay Pride flag.  My favorite was the squares one, because it re-instituted the turquoise and pink–symbolizing art and sex–that were taken out of the real Pride flag in the past.  Also, it reminds me of the new Pet Shop Boys album.

Charles and Ray Eames debuting a new chair on NBC in 1956. [via Joe Gebbia's Posterous]

And, finally, my 1000th Tumblr post went up about fifteen minutes ago.  Trying to do something memorable/milestone-y, I went with a photo I shot myself, though it’s not a self-portrait so don’t get your hopes up.