Max Power, Y is sometimes a vowel, as in fly or cry. Have people forgotten EBN-OZN?

I don't know, I found the prose excerpt charming in a gimmicky way. But it is a pure stunt, and reading a whole book of it would probably be like watching somebody juggle chainsaws for hour after hour. (I just tried, and I can't even do one sentence of it.)

Wow. Some mean-spirited commenters, here. Like a fat little kid is the weirdest and most appalling thing ever. Come on, he's cute... Jeez!

Yes, he is lip-syncing. The "Cuppy Cake" song has been around for years, long enough that the little girl who sang it has grown into an amazingly pretty young woman with her own Youtube acco8unt.

Ah, Valerie, don't be mean to toothy. He was the original emo kid. Seriously, watch some of their old videos, and he just looks SO sad, and you know he's not faking it. (That's a boy who obviously got picked on a lot in gym class, poor thing.) If I remember, he wrote most of their songs, so it's natural he'd be upfront. Maybe it just seemed odd because there was this more conventionally handsome guy hiding in the background, while this toothy little guy was in your face singing.

Sigh. "How It's Made"... "CSI"... "Dirty Jobs"... They don't need to do a marathon of any of this stuff, it all seems to be on 24/7 as is. Throw in that show with the damn crab fishermen, and you have the lineup that'll be on TV forever in my personal hell.

(Oh, I'm being cranky... But where's my Twilight Zone?)

Honestly, I can't see how the iPhone works for anybody BUT women (and tiny men.) I'm over six feet tall, and I go nuts trying to use my friend's iPhone... I sit there stabbing at that damn screen, hitting three keys at once. It's like a children's toy or something. The iPhone isn't just anti-male, it's anti-big girls!

(Didn't SNL do some fake commercial about how men could get "Ladyfingers" to use the iPhone? I know I saw something like that, somewhere.)

Neurogirl, I don't think the men you're talking about are classic "bad boys". They are weasels, acting nice up front and then turning bad. Traditionally, "bad boys" are just rotten, right up front. And girls love 'em for it.

A lot of people (women and men) have a deep submissive streak, it's much more common than a dominant streak. Thus, we respond to "strength" much more than weakness. (To be submissive and find a lot of partners, you have to be so cute that people will seek you out and pursue you. A homely or aging submissive is generally outta luck.) Men and women are very attracted to sexually aggressive people, up to a point. But the old adage holds true: you date the wild ones, but marry the nice ones. Being a jerk becomes a lot less attractive as times goes by, and becomes a huge liability in terms of finding possible mates after 40 or so.

Women being attracted to "bad boys" is one of those things that does not speak well of our species. Men act horribly to impress women, and women respond and reward the men by sleeping with them, and thus the men continue to act horribly while women (and other guys) complain about all the jerk guys in the world. (Jerky women are also pretty popular with boys, but their jerkiness doesn't tend to have the catastrophic, worldwide impact that male jerkiness does. Women don't start wars to impress guys.) It's a horrible cycle, and we won't break it until girls own up to their role in helping to make the world miserable, and stop flocking after nasty idiots. Guys will do anything to impress the ladies, so ladies have to show them that being a bad person is not impressive.

(And no, I do not actually imagine that one message board comment is gonna change the world.)

I am not a vegetarian, but I am a no-pig-etarian. How could anybody ever eat a little sweetie like that?!

Anthony - I have no experience sculpting in wax, but plenty of experience sculpting with Sculpey and other materials... and I can tell you that sculpting tentacles is wonderfully simple. I have to fight the tempation to put tentacles on every little monster I make, because tentacles are a cinch and they always look deceptively complicated and fiddly. First I'll make a bunch of little circles (the suction cups) and fire those, then I'll make the tube of the tentacles and I'll stick the fired, firm suction cups on, and fire that. Presto: a tentacle! And that surface detailing would also be easy to duplicate with a toothpick or pressing in a piece of some other material.

I'm assuming (and hoping) this artist ISN'T killing the octopus, but they could avoid any ethical questions (and boost their crafter street cred) by sculpting the thing instead of using animal meat.

The thing is, a person with any sculpting skill at all could make something like this without needing to harm an octopus. Seriously, look at it: a tube for the tentacle, and then a bunch of circles stuck on, for the suction cups. A second-grader could sculpt that. Even if they're buying dead octopuses, and not actually killing live octopuses for this process... Why bother? Just sculpt the darn things! It's an intersting-looking object, I like the idea of octopus-themed jewelry... But using a REAL octopus for this is just gross.

That "literary joke" was a bit too subtle for me. I don't get it.

The actual performance was pretty cute. Watch for the Uhura cameo!

I think the likeliest explanation is that she was aware on a subliminal level that something was wrong, and her brain, probably because of some weird misfire due to the tumor, was able to send her a very literal warning message. There's nothing supernatural about that.

I'm reminded of Grant Morrison, the comics writer. He wrote a story about a man who was tortured, and his torturers convinced him face was being eaten away by some weird virus. Not long after, Morrison really got some weird virus that was eating his face away. I think that it's the same thing - on some subliminal message, he knew something was wrong, there was a virus attacking his face. So, that idea bubbled up in his fiction, the same way you can have a nightmare about getting sick a few days before you get the flu. It's not actually a prophetic dream. Your body is letting you know, "Hey, you're coming down with the flu," but you haven't figured it out yet, on the waking level.

The body and mind are fascinating and mysterious enough, without needing to look for supernatural stuff.

I should have picked a cool name like you, "Mr. Kotter".

"IdDoUrsula"... Er, thanks, but I think our love is doomed. After all, I don't know if I could ever be Mrs. Ursula IdDoUrsula.

This stuff is only funny if the idea of a cute girl with a wang freaks you out, and a cute girl with a wang only freaks you out if you are one seriously repressed homo. Since America is one vast, seething cauldron of repressed gayness, this stuff NEVER gets old.

Although it's an endlessly popular joke, in real life, trannies don't go to regular bars and just pick up random straight guys. Know why? Because doing that can get you seriously hurt or quite possibly killed. Just walking down the freaking street can get you killed. (http://www.rememberingourdead.org/about/core.html)

Brandon Teena was "tricking" people, too.

Speaking as an actual tranny, this kind of thing is INCREDIBLY annoying and tedious, even when it's presented through little picture puzzles. That whole idea of some poor, poor guy getting home to discover that a naughty transgendered person "tricked" him. I'm not as uptight about this stuff as a lot of trannies, but it is a pain in the ass to see people like you depicted as a gross-out punchline over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

"Dangers". Thank you very much.

I'm amazed by some of the comments here, and the patronizing, scolding tone of the original article. Why is it so stunning and appalling to people that these women figured out relatively early in life that children simply weren't for them? Most of you probably know people who made the same decision and have lived happy lives without breeding. That's their choice, and you're in no position to judge them for it. And if the ladies in this article believe in zero population growth, they're doing something admirable by acting on it. To suggest that they should kill themselves is idiotic. They want to make life better for the creatures on this planet NOW, by not crowding the planet with still MORE creatures. Zero population growth obviously does not mean killing the population that's here!

Yes, it's possible that some day they'll decide they wants kids. If so, they can ADOPT. There are already millions of kids who need parents.

Still... it is a little scary when smart girls like these decide not to reproduce, and all the dopes start hollerin' about the sanctity of breeding. Next stop: "Idiocracy".