The Guardian on Saturday ran a review of The Wisdom of Whores, which is newly out in paperback in the UK. In it, Nicholas Lezard suggests I sound like a fun person to go for a drink with. By conincidence, I spent the weekend with someone who was at university with Nick. He was, aparently, [...]
It’s always dangerous to mix your coms with your orgs. In China, a link from the UNAIDS site takes you to a classic sex cybersquat: it offers links to dildos, fetish and swinger sites. All because the url for the Beijing Association of STD & AIDS Prevention and Control, bjaidsass.com, has “ass” in [...]
It is with pride that I post my first link to Indonesia’s new-born English language newspaper, The Jakarta Globe. Not just because its editor appears in The Wisdom of Whores, translated the book into Indonesian and is one of my dearest friends, but also because they are publishing fun stuff. Including this reflection on the [...]
So women in Uganda are smearing chloroform on their chests, making men in bars swoon. When they wake up, they find themselves naked and penniless.
So reports AFP, in a story predictably but nonetheless delightfully headlined “Ugandan men warned of ‘booby trap’”. My question is, how close does a random punter in a bar have to [...]
It’s official: the Bee Gees can keep you alive. According to David Matlock of the University of Illinois, the song “Staying Alive”, of Saturday Night Fever fame, provides the perfect rhythm for the chest-thumping that’s needed to bring someone out of a heart attack.
As the New York Times reports, Queen’s just as good. “Another One [...]
Stolen from Sean Casey, with thanks.
From Heather, at A Minha Vida, I learned of an interesting compilation of HIV-related slang (originally from PlusNews). As they observe, the euphemisms we choose to say the unsayable often tell us quite a bit about our own cultures. In Angola, for example, getting HIV is like “pisar na min” –stepping on a landmine. But [...]
A couple of recent comments on this blog have made me question the nature of the beast.
Jerome Martin of Act Up Paris takes me to task for not speaking to Act Up before commenting on a statement from colleagues at the Treatment Action Group that was critical of Act Up’s work. Jerome is quite [...]
Other people get spam e-mails offering them all night erections and a life free of depression. I get offered syphilis diagnostic kits and statistical analysis software. And now, viral art. The sculpture pictured above landed in my in-box from Bioetch — no, that’s not a typo. And I’m passing on to you the chance to [...]
I’ve had lots of fun in recent weeks pontificating in talks and interviews about sex, drugs and the AIDS biz, usually to people who know a lot more about all of the above than I do. (My favourites of recent weeks: sex worker radio XXBN and Sex Goddess radio Susie Bright, not pictured below). But [...]
