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The Muslim Heroes Of The Paris Attacks

Lassana Bathily, un Mensch #Vincennes... fb.me/3xoP3jslF

—
Jewpop (@jewpopblog) January 10, 2015

You already know about Ahmed Merabet, the Muslim cop who died confronting the killers outside the Charlie Hebdo offices. But now there’s another Muslim hero to emerge from the mayhem this week:

A Muslim employee of a kosher grocery store in Paris is being hailed as a hero for hiding several customers in a walk-in freezer to save them from a violent gunman. Lassana Bathily, 24, led the others into the basement of his workplace, Hyper Cacher, when Amedy Coulibaly opened fire on Friday, according to French media. … “I opened the door, and several people came in with me. I turned off the lights, I turned off the freezer, and they got into the freezer,” Bathily told local station BFMTV. “I told them to calm down, to not make noise. If he knows we’re here, he can come down and kill us.” …

The people he saved expressed profound gratitude after the violence was over, he said. “When they got out, they congratulated me,” Bathily told the station. “They said, ‘Honestly, thank you for having thought of that,’ and I said, ‘You’re welcome. It’s nothing, that’s life.’”

A Story About Putting Kink In Context

Dan Savage shares how smashing birthday cake into a college student’s face taught him empathy for straight people:

This story also appears in Dan’s 2005 book The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family. For more info on Bawdy Storytelling, which hosts shows in LA, San Francisco and Seattle, go here. Previous live storytelling on the Dish can be found here.

The Mysterious World Of Female Ejaculation, Ctd

It just got a little less so:

Researchers are now saying that squirting is essentially involuntary urination.

Female ejaculate is technically the small amount of milky white fluid that’s expressed when climaxing, New Scientist explains. Squirting, on the other hand, results in a much larger gush of a clear fluid, which comes from the urethra, the duct where urine is conveyed from the bladder. The findings, which combine biochemical analyses with pelvic ultrasounds, were published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine on Christmas Eve.

More details from that New Scientist piece:

To investigate the nature and origins of the [milky white fluid purportedly from the Skene glands], Samuel Salama, a gynaecologist at the Parly II private hospital in Le Chesnay, France, and his colleagues recruited seven women who report producing large amounts of liquid – comparable to a glass of water – at orgasm. First, these women were asked to provide a urine sample. An ultrasound scan of their pelvis confirmed that their bladder was completely empty. The women then stimulated themselves through masturbation or with a partner until they were close to having an orgasm – which took between 25 and 60 minutes.

A second pelvic ultrasound was then performed just before the women climaxed. At the point of orgasm, the squirted fluid was collected in a bag and a final pelvic scan performed. Even though the women had urinated just before stimulation began, the second scan – performed just before they climaxed – showed that their bladder had completely refilled. Each woman’s final scan showed an empty bladder, meaning the liquid squirted at orgasm almost certainly originated from the bladder.

A chemical analysis was performed on all of the fluid samples. Two women showed no difference between the chemicals present in their urine and the fluid squirted at orgasm. The other five women had a small amount of prostatic-specific antigen (PSA) present in their squirted fluid – an enzyme not detected in their initial urine sample, but which is part of the “true” female ejaculate

As a parting thought, Salama “believes every woman is capable of squirting ‘if their partner knows what they are doing'”. You can head to YouTube for that. Previous Dish on the subject here. Update from a reader:

Thank you for officially ruining female ejaculation for me. I cringed when I read the first sentence of your post and realized that all those years I was getting peed on and loving it. Dammit. Good thing I was always coming from swim practice and had my swim goggles handy!

Another:

I would dearly love to read the grant proposal for that research. Especially the informed consent form.

The World’s Best Beer Pong Player

Is a robot:

But the major innovation is how the machine grips the ball:

In the video above, you’ll see that the mechanized arm picks up each ping-pong ball in a green sphere. That sphere is known as a Versaball and it’s filled with sand. When the Versaball is pumped with air, the sand granules can move around freely and form an impression around the objects on which the sphere is placed. Once the ball is in place on top of an object, the system sucks the air out of it, causing the sand grains to tighten around the object, thereby allowing it to be lifted.

David Pescovitz covered this technology last year:

Many of tomorrow’s robots may have more in common with beanbag chairs and bouncy houses than the hulking industrial arms in factories today. Breakthroughs in the nascent field of soft robotics, in which steel skeletons and power-hungry motors make way for textiles, are beginning to move from the laboratory to the startup world. Imagine an octopuslike robot that can squirm through rubble at a disaster site but has the strength to pull bricks off an injured person. Or a machine that can safely place an elderly person in bed. Several companies are working on these problems, frequently working from research sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon arm that seeks and funds futuristic technology. “Soft robotics has the potential to influence all kinds of robotic and machine design,” says Gerald Van Hoy, an analyst at market research firm Gartner. “It’s a key development in the evolution of robotics.”

When Date Night Is Fright Night

Alice Robb rounds up research on what a love of scary movies suggests about their watchers. Among her findings? Scary-movie aficionados are more likely to “be a man accompanied by a frightened woman”:

In an experiment in the 1980s, a team of psychologists led by Dolf Zillmann had 36 male and 36 female undergraduates watch a horror movie in opposite-sex pairs; each viewer had to evaluate their companion’s desirability before and after the movie, and answer questions about their experience of the film. Men were most likely to enjoy the movie when paired with a woman who was distressed by it, and least likely to enjoy if the woman was unperturbed. It didn’t make the woman more attractive, though: both men and women judged their companions as less desirable as “working mates” if they showed distress.

An Annual Dry Spell

John Ore Drynuary, the tradition of giving up alcohol for the month following New Year’s:

Make no mistake: If you like drinking, Drynuary is hard, and it’s supposed to be. I’m not particularly religious, but I appreciate the Lenten aspect of giving up something I enjoy for an extended period of time just to say I can. (My birthday falls during Lent, so no way am I giving up drinking then.)

Drynuary forces us to consider the the role alcohol plays in our everyday lives, especially when its absence is the most obvious or stark. My wife and I don’t hibernate for a month, sipping herbal teas and avoiding glances at the stemware and the three neglected beers left in the fridge. There are still the NFL playoffs, and the college football championship, and concerts and recreational beer-league ice hockey. Our first Drynuary we met friends at a sports bar to watch football, and the amount of club soda we downed led to plenty of speculation that we were expecting. Ive been the designated driver for post-snowboarding pub crawls and I’ve had to explain to business associates why I’m not having wine with dinner while traveling for work. Half of the point of Drynuary is to live your life as you normally do, just without drinking.

For last year’s Drynuary, Jolie Kerr created a guide for the uninitiated:

If it’s so hard, doesn’t that mean you have a problem?

Yes and no. But more no than yes. Think of it this way: If you decided to give up chocolate for a month—or sourdough bread, or Irish butter, or picking at ingrown hairs, or whatever it is that you love most in this world—it would probably suck. You would probably say, “Gosh, this is hard!” Would that mean you had a problem with chocolate or sourdough bread or Irish butter or picking at ingrown hairs? Maybe. But probably not.

And what about the health effects of a month on the wagon? Amy Guttman looks at what happened when staffers at New Scientist experimented with foregoing drinking for five weeks:

Dr. Rajiv Jalan, a liver specialist at the Institute for Liver and Digestive Health at University College London, analyzed the findings. They revealed that among those in the study who gave up drinking, liver fat, a precursor to liver damage, fell by at least 15 percent. For some, it fell almost 20 percent.

Abstainers also saw their blood glucose levels — a key factor in determining diabetes risk — fall by an average of 16 percent. It was the first study to show such an immediate drop from going dry, Dr. James Ferguson, a liver specialist at Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham in England, told us last year.

(Photo by Flickr user Apionid)

Map Of The Day

Carl Bialik shakes his head at Indonesia:

A year ago, [it] rated above average. Then, last May, the ICAO audited the country. The results were abysmal. Indonesia rated below average in all eight categories, including legislation, operations and airworthiness. The organizational structure of its civil aviation rated well below average, scoring 18 percent compared to a global average of 65 percent.

He adds that “it’s too soon to link Indonesia’s poor audit scores with the [AirAsia] disaster that is presumed to have killed all 162 people on board”:

There are, nonetheless, already indications that lax oversight played a part in AirAsia flight QZ8501. The flight took off without the necessary clearances from regulators, the acting head of Indonesia’s transportation ministry said, according to the Associated Press.

A Poem For Saturday

Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn writes:

The Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie, born in 1962, is the author of seven collections, including The Overhaul, just published here by Graywolf Press and shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize when it was published in 2012 in Great Britain. Too few poets from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales are published here. She’s one to follow along with the Irish poet Michael Longley, who also has a new volume. We’ll feature Jamie this week and Longley next.

“Hawk and Shadow” by Kathleen Jamie:

I watched a hawk

glide low across the hill,

her own dark shape

in her talons like a kill.

She tilted her wings,

fell into the air—

the shadow coursed on

without her, like a hare.

Being out of sorts

with my so-called soul,

part unhooked hawk,

part shadow on parole,

I played fast and loose:

keeping one in sight

while forsaking the other.

The hawk gained height:

Her mate on the ground

began to fade,

till hill and sky were empty

and I was afraid.

(From The Overhaul © 2012 by Kathleen Jamie. Used by permission of Graywolf Press. Photo by Peter Massas)

Is The “Creative Class” Dying?

Scott Timberg, an arts reporter for the Los Angeles Times who was laid off in 2008, has now written a book, Culture Crash, investigating “the killing of the creative class.” He names anti-intellectualism, celebrity culture, and the decline of print as culprits, along with postmodernism:

Probably the boldest claim that Timberg advances is his indictment of postmodernism as a destructive attack on culture with broadly deleterious consequences. This attack has emanated from the academy, not our profession—most journalists wouldn’t know postmodernism from a doorpost—but Timberg argues that we are all its victims. He offers a whirlwind tour of various critical schools—structuralism, “deconstruction,” feminist criticism, cultural studies—and says that they have leached the joy out of reading and other cultural pursuits. Even the avowedly populist Pauline Kael comes in for some bashing, for allegedly “championing the kind of work that did not really need a critic’s advocacy or interpretation.” In fact, Timberg’s crankiness is reminiscent of the reaction by earlier critics of modernism, who also lamented that the cultural world as they knew it was coming to an end.

Thanks largely to postmodernism, Timberg writes, we are graduating fewer (novel-reading, theatergoing) humanities majors. One could argue, of course, that practical considerations—including a spate of recessions and the sexiness of high-paying Wall Street, consulting, and tech jobs—have been more decisive in this decline.

Evan Kindley finds that “there is, ultimately, an unnerving sense of entitlement to Culture Crash, well-intentioned as it is, and that entitlement is largely generational”:

The real sting in the tail of Timberg’s polemic is not, as he would have us believe, that things are worse for creative people than they’ve ever been before. It’s that things are considerably worse than they were 20 years ago. Throughout Culture Crash, the 1990s function as a go-tobelle époque: “the peak years of journalistic employment, especially for newspapers,” the height of architectural innovation, the heyday of indie rock. His choice of interview subjects (David Lowery, Dean Wareham, David Byrne) betrays an obvious bias toward aging Gen X icons. Timberg makes clear that he’s “not particularly interested in James Cameron … or Kanye West: Celebrity and corporate entertainment—good and bad—hardly needs defenders.” Yet he’s not very interested in the genuinely marginal, obscure, or underprivileged, either—or in anyone under 40: Timberg’s interviews are all with white men who did extraordinarily well in the 1990s (or occasionally the 1980s or early 2000s), and are doing worse (but still reasonably OK) now. One can hardly blame folks like Lowery or Byrne for complaining about the relative decline of their industries: They have firsthand experience of an age d’or to share and probably (even correctly) view themselves as spokesmen for the many suffering artists who don’t have a comparable platform. But Timberg certainly could have tried harder to talk to a wider swath of the creative class beyond his personal social circle and those he comes into contact with on his promotional rounds.

The View From Your Window

Holland, Michigan, 9:55 am. “I like the lake-effect clouds in this picture. Two minutes later it was snowing heavily.”