BBC NEWS | Technology | US pupils to dance themselves fit

Nice article about a school offering Dance Dance Revolution to kids as a PE option.

But this graf cracked me up:

Many people already use DDR to lose weight and some machines have a workout mode that makes copying the dance moves more like exercise.

Doesn’t that miss the point? DDR is a blast because it doesn’t feel like “exercise”!

jedi is coughing and spitting up and now vomiting so we have to go back to the vet again and this time get shots. he’ll be okay but this is traumatic on both of us — he coughs so deeply, with barely a moment’s rest between attacks, and now he’s probably dehydrated despite his drinking extra water. and i’ve cleaned the floor so many times it’s probably the shiniest it’s been since it was built in 1909 — if i were home in LA i could confine him to the ktichen and lay down a bunch of dog towels, but i’m in the rental in SF and lacking resources - maybe after the vet, the shot will knock him out for a while and i can go buy cheap towels. poor jedi. poor me. our nerves are shot. almost 6 years together and he’s never been sick, although he’s had one injury that required six months of biweekly physical therapy to correct … (he’s definitely an LA dog after that!) i hate seeing him in pain. poor doggie.

I accidentally decided it was okay for Grandpa to read my book.

Even though I signed it “read at your own risk,” I’m now wondering if I’ve just overshared.

It’s not that I’m ashamed of anything I wrote. Only that the people who changed your diapers and took you to ride streetcars and let you order chocolate milkshakes with pancakes for breakfast might have a hard time remembering thatyou’re not six anymore.

On the other hand, he emailed me a link to a dirty joke the other day, and judging from the FW history, he received it from other grandparents. So maybe it’s okay after all.

Meanwhile I’m about halfway done with the proposal/outline for the next book. Because two full-time jobs aren’t enough … and I just can’t shut up.

Harmony 4-Foot Clawfoot Tub
SKU: P0731C

Harmony 4-Foot,porcelain-on-cast-iron Clawfoot tub has a hand-smoothed, primed and white painted exterior.

This article talks about theater chains refusing to show “Bubble” because the producer is releasing it in all formats at once — DVD, cable, theater, etc.

CBC Arts: U.S. cinemas back out of Soderbergh’s ‘Bubble’

Soderbergh’s feeling is that all movies are available right away anyway, through piracy, and that this way he can control the release.

I think the theaters are reacting the way the music industry reacted to online distribution: completely opposite of what they should be doing.

They should act like the DVD, cable, etc is no threat to them whatsoever. Why would anyone watch a movie on DVD when they can have the full theater experience with huge screen, big sound, etc?

Well, two reasons. One is that DVD has ruined audiences — when was the last time you got to enjoy an entire movie without someone *talking* in the theater and bringing out out of the experience, ruining your immersion in the film? The other is the lazy factor … why drive all the way to the theater, why bother, I have a big TV and surround sound here, etc …

I think theaters need to start marketing themselves as the REAL movie experience, the way they are meant to be seen, larger than life. A movie theater offers no interruptions from daily life. You’re not in your usual environment with to-do list hanging over your head, dogs barking, kids running through, neighbor’s car alarm going off, etc.

The movies are a freelancer’s vacation — no one can reach you there, you can squeeze it into three or four hours and yet really feel like you got away. A total mental escape that leaves you refreshed and rejuvenated for work.

The real movie experience applies even on small movies. Of course you must see KING KONG and LOTR and the like on the big screen. But even romantic comedies are a different experience in the theater.

I used to LOVE going to the movies. I still do, except that I wish they’d give me a bat so I can bonk people on the head who are talking or playing their PSPs or on their cell phones or whatever (excuse me, why pay $10 for a seat if you’re just going to TXT? go sit outside for free).

But if everyone would just remember that this is not their living room and SHUT THE FUCK UP, a good movie offers a transcendant experience. It’s like reading only for most people it doesn’t take as long to get to the end.

That’s why I don’t think simultaneous release dates should threaten theaters. Watching it in a home theater, no matter how big, is not the same experience at all as going to the movies.

And if the theater experience really isn’t worth it for people, and we only go to the movies because we have no other format when the movie comes out, then maybe theaters have had their day anyway.

Cinemas do not have the *right* to stay in business — no business has a *right* to business. A business has the obligation to provide what its customers want, if it wants to earn its privilege to stay in business.

If movie theaters can’t make customers want to go to the movies, refusing the carry a movie because it’s also available on DVD/cable is only going to hasten the theater’s end.

This would have been a perfect opportunity for theaters to find out just how much attendance drops, if at all, with this type of model. Instead, they are forcing people who want to see the movie to either go to a competitor’s theater or to settle for seeing it on DVD/cable/download.

They are also implying that a theater experience is no different from DVD, which puts it in our heads that maybe it’s not worth it to go to the theater after all.

Why aren’t they reminding of us of all the wonderful things that make the theater so great? I’m not talking about 20 minutes of big-budget commercials and 20 minutes of trailers before the feature, either. Although I confess that I love trailers — I don’t watch TV so I never see trailers unless I make time on purpose to go to Apple’s trailer park, where, again, you don’t get the real movie experience.

I want to boycott the theater chains that are refusing to carry the movie, but CBC doesn’t identify them. I’ll have to find out more about it later when I have more time.

Maybe simultaneous release will improve the theater experience so much, cinemas would start having higher attendance. All the people who treat theaters like they’re watching DVDs at home would stop going to theaters and thus they’ll stop ruining movies for the rest of us. Then, those of us who STOP TALKING the moment the feature presentation begins, and who refuse to say ANYTHING until the ending credits start to roll — no matter how clever or pertinent — and whose only sound is to join in the group share of laughing/crying/gasping/whatever emotional response the film elicits — maybe we’ll all come out of our houses again and fill the theaters with moviegoers who are there because we truly, deeply love to go to the movies.

I’m downloading two Chieftans albums from iTunes, and I maximized the artwork for Live from Dublin: A Tribute to Derek Bell. It’s just five Irish gentlemen posed outdoors but suddenly I had a tear in my eye and a catch in my throat. They look so Irish and it suddenly made me think of Grandma, born outside a silver mine in Nevada in a shack in 1916 or 1917 (I never was too clear on Grandma’s age, although I know Grandpa’s). It was her parents’ journey from Ireland to Berkeley, California, for a new life.

She died a couple of years ago, and the older I get, the more I understand her, and the more I wish I’d probed deeper in our conversations about her early life. The experiences that shaped her strength and determination, her boundless love for family, her extreme practicality that hid a sensitive understanding of human motivations and concerns. She never hurried — “I’m not Flash Gordon, y’know,” she’d say, making sure the task at hand got done right and thoroughly the first time.

No one else’s turkey sandwiches could ever come close (why do you think I’m a vegetarian now? There’s just no point in meat, without Grandma’s cooking).

She was so small and yet her presence so solidly there you didn’t realize her diminutive stature until you stood right up close. (She said once, when I was in my early teens, “Gina’s almost as tall as I am now.” Everyone around us laughed and she didn’t know why. For the record, I am five-foot-one-and-three-quarters in my bare feet standing flush to the wall, but I claim I’m five-foot-two. Who knows, after all this Pilates, maybe I really am.)

And though she wasn’t born in “the old country,” Granda was fiercely proud of Ireland and everything it meant to be Irish. It took everything her parents had to come to America after the cow fell over the cliffs of Cork in a morning fog — the cow was their livelihood and now she was gone — and despite the prejudice they faced in the new land, and the deaths of Grandma’s father at 36 and her siblings as children, Grandma survived to live a long healthy life and instill the love of the Irish in her grandchildren.

I’m not sure she’d approve of my reflections about her appearing in the same blog as porn stars, but then again, I was always able to get away with — even be approved of — doing things my mom would have been killed for. For example, my Grandma’s comment to my mom, after I visited on my motorcycle one afternoon, was, “She looks kind of cute on that thing.”

Grandma, you rock.

For three days now I’ve felt sleepy. Debilitatingly sleepy. Couldn’t put words together. Couldn’t focus on my (part-time, freelance) day job.

But I had to. Don’t have the luxury of days off, not with a release deadline staring us in the face.

Finally it hit me: my body is peacefully negotiating a settlement with a cold that’s trying to move in. I’m so rarely sick in a mild way that for once I didn’t recognize the symptoms and do what I always do: sleep for 24 hours and wake up in robust health.

My roommate works in early childhood education, which means she comes into contact with a lot of germs, all those children and parents and siblings passing ‘em around like baseball cards. It’s amazing that I haven’t spent the past three years of our cohabitation single-nosedly supporting Kimberly-Clark’s Kleenex brand of facial tissue.

No, if I am under the weather, it’s always for something severe, never just a nice gentle cold or light flu. A broken arm. Kidney stone. Pneumonia. Strep throat so bad it lasts two weeks. Mono.

Finally recognized the source of the sleepies yesterday afternoon. I went to bed for three hours — I take very seriously that “90-minute cycle” thing when it comes to sleep (and O! how I love sleep) — and got up to eat pizza, drink juice, watch the last hour of Hidalgo, and then went back to sleep through the night until 8:17 a.m.. That’s pretty late to sleep in, for me.

Consequently, while still feeling icky throat and slight congestion, I’m much more alert today than I’ve been all week. Have a Pilates session at 1:30 and am otherwise devoting the entire day to catching up on work I worry I didn’t do up to my (high) standards on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Boy, I sure live the life, don’t I?

My sister just called to say she’s finished writing her latest song — and it’s the first one she’s written for publication that’s in 3/4 time. Cool.

Several Sex Drive readers emailed me to say “get pictures with porn stars at AEE” — so I did. I haven’t the time, the patience or the interest to learn how to retouch photos. I’ve resized these to make them fit but otherwise, they’re complete with shine, redness, etc. Note how flawless the porn stars look anyway. It’s enough to make a regular girl sigh.

Better Unfaithful Than Fat

ROME (Reuters) - Most Italians feel more guilty about over-eating than they do about cheating on their partners, a survey has found, suggesting that people in Casanova’s native land care more about staying slim than staying faithful.

The survey, by psychology magazine Riza Psicosomatica, found that excessive eating and spending topped the list of what people considered the most guilt-inducing vices.

Sexual infidelity came bottom of the list of the magazine’s ’seven deadly sins’, behind neglecting friends and family, failing at work and not looking after one’s physique.

The survey of some 1,000 Italians aged 25-55 found that religion played little part in determining what made people feel guilty, despite Italy’s Roman Catholic traditions.

Only 7 percent of those questioned said religious rules induced guilt. The most powerful drivers of guilty feelings were the judgment of loved ones or the disapproval of society as a whole.

That’s because it’s supposedly easier to resist food than sex.

Nice drive home from Las Vegas today. I indulged in a risky behavior and yakked on the phone just about the whole way. Of course, it’s a headset. But it’s still stupid and dangerous and we all know it and yet sometimes, we do it anyway.

Every year, I meet a ton of people and reconnect with folks I met last time. And every year, I intend to write to each of you immediately upon my return to reality. And every year, I don’t get to it right away, or I lose someone’s card, or I got three cards from your booth and don’t know which one is yours because of all the new names in a pile of Scrabble tiles in my mind.

But I’m very glad to have met you, to have seen you in person if I already met you online, and to see you again if I already know you.

A special shout-out to strangers who approached me and bought my book — hope to see you in the forum soon.

Pics and anecdotes to follow.

It’s not possible for one writer and one photographer to “cover” three trade shows in four days. It’s exhausting — I’m not sure why, but it is. We haven’t even stayed up late at parties or anything, although we have been talking until 12:30 or 1:00 a.m. about various sex-tech angles on some of the gadgets we’re seeing here, and some of the conversations we’ve had with folks in the consumer electronics side and the adult side.

But it’s only Saturday morning and I think I could sleep for 24 hours straight. I’m now a little bit worried about driving home tomorrow and being bright-eyed for the day job on Monday … LOL

I never want to go another week without dancing. After Prof. Farnsworth and Wendy from the Sex Drive forum left — we met up for dinner and a beer, and I made them meet me at the Toby Keith I *heart* This Bar — so after they left, I couldn’t help it, I went forward to “take a look at the band.”

Ended up dancing for, oh, I don’t know, an hour? Two girls knew all the line dances, and I used to know many line dances, so if they danced I could follow and pick it up again by halfway through each song. (But I couldn’t lead — once, they left the floor mid-song, and I spun out.)

I used to dance at least once a week, sometimes twice, at a Burbank country bar that’s now out of business. The closest country dancing is now in San Dimas, which is quite a haul from where I live. And yet, once you’re there, you’re there, right?

I was clumsy tonight, and only partly because I was in sneakers. Out of practice but Oh did I have fun. I’m sprawled on the bed now, blogging while I stop sweating, half-deaf from the bar (and the general decibel level of Vegas), heading for the shower in about 10 minutes … and bobbing my head along to the radio, tempted to forget about being responsible on this business trip and instead heading back out to dance ’til 2:00.

I will post a recap of the blog/podcast panel, as well as everything I forgot to say. I think the panel got off track and didn’t answer the main question, the main info people were there for: blogs and podcasts as revenue-generating, or at least worth the ROI, in adult entertainment.

It’s going to take me a while to get to it though because I’m covering three trade shows this week, and today has already flown by without my getting to half my list.

I’ll post it at the Sex Drive Daily and link to it from here. Stay tuned.

I remember reading about this, too late to submit a secret:

PostSecret

It’s an art project where people sent in their deepest secrets, anonymously, written on homemade postcards. Taken as a collection, themes arise — sex, silence, shame — and I’m finding it very powerful.

You can buy the book if you can’t make it to Washington DC by Sunday to see the exhibit in person.

The February issue of Marie Claire included me in a feature called “Ultimate Sex Tips from the Pros.” We asked the five leading sex experts in the U.S. for their most frequently asked questions. Here, their answers about hooking up, kinky sex, taking charge in the bedroom, and more.

I don’t consider myself a “leading sex expert in the U.S.,” but it’s fun to think that someboday does. Heheh.

The reporter interviewed me for about half an hour, and rounded up a photo plus a book cover graphic, neither of which made the final story. However, I’m in good company. The other four sources are Dr. Ian Kerner (on feminine sexual assertiveness), Dr. Drew Pinsky (on the dangers of anal sex), sex grandma Sue Johanson (on orgasms), and columnist Natalie Krinksy (on expectations).

My blurb, of course, is about using technology to stay connected and hot for each other when you’re apart. Balloons, anyone?

Not that I paid attention, but the article is on page 161. And it’s at newsstands now.