New in Labs: “Got the wrong Bob?”
Ever included Bob (your boss) instead of Bob (your friend) on an email by accident? Oops! Turn on “Got the wrong Bob?” and Gmail will check if you meant to include Bob Smith rather than Bob Jones based on the groups of people you email most often.

Of course Google can’t say “Ever included Bob (your boss) instead of Bob (online hottie in which you are engaging in a torrid, multimedia erotic extravaganza) on an email by accident?” but you know that’s what they mean.

One caveat: If you’ve ever tried to use Undo or Send Later or any other feature to help you send to the right person, you already know that it does not take long to get so used to the confirmation dialog that you end up clicking it by habit, thus preventing it from preventing you from doing something stupid.

In order for any of these life-saving tools to work, you have to meet them halfway by slowing down and reading the address or addresses in all of your To, CC, and BCC fields. Just like with sex, the technology cannot replace the human brain.

One is that writing is archived forever — and it isn’t instant. So when I start to write things like “you can annul a marriage in California up to the five-year mark,” I can then go verify that I’m right. Then I find out I’m wrong, by an inch or a mile, and I revise my writing. On air, I can’t do that, so I say these things and then I go “wait! I’m not sure!” and the producers go looking stuff up but meanwhile I’m hanging there live on air being wrong with stuff people might depend on me to be accurate with. (In the spirit of live radio I’m not going to revise that poorly constructed sentence into a more readable one.)

So, to clarify, in case you missed the correction on air: In California, you can get a summary dissolution within the first five years of marriage, not an annulment. Annulment (talking legal term here, not religious) is specific to certain conditions such as incest or bigamy and does not depend on the amount of time married. Here’s a summary of the law from the Superior Court of Sacramento.

I think that’s it for this week’s corrections, so now, on to Sex in the News.

The divorce/annulment/dissolution subject came up in the context of the story about Germany considering making marriage licenses renewable, in hopes of cutting back on the divorce rate. In this way couples would have to renew their legal marriage on a periodic basis — or not renew, which would be a different legal action than filing for divorce. Dina over at This Marriage Thing has a nice summary and an invitation to conversation on the issue.

On air, we compared it to the Scottish tradition of handfasting, where you pledge a year and a day of “as-if” marriage, and on that day decide whether to get married, split up with no legal/social repercussions, or renew the handfast.

I think this concept recasts relationships because it changes the default from “stay together” to “split up.” It forces couples to decide actively to stay together, otherwise legally their status as a married couple dissolves. (I know that in marriage people make active decisions to stay together every day, sometimes every hour – I’m talking on a larger scale than that, here, about legal status.) As it is now, marriage licenses default the relationship to staying together, making divorce the active decision.

I wonder how that would change things, if the renewal period fell within one of the inevitable bad spells of a marriage? Would couples, faced with losing their marital status whether they like it or not, just let things dissolve? Or would an inevitable renewal date help couples see beyond the temporary horribleness and misery and grasp for some reason to work it out? How would letting a marriage expire affect the emotional aspect of a breakup, even if legally it’s a different action/status than divorce?

(I want to get these show notes posted quickly so I’m going to leave it at that, but this is an idea I’d like to revisit in the future and would have totally written a column about, back in the day.)

We also talked briefly about this cosmetic surgeon who “did not attempt to stop” a patient from blowing him, and who also chose to perform her nose job anyway. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the 22-year-old woman thought she could get away with something by blowing the 50-year-old male doctor and later suing him, and the case was dismissed. But I couldn’t help but laugh at this quote: “Knowing her nose better than anyone else, I was in a unique position to take care of the problem.”

Really? And what position was that, Doctor?

Also, I’d like to know what a “celebrity plastic surgeon” is and how that differs from non-celebrity plastic surgeons.

We didn’t get to the story about the German phone sex addict who has a history of checking into hotels, running up the phone bill, then running away without paying. His latest transgression is a six-day stay and about $10,500 in phone sex bills.

And we spent the first 25 minutes of the segment discussing the Bondage lovers happier than normal sex counterparts study, because as it turns out, the column I wrote on the subject was inspired by a conversation with Tiffany and the fishbowl while I was a guest on the show last year.

It’s that writer thing, y’know? Just as everyone you love is going through the most horrible of things, there’s a little part in the wayback part of your brain – at the base of your spine – that’s going I could write this….

It was fun to be the techie in the room, ’cause I was looking it up on USGS before the aftershocks even stopped, and there it was: a 5.6 epicentered in Chino Hills. We were able to reassure Tiffany that her house/dogs/husband were okay, that the quake was even further from her home than the studio, and after about two minutes of music filling the air she was able to get back on. And I think her listeners will spend the next couple of hours calling to offer support and love and she’ll be okay.

But! Before all the excitement, we had Sex in the News.

We started with a shout out to Stroker Serpentine and his company Eros, which has just opened up a virtual Las Vegas inside Second Life, and celebrated by offering some free time with the SexGen playthings.

Boston College researchers found a direct relationship between quality – respectful, attentive, joyful – family time and teenagers practicing safer sexual activity. The opposite also holds true: the less secure a young person’s environment, the more likely they engage in sexual risk. I’m sure this pertains to drinking, drugs, tagging, gang membership, crime, and just about every other rebellious / risky behavior. Not a surprise finding, but nice to have evidence, and nice to see people looking beyond the “are they/aren’t they” into more complex questions.

Meanwhile, grown-up people are having more sex and more importantly, enjoying it more. Why? Combination of things. We have better treatments for physical issues that make it more difficult to do teh sex as we retire, like arthritis, and for sexual function, like Viagra and prescription estrogen vaginal lubricant creams. I also think the social changes have helped; the boomers came of age expecting to have and enjoy sex even if they were – gasp – female. But they’ve got to catch up on the whole safer sex thing.

National Orgasm Day is July 31, this Thursday, so we urged listeners to practice their Kegels, Pilates, Yoga, etc. and get their pelvic floors in shape for the big day.

A fun little utility over at MikeOnAds.com analyzes your browser history and guesses whether you are male or female. It’s just for fun, not for market analysis, but I was surprised that it nailed me at 99 percent probability as female. I do realize that last week I worked onsite at my day job all week, and the column before that I covered the Adult Novelty Expo, so in the past 30 days I haven’t done as much tech-and-sex browser research as usual. But a male friend of mine came out 51 percent probability of male and another came out 74 percent probability of female (this is a correction, btw, as on air I said male instead of female, oops).

I chose not to deal with the Lifestyles claiming they’ve asked Mylie Cyrus to rep their message of ’safer sex.’ Maybe I’ll write about that later, as I have some fledgling but strong opinions on it. Mylie’s publicist claims Lifestyles did no such thing. Here’s the article I saw.

While searching for something else (reviews of Sexier Sex, if you must know; have you had time to post one yet?), I came across this blurb from the June issue of Best Life Magazine.

Tech-Savvy Seduction
Twenty-first-century ways to add mystery to your romance, from Regina Lynn, author of Sexier Sex: Lessons From the Brave New Sexual Frontier

It’s five little romantic things you can do, easily, with the technology you have in your pocket. And because I came to it from a Google search, I’m not actually sure what the context is. Was it a sidebar to a larger article? A filler on a “blurbs” page? Either way, it’s basic stuff that nevertheless can make someone’s day.