And also, my congressional district has apparently produced or hosted at some point in their lives the winners of almost one fifth the Nobel Prizes ever awarded. Weird.

Not so surprising near Harvard and M.I.T. as it would be if I discovered that about my congressional district.

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My cat doesn't like tuna.

You know, I'm having some doubts as to this even being a cat. I'm starting to think "alien observer".

Years ago I read an article on the cat food industry industrial complex. Do you know what food cats prefer above all others? Cooked salmon.

Which is kinda weird, as before cats started hanging with us humans there probably wasn't much cooked salmon to be found, but there ya' go....

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before cats started hanging with us humans there probably wasn't much cooked salmon to be found, but there ya' go

But now there is ... suspicious, isn't it?

I can hear the discussions now ("Fuck -- they've had fire forever! What's taking them so long?" "WHAT'S WITH THE COD??? DID I TELL YOU TO COOK COD???")

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I was gonna say -- why did you think they domesticated us?

Jewelry made from dismembered doll parts (Sadly, the original site wasn't expecting to be BoingBoinged, and has no bandwidth left.)

And yet another study about the female orgasm. If one were in a catty mood, one might suggest that the scientists conducting these studies need to get laid more.

For women, it seems, sex is a big turn-off, reveals a brain scanning study. It shows that many areas of the brain switch off during the female orgasm - including those involved with emotion.

“At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,” says Gert Holstege of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

His team recruited 13 healthy heterosexual women and their partners. The women were asked to lie with their heads in a PET scanner while the team compared their brain activity in four states: simply resting, faking an orgasm, having their clitoris stimulated by their partner’s fingers, and clitoral stimulation to the point of orgasm.

The results of the study are striking. As the women were stimulated, activity rose in one sensory part of the brain, called the primary somatosensory cortex, but fell in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas involved in alertness and anxiety. During orgasm, activity fell in many more areas of the brain, including the prefrontal cortex, compared with the resting state, Holstege told a meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development in Copenhagen on Monday.

In one sense the findings appear to confirm what is already known, that women cannot enjoy sex unless they are relaxed and free from worries and distractions. "Fear and anxiety levels have to go down for orgasm. Everyone knows this but we can see it happening in the brain," he explains.

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I find it hard to imagine being "relaxed and free from worries and distractions" in a PET scanner in a roomful of sciencey types, myself.

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I find it hard to imagine being "relaxed and free from worries and distractions" in a PET scanner in a roomful of sciencey types, myself.

Particularly while masturbating and/or faking orgasm.

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“At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings,”

Huh. I mean, it's not something I'd have even thought to state. Which is why I'm not paid the big research bucks.

I wonder, though -- especially for a female orgasm -- are they the same in a lab as they are at home? Are the women who can come enough for research purposes in clinical scenarios having the same sort of orgasms as they ones how need more conducive psychological surroundings?

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I find it hard to imagine being "relaxed and free from worries and distractions" in a PET scanner in a roomful of sciencey types, myself.

Maybe some women are into that....

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In unrelated news, some people should not be allowed to watch Fight Club:

A bar of soap reportedly made from fat pumped from Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi has gone on display.

Artist Gianni Motti claims he made the soap made from fat from Berlusconi's liposuction operation.

It is part of an art exhibition in Basel, Switzerland, where anyone wishing to wash their hands with Berlusconi can buy it for £10,000.

The artist who put the soap on display, Gianni Motti, 47, claims to have acquired the fat from an employee of an elite plastic surgery clinic in Lugano in Switzerland.

Motti said: "Berlusconi had face lifting and liposuction operations in a clinic in Lugano, where I have good connections that provided me with some of the fat. It was jelly-like and it stunk horribly, like butter gone off or old chip pan oil."

According to Motti, the artwork called Mani Pulite (Clean Hands) expresses opposition to corruption and mafia structures in Italy, as well as his personal opinion of Berlusconi's policies.

He said: "I came up with the idea because soap is made of pig fat, and I thought how much more appropriate it would be if people washed their hands using a piece of Berlusconi."

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I don't think I could do it, with my head in a PET Scan thingie. Maybe *that's* why their brains shut down?

Also, I get a bit defensive because I have trouble remembering if I'm supposed to do Father's Day, because we don't do Mother's Day. And my family gets really irritated by Valentine's Day (well, my mother and I do. So my mother sends me a card about marrying a rich man, and then we laugh). It can be a weirdly touchy subject, much like telling your kids there's a Santa Claus or not -- you'd think it'd be an individual family choice, but in fact lots of people get all het up about whether other people should do it or not.

Was the original entry one that lambasted the holiday? I ask, because frankly, I'm sick of the "I HATE Holiday X" posts. I don't think I'd go off in the comment-section of a blog with that sort of entry, but I would in my head. When I don't celebrate a holiday, I don't resent the mere mention of it, and bitch as if anyone who could get enjoyment from it was either a dupe of the mega corporations, or a deluded fool.

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