Here’s why I don’t usually participate in the Friday Random 10 iTunes meme. It’s not the songs part, it’s the “justify your choices” part that’s hard.

• Road Movie To Berlin – They Might Be Giants: “We were once so close to heaven / St. Peter came out and gave us medals / declaring us the finest of the damned”
• Fly-by-Night Benny Goodman – All The Cats Join In (Vol 3): What can I say, I can’t think when I’m listening to music with lyrics so I tend to go for instrumentals
• Ballad Of Ronald Reagan – Austin Lounge Lizards: Ominous that I feel nostalgic for the pragmatic politics of Ronald Reagan
• Sometimes I Don’t Wanna Go Home – Joan Armatrading: Awesome song about the uncertainty of emotionally-abusive relationships
• On The Couch – Ry Cooder: Instrumental from Paris, Texas, another epic relationship movie.
• Blues [A Jam Session] – Fats Waller: awesome instrumental ensemble
• Punahele Excerpt – Masters Of Hawaiian Slack Key: awesome slack-key guitar
• Mercenary Territory – Little Feat: “Now some kind of man, he can’t do anything wrong / If I see him I’ll tell him you’re waiting” More lyrics about self-doubt in unhappy relationships, this time from an uncertain man’s perspective.
• Just Joshin’ – Josh Graves (The Great Dobro Sessions): What can I say, Graves invented a lot of what we think of as modern bluegrass Dobro.

• Sousa’s “The Washington Post March” – Leonard Bernstein: New York Philharmonic Orchestra: In a few years this might be the most memorable cultural feature titled “The Washington Post.”

(What can I say? I’ve made a point of buying no new music since the RIAA went all Gestapo. I’ve got thousands of songs but most of them are very old. Then again, most were old when I bought them.)

So how about a link round-up instead? These are all posts I recommend highly but probably won’t be able to say what I want to say about them in posts:

• Pek Van Andel has made a video of the still-image MRIs he took of volunteers having intercourse back in 1999. I’m still shocked that no one else seems to be imaging the anatomy of dynamic sexuality. Or at least publishing them. 1999 was a very long time ago now. (Via Em & Lo and Ms Naughty)
• Ann Bartow: Dan Kahan, “Culture, Cognition, and Consent: Who Perceives What, and Why, in ‘Acquaintance Rape’ Cases”. Looks like an extremely interesting investigation with kind of creepy conclusions about victim blaming in men and, especially, women with hierarchical worldviews.
• Joe Sonka: “Are you a treasure or a target?”: More sex ed FAIL from Ohio. What is wrong with those people and their persistent belief that perpetrators are less relevant to sexual assault than their victims?
• Vanessa at Feministing: STIs are so manly. Dismal reflection on the way we “treasure” of women (as pristine objects, anyway) and disregard “uncleanliness” in men. Which is significant because since it’s not the case that sex with men makes women “unclean” men’s “cleanliness” actually matters!
• Hortense at Jezebel: “Godmothers” Begin Taking Control Of Crime Syndicates. An unnecessary demonstration that women are just as capable as men. See also Tyler Cowen on Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. “Women are significantly less violent than men in the outside world and less lethal when they are violent. This holds in all times and places for which relevant data exist. And yet in prison this universal fact is overturned: women become at least as violent and often more prone to violence than men are.”
• Over-Educated Nympho: Seeking Short-Term Boyfriend (to paint her house.) Tongue in cheek but see also Cheri at Secret Lover’s Lane mentions some kind of Ashley Madison offshoot called Barter Clubs where the idea is evidently taken seriously.
• Geek Feminism Blog: The Thank-You Meme. “I have a theory: Most people in open source support what we are trying to do, it just doesn’t feel that way. On the Internet, no one can see you nod. ... If you get a really positive, well-written thank-you for your work in women in open source, we’d love it if you shared it with the rest of us.”

• Lisa Campo-Engelstein: Autonomous Contraception – Science, Sociology, and the Potential of a Male Pill. Another reason why foot-dragging in male-contraceptive development is dumb: “while mass media articles in the English speaking-world assert women will not trust men (including their partners) with contraception,[16] an international study reveals that only 2 percent of women would not trust their partner to contracept.” (Via Samhita.)