Despite the dolorous tones of my previous post I’m now fine. I’m not sure where root canals got their painful reputation — what actually hurts is the #%$!@* abscessed tooth that have to be treated with a root canal.

In fact, just an hour after I better than I have for more than a week.

A few hours after that the last $%)$@*! Vicodin wore off and now I really feel great.

But that’s not what you come to this site expecting, nor is it what I came here to talk about.

Instead, you want to know something else opiates like Vicodin cure? Libidos. Or at least it always cures me of anything like one. Admittedly I’m often in, um, pain when taking prescription painkillers, but on other occasions when I’ve been in comparable pain but using non-opiate analgesics like Toradol a.k.a. ketorolac I was otherwise, well, unimpaired.

Now that I’m back to just a couple of ibuprofen (plus completing a course of antibiotics) I’m… interested again.

And actually, technically, that’s not even what I came here to talk about.

Because before things got to the 3:00AM “hmm, Vicodin or the pliers in the kitchen drawer? Decisions, decisions?” point I’d noticed that in kind of a dog-leg jog away from BDSM, whenever I was erotically distracted my awareness of pain was equally distracted.

I’m not exactly sure how one would write a human-subjects grant application for something like this, let alone get a review board to certify it, but I’m very curious now whether there’s been any research done into erotic and/or sexual stimulation as palliative care.

And, incidentally, no I’m not imagining variations on porn cliché #31, involving the sexy dental-hygienist costume.

Quick aside: despite quite a bit of Googling it turns out that while most “sexy XYZ” costumes are for women there aren’t any readily-findable “sexy dentist” costumes for women. And of course nurses. Sexy tooth-fairy costumes, yes. And at least two dentist costumes meant for men. There are, in the imaginations of “sexy” costume designers… or just as likely their customers… no women dentists and thus no call for special costumes for them. There are “sexy” women doctor’s costumes, which I guess is a nod in the “right” direction considering more than half of all med-school students are now women. But dentists are right out. Not that everyone’s fantasy “sexy” dentist or hygienist would be only female or only male. I just think the omission is odd. Oh, and to conclude this digression, one of the “sexy” male dentist costumes has a giant blue plastic tie that has “open wide” printed on it. So, um, yeah.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, so no, I’m actually not thinking about the caregiver-straddling-the-patient schtick for distraction. (In the exceedingly unlikely chance one of my own caregivers is reading this I’m not thinking about you. In this context anyway.) Not least because over time that could get a annoying for the caregiver. In fact I’m not sure how one would go about it. (Audio or visual stimulation through headsets? Participation from a partner? Discreetly placed TENS units? I dunno.

I’m guessing if I participated in such research I’d end up, as usual, in the control group.

By the way, even the forgoing discussion — stimulating though it might be — is not what I came here to talk about. I mostly wanted to mention that now that I’ve recovered from my little experiment in dental agony I’m going to take up to a couple of days to unwind, and maybe convert this site to a whole new blogging platform (as the delightfully not-work-safe AlwaysArousedGirl has been urging me to do for several years now.)

Y’know, some stories sound just too good to check. This time I checked and… it appears to be true. Read on…

        
iPhone screenshots of Apple calc (left) TLA Systems PCalc (right) by me

Carly Z of new-technology review site Gear Diary has a great twits-vs-substance alert…

What would you rate a calculator on the age-rating system in the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store? Does a calculator even NEED an age warning? Apparently, according to Apple it does…read on for details, and the absurd way this has been resolved…

PCalc, by TLA Systems, was given a 17+ rating by Apple. Why? Because when you type 5318008 and flip the calculator upside down, it spells (WARNING: NSFW, do not read on if you are easily offended)

BOOBIES (8008135)

So what’s the solution? Censor that number, of course! No one ever needs to know that 2659004*2=5318008! And why stop at that? They should also censor 7734 (HELL). I mean, come on here.

Read the quote in context here.

All well and good. And seemingly perfectly true. Except for the 17+ rating. I didn’t get that warning when I downloaded the free version of the calculator. Or at least iTunes didn’t give me the same warning I get when I download an update of, say, the Wikipedia apps. (Wikipedia evidently sometimes defines naughty words. And, I should have guessed, naughty upside-down numbers!) On the other hand there’s a possibility that I’ve just turned off the “warn me about calculators with adult number possibilities” feature in iTunes so that claim is inconclusive.

Anyway, now for the debunking part. Carly Z says

And having censored it, the app now has a 4+ rating.

Strolling (not trolling) the comments and reviews of the calculator it sounds like it’s just a darn good, darn complete technical calculator that a lot of people find worth the $9.99 the full-featured version costs, and it appears to have had that 4+ (out of a possible 5) rating for quite some time.

I also didn’t see any references to the “censoring” in the comments or promotional text for the app. Which leads me to think it’s more of a developer’s “easter egg” than, say, a viral-marketing campaign coup or a twits-vs-substance outrage.

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.)

This is a brief departure from sex blogging, true, but it’s too good to pass up and the original poster should get wider notice.

Women’s history scholar Sungold of Kittywampus says

Stop scrambling German history.

It was [Otto von Bismarck, not Hitler, who introduced universal health care in Germany. Bismarck established public, non-profit insurance agencies funded by worker and employer contributions. He didn’t do it because he was a bleeding-heart liberal; his intent was to co-opt an issue that drew support to socialism.

Please get your mustaches straight.

She said it here.

It’s a great point you know. Confusing the current proposal for health-care reform, as illustrated in the accompanying chart…

Chart found at Think Progress, Yglesias division

...with socialized medicine, or, for that matter, confusing President Obama’s governing style with Hitlers is kind of dumb. Not as dumb as thinking the original Bible was written in English. Not as dumb as not knowing whether the Old Testament was written before the New Testament. Not as dumb as not realizing Stephen Hawkings is, in fact, British. Or, (and this is a new one) that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii but that Hawaii isn’t part of the United States! But still dumb.

To be precise, according to Wikipedia…

Bismarck’s program centered squarely on insurance programs designed to increase productivity, and focus the political attentions of German workers on supporting the Junker’s government. The program included Health Insurance; Accident Insurance (Workman’s Compensation); Disability Insurance; and an Old-age Retirement Pension, none of which were then currently in existence to any great degree.

Also note: Bismark introduced universal healthcare in Germany in 1883. Adolph Hitler didn’t come to power until 1933, fifty years later.

Nor was Bismarck exactly a political liberal…

In the year of his marriage, 1847, at age 32, Bismarck was chosen as a representative to the newly created Prussian legislature, the Vereinigter Landtag. There, he gained a reputation as a royalist and reactionary politician with a gift for stinging rhetoric; he openly advocated the idea that the monarch had a divine right to rule. His election was arranged by the Gerlach brothers, who were also Pietist Lutherans and whose ultra-conservative faction was known as the “Kreuzzeitung” after their newspaper, which featured an Iron Cross on its cover.

... in other words he more of a protege of the Fox News, National Review, or Washington Times of his day.

Sungold illustrates her post with a picture of Bismarck’s giant handlebar mustache. I’m illustrating mine with an entirely different, and even more appropriate mustache.

Photo by Flickr user blunderer. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Bottom line: if you’re into not just “worker” productivity but actual workforce productivity Otto von Bismarck and Barack Obama can be found on the right side of the divide, while Adolph Hitler and the post-Reagan ‘wingers can not.