Liz Langley

Now of course on the day I post a blog about the rain the sky is a perfectly clear Wedgewood blue. Nontheless, we in Central Florida have had a crazy amount of rain lately and all this wetness made me want to tell you about a) the upcoming World’s Largest Skinny Dip event and b) the three best romance-in-the-rain moments in film (hint, above). Enjoy! And stay dry!

Dja ever get that feeling you're being watched? A LOT? I'm so so proud! One of my YouTube videos, "Top 5 Sex Ed Scenes in Film" has gotten over 10,000 views as of this week The name of the blog has changed but even then it featured cute costuming from   Fairvilla Megastore   (since then I've grown a pair and actually started wearing the Fairvilla costumes as in   Top 5 Human/Alien Hook-Ups  and the forthcoming "5 Sexiest Captains in Movies"). The video was shot by Jim DeSantis of the fabulous cult film podcast Movie Brain Rot   and you can see the work of Orlando artist Lani Brito in the backgorund. I'm so pleased I wanted to run it again, so here it is, hope you enjoy it, check out the others on YouTube and be on the look out for more! xoxoxox

My Brooklyn soulmate  Jim  and I were discussing the late great  Nancy Walker nad just days later I discovered a weird, hidden jewel: Nancy Walker’s album “I Hate Men,”  posted on the blog of NY/NJ’s  WFMU  .  Click and listen to Ms. Walker's  bitter, hilarious, thoroughly vintage tunes like “You Irritate Me So.” about her less-than-stellar love life. I’m no man-hater (God, the trouble it would save me if I was) but Walker’s caustic comedy is a retro-treasure. This one’s for Jim: now he can’t say I never gave him anything but headaches.

       What’s the last thing you’d expect to turn up on a sex and relationships blog? What seems like the opposite of sex? Is it death? Bowling? Garfield?        Nope. It’s Puritans. The above examples might be quite sexless but they’ve got nothing on our national ancestors who often feel like the human embodiment of the cold shower. What with the buckle hats, the Bible-thumping, and the distance and image we have of them, it’s hard to imagine how they ever begat any little Puritans.        The engaging, pop culture history book "The Wordy Shipmates"  by author and frequent NPR contributor Sarah Vowell (which I listened to on audio book), humanizes our black-clad founders and gives them some most of us may never think of them as having. Vowell doesn’t look away from their tragic history or flawed perceptions but she does make them seem more like people with varied ideas, hopes, sorrows and noble aspirations than the monolithic zealots of “The Crucible.”          And nothing

      At first I thought it was a joke – a website dedicated to dirty pictures of dirty old men – literally dirty, guys who look like rough trade extras from “The Road Warrior,” like Walt Whitman if you left him in the outback for a few days with only a skinful of whiskey and a couple-a Zagnuts.        Then I clicked onto  Hobofoot,   entered the site, saw the swinging dong and the naked truckers and the number of pay sites dedicated to the sexual appeal of “old outlaws and drifter types,” “hard living men, bear-assed and holy” and “naked old tramps” and realized “Wow… what a judgemental cow I am,” to think it was a joke. It's just a preference after all, more or less a matter of  preferring Alan Arkin to Greg Kinnear in "Little Miss Sunshine" (maybe with a little less bathing). That which pulls us thither by the hips is magically varied, so it shouldn't have been that surprising that some people want to see bum's bums.           The guys on Hobofoot (I didn't

          If you’ve decided to go off your birth control pills do the fish a favor and don’t flush the leftovers down the loo.          A Washington Post story  by Susan Q. Stranahan says that small amounts of 100 pharmaceuticals have turned up in America’s water. Currently they're not seen as a threat, but an EPA water chief with the fab name of Benjamin Grumbles has said “there’s still uncertainty about their potential effects on public health and aquatic life,” in the long term.”Get this: “Hormone-disrupting pharmaceuticals,*" Stranahan writes, are a possible cause of  of “intersex” fish in the Potomac River basin: male smallmouth bass producing eggs, females exhibiting male characteristics." Nothing against gender-bending fish, but shouldn't sex changes be on a voluntary basis?         I realize it says “one possible cause” so it's unproven, but the idea of drinking Viagra in my coffee makes me feel pretty icky; icky enough to make more coffee and hope there&

     Long before anyone ever heard of butterfly ballots, Floridians were used to living in a punchline. The warm, moist wang of America has always seemed to invite an eccentric brand of trouble and whenever we hear a weird headline - plagues of snakes, gorilla skulls for sale, "Pregnant cougar turns herself in after escape" (wasn't me) we wince and wonder if it's us. It usually is. We don't have our own category on  Fark.com  for nothing.      So it's a banner day to come across a news story in which, in some way, we  aren't  the class fuck-up.       Cue the Las Vegas Sun's  "One Nation, Seven Sins"  by Abigail Goldman in which geographers from Kansas State University mapped which parts of the country were the most and the least afflicted with anger, lust, gluttony, pride, sloth, greed and envy (yes, we imagine they did get paid). Wrath is calculated by the number of violent crimes reported to the FBI per capita while envy by the number of t

Ta-da!!! My fabulous new flyers are here! You know how I love everything to be as personal as possible, so I designed these to promote the blog but also connect one-on-one with my lovely readers (that's you - give yourself a big kiss!) If you want a card with a personal message, send me your address - you can find me on Facebook, @LizLangley on Twitter or at langley.liz@gmail.com. Thank you to Miriam Lorenzi for the great photo and to Doug Rhodehamel for doing the layout (you can find them both among my friends on Facebook). These will also be available around town soon at   Farivilla Megastore ,  Enzian Theater  and some of my other favorites places about town (watch for updates). Hope you like them - see you out there soon!