Liz Langley

        It may have been a while since Spain was an empire but Spanish men just won a victory which that’s going to make mince meat out of the egos of their rivals, in fact, of all the other men on the world stage. Spaniards are the best lovers in the world.        They are, at least, according to a poll (detailed in the London Daily Telegraph)   from www.onepoll.com, which surveyed 15,000 women on who the best and worst lovers on a global scale. I have yet to find a story that says why they’re the best, but the countries the ladies listed as having the most satisfying lovers, from 1-10 are  Spain, Brazil, Italy, France, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Denmark and Canada. (and on a pesosnal note: Go, Canada! Wahoo!!! You rock, eh?!)        Male or female, you have noticed that Americans didn’t make the Top Ten cut.        Well, they’re not the worst in the world according to the poll. That distinction goes to the Germans who were castigated as the worst lovers in the wo

Those of you who are suffering through this September in Florida with me and dreaming of the day the highs dip down into the low 80's can empathize with a desire to be refreshed in any and all ways possible. One of my stupid little dreams is to have a bidet, one of  those marvels of European hygiene that refresh your nether regions the way a good splash of cold water refreshes your face. Thanks to  Alternet  for giving me a great excuse to research the cleanness and greeness of bidets for this piece   "The Green Clean Art of Keeping our Rear Ends Hygienic: What are we afraid of?"  or as I keep thinking of it "I coulda hadda bidet!"       Plus it turns out that washing your heinie in a stranger's bathroom is really fun. Enjoy! PS: If you love this story and want to help keep me flush donate at PayPal: 

Though I consider myself an arch-romantic, I am not generally a reader of romance. To me “romantic” is more like traveling the country in an Airstream and making a living from the road as it is red roses, wine and chocolate, which are nice, but too safe to really be romantic at all. If you’re checking off boxes to create romance...you haven’t.        Romance writers are getting the hang of this and the  genre  is changing in unexpected ways. One local author and new president of our local chapter of the Romance Writers of America  is Lara Dien  , whose stories are available on the Wilder Rose Press  . Lara has a way of giving you a story and largely bypassing the clichés of romance – plus her sex scenes are hot, which matters to me as one of those people who eats the frosting and leaves the cake.        Another great thing is that the stories on Wilder Rose Press are very inexpensive – as financially painless as downloading a couple of songs off iTunes. I like books as much as anyon

Much as I wish I had, it’s hard to miss a headline like  Anti-Choice Floridians Peddling Constitutional Amendment to Criminalize Birth Control Pill f rom the pages of alternet.org  (for whom I sometimes write)          Sigh. It isn’t just having to scream “We’re not all crackpots!” in defense of Floridians again . It isn’t just that exhausted “Oh, what now?” feeling when far-right hysterics try to get in our business. It’s the waste.         Here’s the skinny.        ON 9/11/09, Tampa Bay Online reported   “ The "Personhood Amendment" that conservative activists are filing today in Tallahassee would add language to the state constitution that defines someone as a "person," regardless of age or health status, "from the beginning of the biological development of that human being." Lisa Lowen     of About.com explains the implications of this, saying “ If a "Personhood Amendment" passes in Florida, an embryo would have human rights at the moment of

 If a man was pee shy to begin with and came face to…face…with this men’s room mural, chances are he wouldn’t be able to whiz in public again until about 2012 : The picture was sent to me by a girlfriend recently in an email with the story of the mural detailed. Thinking it was genius and wanting to share it, but suspicious that commercial art could ever be this witty, I thought I better look it up.        Sure enough there was a snag. The mural is totally real. The story in the circulating email, however, seems to have gotten twisted up in a sort of internet version of “Telephone,” where the story of the picture has been passed around and changed over the years as related here on Hoax Slayers . Th e true story of the art work is that it was put up in the Sofitel Queenstown, New Zealand in 2005 and was designed by Perron Developments. Some men thought it was funny, some felt strange being ‘looked at’ and some were inspired to go to the gym. Though this 2005 story on the mural   says

        Except for the presence of the iconic and ever-wise Tim Gunn, this season’s Project Runway has been a bit of a let-down in my fashionista book. The contestants are certainly talented, but they’re so largely similar (young, beautiful, ambitious, creative, yawn) that the whole thing is about as exciting as bar soap.        That’s probably why I’ve never stuck around to watch the PR spinoff, “Models of the Runway,” about the girls who work the clothes for us every week. In seasons past any sidebar to the joy of PR would have been an instant watch, but this year the show hasn't been interesting enough to want more; it's a going-through-the-motions thing, like when you know the relationship is over but you’re too lazy to get up and find someone else to kiss, so you take what’s next to you on the couch.        Anyway, last night I was too lazy to get off the couch, so I did watch “Models” for awhile and actually got kind of a kick out of it, especially when PR hostess and c

        “Craigslist diaper fraud” isn’t a Google search string you may have ever envisioned yourself using,  but I got the chance today after seeing a report on WKMG Local 6 news last night about a Brevard County man who was arrested for defrauding women into changing diapers he didn’t need.        There is a fetish called paraphilic infantilism, defined by Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary  under autonepiophilia as “a paraphilia in which sexual arousal and orgasm are dependant on the subject acting as or being treated as an infant. The subject may need to wear diapers, for example, in order to become sexually aroused.” (Below is video from the Tyra Banks show with Dr. Victoria Zdrock talking a little bit about the nature of this and other fetishes).          Sean Kelly was charged with organized fraud for offering to pay women to take care of him in this way and then not doing so ( see the detailed story and video here  ). To make it clear, it’s not the fetish – it’s the fraud – t

In the past few years a delightful new trend has emerged - the study of happiness - which in my mind is the same thing as focusing on how to get healthy rather than waiting to deal with your health when you're sick.       Slate  magazine has an ongoing blog called The Happiness Project, which I check in with from time to time to see what people are talking about in the world of misery prevention and I loved today's post from Gretchen Rubin that offers  Ten (More) Tips for How to Fight Right with Your Sweetheart  based on a new book Prince Harming Syndrome: Break Bad Relationships Patterns for Good  by  Karen Salmonson  and offers excellent tips that even the hottest of the hot-tempered will realize are a good idea, especially if you know deep down past your ego that you actually want to keep  a relationship with this person. It might be tough to remember tips like "Avoid harsh start-ups" and "Pick the right time and place" when you're in the heat of the

         World’s Greatest This. Top 100 That. And these days everything must be XTREEEEME! (X-treme Jell-O, for tit’s sake….how the hell can Jell-O be extreme, unless you can bounce a car off it?)          The more loud and ludicrous everything around me gets the more I find myself appreciating subtlty and even simple competance. The best title I’ve seen in the last two years was – no kidding - a show on PBS “Sandwiches That You Will Like.” How lovely. How pleasing. Nothing was going to blow my head off or change my world. And by not overpromising the show delivered. There were sandwiches and I would have liked them.          The “sandwich” title almost outdid my favorite title of all time, which came to my attention two years ago when I saw the exhibit "Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings," at MoMA in NYC. There was certainly a lot of lovely work in the “Nudes” section but this one, of London’s Sue Tilley  napping on a comfy couch, sported the title “Benefits Supervisor Res