from Susie Bright:

The next guilty teenage boy you see on the street... buttonhole him, and whisper, "You're not doing it ENOUGH! You better beat off like your life depended on it!"

A new study shows that regular masturbation can reduce the risk of developing prostate cancer. Seriously.

The Australian researchers who carried out the tests found men who ejaculate more then five times a week were better off then men with more modest numbers. And the younger you start, the better the results.

And, no. I have no idea why C-3PO is up there. It just felt right.

I don't have a proper segue for this, but: My father had funny ideas about the prostate. Sometime in the mid-70s, ground pepper was banned from our home because he picked up the notion somewhere that the grains somehow enlarged the prostate. When a male relative came down with some trouble down there, my father leaned over to me - at dinner, while dude was sitting across from me - to whisper that the relative had taken ill because dude masturbated into the pocket square he always wore six times a day. (The beauty of that story is that I must have been, like, 9. Me and Dad didn't see eye-to-eye much, but nothing brought us together like the male urinary tract.)

In stark contrast, my father claimed not to have touched himself since his days at an all-boys military boarding school, which, besides being a bold-faced lie (I found "the stash" when I was 10) gave me the raw material for a lot of likely homophobic - but good natured, I swear! - innuendo-making at his expense. Dad subscribed to a lot of quack "newsletters" - this was before the intertubes, they came in the mail - and had clearly picked up both the pepper thing and the prostate-wanking connection in their pages. When his own gland swole up unexpectedly one day, I couldn't resist telling him how it just couldn't be his prostate seeing how he had given up his life of dickcrime way back in boarding school. He didn't have much in the way of snappy comeback, but that might have been because he was howling in agony in the bathroom trying to pass a drop and a half of urine, poor old guy. :(

Dock Ellis, talks to Donnell Alexander and Neille Ilel about pitching a no-hitter on LSD:

We flew into San Diego and I asked the manager could I go home, because we had an off day. And he said, "Yeah."

She said, "I don't know but you better get to that airport."

from boing boing:

Over at MobHappy, Russell Buckley comments on a news story about an elderly gentlemen who for years has called his late wife's Verizon voicemail just to hear her voice. During a system change though, the message was lost. Apparently though, Verizon heard about the sad situation, found a back-up of the old greeting, and restored it.

The first few years after he died, I would call my father's old number every 2 or 3 months, letting it ring a few times before hanging up. The number had been reassigned to new people, who I liked to imagine wondered what the quarterly prank call from Boston was about. (This was circa 2004 or so, Cambridge days.) I never left a message, don't think I ever held the line long enough for anyone to pick it up. I can't say for sure what I thought I was doing. There was no ghostly recorded voice on the other end, and I harbored no supernatural fantasies about Dad himself answering. My father was a strict materialist and good with electronics, and I figure that he'd find a way call me directly should he find himself inhabiting the phone system.