But what if the original argument is evil and/or naughty, and you interrupt yourself to present the other PoV for a moment?  Is that "playing Angel's advocate?"

Just a thought, and yes, you'll see this concept in action further down this page, which is what I was typing when I thought of it.

For another odd topic, I am hurting and my hands are typing very slowly.  The reason is that I did 25 push ups, fast, full extension, on my fists, around 9pm.  It's now 2am, and I can lift my left arm, but not very quickly.  They didn't hurt when I did them, but about 10 minutes later it began to feel as if I had about 20 pounds of weight tied to my left arm, and maybe 15 to the right.  The front of my shoulder and the front of the elbow are not hurting or throbbing, but they just feel dead.

What makes this odd is that I do 10 or 15 pull ups multiple times a day, and suffer no ill effects, other than a few minutes of burning afterwards. And that's to be expected/desired from the exercise.  And in theory, pull ups are far more physically demanding than push ups.  Most anyone in decent shape can do 5 or 10 push ups if they have to, but they'd be hard pressed to manage 1 or 2 pull ups, if they could even do that many.

Which is why it seems odd to me (and my dangling arm) that I'm so sore from what is supposedly the lesser exertion.  Obviously it just hits different muscle groups, and my increased muscle tone from all the pulls ups over the winter probably made me just strong enough to do enough push ups to get really tired.

I shall have to incorporate push ups into my regular routine, though hopefully in slightly smaller doses.

¤ And since that blue-painted g-string ass isn't enough hot-chickage for the day (to counter out all the penis talk below) here's another lovely image.  I find myself staring at this and almost breaking into tears.  It's just so perfect.

The image is from the Spanish Tourist Board, and has been recalled since it was being protested as sexist.  Here's the quote from the news article.

Spain's tourist board has temporarily withdrawn this advertisement bearing the slogan 'Spain marks,' after a deluge of complaints that it was sexist. The ad was pulled after protests by political and women's groups, a spokeswoman for the tourist board Turespana said. A meeting of regional government and tourist authorities will decide whether the poster should be banned altogether.

I don't really care about any of that, and I'm not entirely sure why it's sexist (exploitive, certainly) I just love the image.  A woman's strong bare back, especially one that's tanned and smooth and even like this, just kills me.  It's not a sexual thrill, it's more like the sigh of blissful relaxation and enrapture that I give off when I have a nice big Van Gogh image to view.  I don't even care about the thong tan line in this so much, it's the curve of the spine and the no strap tan line and the dress being bare backed that so thrills me.

The ad image does not have the desired effect on me, I mean I have no inclination to tourist Spain because of it, but man it's easy on the eyes. You can see the ad version of it, with lettering and such, on the misc images page for the day.

¤ An interesting chart showing world wide support (or lack thereof) for a war/invasion of Iraq. The red countries oppose it (based on a majority of the population, I guess) while the blue one support it, by the same criteria. As you could probably guess w/o looking, it's damn near all red.  The only blue is the US, UK, Israel, and Kuwait.  They also have a blue spot for "Al Queda" but I don't know what that means, it's not a country and I can't see Al Queda supporting anything the US is doing.

So there are these various pro-war types in the US who are always raging on about how France and Germany and other countries are not supporting the war effort... what do they expect the leadership of those countries to do?  Their citizens are like 80 or 90% opposed to the US plan, and they are democracies.  You know, where the person who gets the most votes becomes the leader?  Just had to point that out.

Anyway, what do they expect the French president to do, when virtually everyone in his country opposes the war?  He is their elected representative.  Take that literally: "elected representative".  It is his duty and requirement to lead, but to also acquiesce to the will of the people he is representing. He is there to act in the will and best interests of his people.  Should he rubber stamp Bush's desires, and throw away his own political career, since a recall or defeat in the next election would be guaranteed by it?  It's like the current US administration are children, unable to imagine that anyone could believe anything they don't, or have different priorities than they do.

Related to this is a new poll showing that Americans are still 59% in favor of sending troops to Iraq. The poll also shows lower confidence in the economy and Bush, as he's dropped below 50% support for re-election for the first time since his 9/11 popularity windfall.

This is somewhat amazing, if you think about it.  The US is stupid enough to foot the bill, and sacrifice our own troops to rid Iraq of Saddam.  Countries like France and Italy and Spain and Canada and Germany and Japan and on and on; they don't have to do a damn thing.  No troops, no military bases being used, no airspace being allocated.  No personal involvement at all, no military lives risked, etc.  All of them know that Saddam is a psycho and would be colossally dangerous with nukes, if he could get his hands on them... and they still aren't in favor of it!

I think this has to reflect almost entirely on the unpopularity of the US around the world, especially the US with Dubya in charge of it, and suspicion of the US' motives for the Iraq Attack.  No one on earth would shed a tear if Saddam were ripped apart by wild dogs tomorrow morning just after breakfast, everyone knows he's trying to get his hands on weapons of mass destruction, and yet they still won't even passively support a military operation, with the excuse being that Saddam doesn't have such weapons.  Yet.

Yeah, it's all about who is pushing for the Iraq Attack... I can't see any other explanation.

¤ News Item #1: I'm not even sure I believe this one, but it's been in the news the last few days, so here goes. This is the entire news item, since it's so short. (Get it?  Short?)

MANILA (Reuters) - A Filipino man cut off his penis and tossed it through a window to his estranged wife in a bid to prove his fidelity, a Philippine newspaper reported on Thursday.

The man wrapped the severed member in a newspaper and threw it through the window of his wife's parents' house in the northwestern town of Malasiqui, the Philippine Star said.

"So you will not suspect I am courting another girl," the Star said the man shouted before he hobbled off into the night.

His shocked wife gave the severed penis to police, who sought the help of an embalmer to preserve it until her husband could be found, the paper said.

I like that she saved it, just in case.  As a girl said to me yesterday in a comment that made me groan for about 5 minutes, "She has a dildo now."

I also like how the husband has just run off to who knows where.  Adultery is of epidemic proportions in the Philippines, from what I've been told, so she probably had every reason to suspect him.

¤ News Item #2: There's a weird trial going on now in San Jose, with a gynecologist being accused of rape, or wanking mid-exam, or something.  It's sort of confusing with the various reports.  What makes it odd is that the woman who first charged him seems very ambivalent about the whole thing.  She said he apparently inserted himself, with a condom on, mid-exam, while she couldn't see due to a cloth being over the area.  But she's not sure.  But maybe he was just whacking off.  She says she found a used condom in the trash can after the exam, but then she returned for three more appointments with the same doctor!  And only after that did she file charges, saying she was molested, or raped, or something.

Once she came forward and it got some media attention, some other female (obviously) patients came forward to report odd behavior as well. 

The article about it today is getting into the downright bizarre though.  This part cracked me up.

SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) - A gynecologist accused of sexually abusing patients sat passively on Wednesday as a doctor told a court the exact size of his penis, a measurement the defense says proves his innocence.

When I first saw the headline about the size, I thought maybe it was like the old joke, and he'd prove he was so large they couldn't possibly have not known what he was doing, if he was really doing it. Alas.

In unusual and explicit Wednesday testimony, Dr. Harlev Goldberg said he had measured Ixtlahuac's erect penis at 5.5 inches. Some jurors appeared puzzled as to why the evidence was being presented in court.

The relevance of this is that the defense claims he would need to be longer than that to have been able to reach the vagina of the women involved, due to how they are positioned on the examination table.  I just love that line about the puzzled jurors though.

¤ Essay Thing:

While reading about 5.5" gyno (who is almost exactly average, as far as I know), I started thinking about how penis measurement is conducted.  The margin for error that's allowed is quite substantial, if you think about it.  You'll hear surveys that the average is 5-6 inches, or that 90% of men are between 4-7 inches.  Which is true, as far as I know (I've not/am not conducted my own survey.)

However, it's a ridiculously-wide range of measurements.  I mean what if they said that 90% of men were between 4-7 feet tall?  It's no-doubt true, and probably more like 98% of men, but what does it tell you?  If you are 4'2" or 6'10" you're both in the 98% majority, but as anyone knows, one of you is very short and the other is very tall. Human height tends to be narrowed down to a very precise number, such as 5'8.5" or something like that. Depends on the population, country, ethnic group, etc.  But my point is that they arrive at an exact median, with 50% above it and 50% below it.  They don't go fuzzy and say, "Average men are 5'6" to 5'11"."

Also, how is that for margin of error?  It's huge! (So to speak.) Allowing 1 inch leeway on a 5-6" measurement is up to a 20% error.  That's like saying a 5' guy is 6' tall.  Or a bridge that's 10 feet high is okay for 12 foot trucks.  Which would lead to problems.

My impression is that they allow a lot of margin for error in the penis length measurement since it's such a touchy issue for most men. No one wants to be "below average", which a lot would be if they said average was precisely 5.67 inches, for example. So they say it's "5-6 inches", which probably gets 75% of men right there, and all the 4.8" guys can pretend they got an inaccurate measurement, and all the 6.1" guys can feel an enormous amount of wholly-delusional pride.

To devil's (angel's?) advocate a bit, penis size is obviously variable, and a given man's erection will be larger or smaller from time to time. It's also an imprecise measurement, since you can easily poke a ruler into the skin half an inch at the base, or go from the side and get a higher number.  Combining a slightly-inaccurate measurement with 

Now true, penis size is complicated by it being a fleshy organ and varying in size all the time.  If you're 6 feet tall, you are 6 feet tall, though you might vary an inch or two if you had a sore back or bad posture.  But that's like an inch out of 72 inches, or a very small error.  If you had a slightly weak erection the day you were measured, and were say 5.3 instead of 5.6, that's equivalent to standing in a hole when they measure your height.  If it's a bad day and you are .4 inches off of your usual 5.6 maximum, that's around 7% of your total.  Compare that to height, and 7% of 6 feet tall is five inches. So if you were six feet tall you might come in at 5 foot 7, or 6 foot 5 by that scale, which is obviously a much greater error than would be reasonably expected.

I guess I've talked myself into it, and allowing up to an inch in "average" penis size isn't a bad idea, what with all the variables involved.

A way to increase the precision would be to make multiple measurements over time. But even then, you know guys would be delusional, and always take the highest figure to heart.   If you got measured ten times and they ranged from 5.2 to 5.6, how long would he say he was?  Duh, he'd say 5.6, he wouldn't take the average of 5.4, and certainly wouldn't take the minimum.  In fact he'd probably start thinking to h imself that he's really more like 5.7 or 5.8, or "almost six inches" and that the lab tech with the ruler wasn't doing it quite right, or he wasn't all that hard.

And anyway, I've had several women say that proportion, or thickness, is as or more important than length. Here's an actual quote, from an actual girl:

Its not just the length, its the width sweetie. Nothing is worse than a long and skinny dick. You feel like you are being poked like an oil change.

Yet all reports of penis size go by length, probably since that's just easier to eyeball.  And measure.

Also, size does matter to almost all women, but it's far from the deciding factor. Most women will say that size matters.  All women will say that technique matters more.  Size is sort of icing on top of the cake, but there needs to be a cake there in the first place.

And if you are wondering/hoping, this will be a essay topic at some point in the immediate future. I've been talking to a couple of women about it a lot lately, and their bad stories of rotten lovers/boyfriends are fascinating and depressing.  The more you talk to women, the more you realize that men really are pigs.

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