'Anus.' 6:37 p.m., 8.26.08, 7th Avenue.

Breaking: Crazy-Eyed Niece Hates Apples, Loves Bananas

Hates apples...


loves bananas.

Tropical Storm Fay, Indian River Lagoon, Florida

(Matthew Ratajczak/Associated Press)

Enlightening!

Russian Judge Rules to Allow Sexual Harassment

www.telegraph.co.uk

A Russian advertising executive who sued her boss for sexual harassment lost her case after a judge ruled that employers were obliged to make passes at female staff to ensure the survival of the human race.

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia's history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

"He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word," she earlier told the court. "I didn't realise at first that he wasn't speaking metaphorically."

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled.

Since Soviet times, sexual harassment in Russia has become an accepted part of life in the office, work place and university lecture room.

According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.

Eighty per cent of those who participated in the survey said they did not believe it possible to win promotion without engaging in sexual relations with their male superiors.

Women also report that it is common to be browbeaten into sex during job interviews, while female students regularly complain that university professors trade high marks for sexual favours.

Only two women have won sexual harassment cases since the collapse of the Soviet Union, one in 1993 and the other in 1997.

Human rights activists say that Russian women remain second-class citizens and are subjected to some of the highest levels of domestic abuse in the world.

Irony!

Did you know that the director of "House of Wax," the 1953 3-D hit, was blind in one eye? Monocular!

Beauty Hands

Last night, Third Avenue, Brooklyn. 10:48 p.m. Bodega window.

Gay Day

“Excuse me, is this neighborhood called something?”

I pluck a white iPod headphone from one ear and try to quickly assess what neighborhood we are in while also sizing up if the man speaking to me is attempting to:

a) pick me up

b) kill me.

We are on 23^rd between Sixth and Seventh, so I say, “Um, not really. Oh, wait. Chelsea. Yeah, I guess this is Chelsea.”

The man, a handsome, 30-something, possibly Latino guy, says, “Is this a particularly gay neighborhood?”

He has a small black camera strung around his neck. We are still walking.

“Really?” I ask. “It’s Chelsea. It’s the gay neighborhood in New York.” Suddenly I am worried this guy is some sort of psychotic homophobe. Either that or he is gay. “Um, do you want it to be?”

“Sure. I mean, I’m gay,” he says. [Breathe out.] “And I was sort of blown away a block back by these guys in front of a gym…”

We laugh. All this time, we’re still walking.

“So yeah—Chelsea is the center of gay in New York,” I tell him. “You know, it’s funny, I was just listening to Dan Savage’s podcast…” I wonder why I am telling him this.

“Who’s that?” he asks.

I also begin to wonder what super-straight gay planet this man fell from.

“You know, Dan Savage—Savage Love. Columnist. The Stranger…?”

Somewhere along the way, he mentions he is from California. I babble about weekly papers, the Village Voice. I try to recall the name of a weekly in California; I say something about Dan Savage being gay and answering a lot of questions about gay sex, which he was just doing in my very ears. I am stymied that he does not know Savage Love. I keep talking about gay things—gay neighborhood, gay sex columnist, gay, gay, gay. We reach TekServe, and the man stops and says: “Ah! Here is what I’ve been looking for all along!”

He thrusts out his hand: “I’m Daniel. Have a fun time!”

“I’m McBickle,” I say, smiling. “You too.”

I continue on to the subway, pondering his signoff, curious that I seem to have introduced some core concepts of gay popular culture to this gay man in a random encounter along a gay half a city block. Gay.

Sorority ‘Fatwah’!

From Eric Lipton’s NYT article on Bruce Ivins, accused (and now dead) anthrax killer—about the scientist’s e-mails:

"They provide glimpses into the personality of a man obsessed with a sorority that he first encountered while an undergraduate, asserting in an e-mail message that the women’s group was waging a 'fatwah' against him."