This children’s book on ritual abuse — a product, no doubt, of the ’80s Satanism scare — is the kind of thing my mom would have sold at her ¨ber-fundamentalist bookstore alongside the Jack Chick tracts and Dungeons and Dragons exposés, so for me it inspires a dull sort of dread rather than surprise or amusement. (Via.)

Even I was kind of incredulous, though, at the Pokemon jeremiad (below) that my friend Michael discovered last week.

“Snagged this from my managing editor’s desk,” said a friend who works at a newspaper, following the announcement that Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews will be shuttered. “The teaser in the upper right… Oof.”

Whoa. I thought the midcentury Lysol ones were the worst, but this Tampax ad collected amid some of the more misogynistic print campaigns of yore is singularly dreadful in its own way. (Via.)

Click for the full image at your peril.

Just as the cockles of my heart were warming over Ralph Stanley’s banjo pickin’ Obama radio spot, a reader in North Florida sends along a little something that guarantees they’ll be frozen over till at least sometime next April.

The Jackson County School Board has taken action against a teacher who apparently made racial commentary on presidential candidate Barack Obama.

According to parents and students in Greg Howard’s seventh-grade social studies class, Howard on Friday, Sept. 26 asked the class a question regarding Obama’s call for change, and proceeded to write out what the letters C-H-A-N-G-E stood for.

“She told me that he wrote on the board ‘Can You Help A (expletive) Get Elected, and then laughed about it,” said Shelia Christian, a mother of one of Howard’s students.

Jackson County Superintendent Danny Sims said that description of this incident was “pretty accurate.”

Sims said Howard apparently repeated the action in more than one class, having made the comment in “a couple of periods.”

Between this and the #@&$(#& revised bailout — with its tax breaks for Puerto Rican rum manufacturers and repeal of an excise tax on toy wooden arrows — only one thing prevents me from going home and crawling back into bed: anticipating the schadenfreude flavor of tonight’s debate popcorn.

NB to professors searching for a colleague’s name + “pussy”: If you are going to troll the Internet for images of or information about someone’s genitals, you might want to do it from someplace other than the university where you work.

Especially when your last name and first initial are embedded in your IP address.

And even more especially when the proprietor of the site where you land is a big fan of your colleague’s writing.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been more offended by a Google search. And believe me, what with my affection for Lolita, people have arrived here through some pretty twisted paths.
 

Update: I’m not interested in playing 20 questions, and given that my sidebar rotates I’m sure you could plug in fifty female writers’ names at any given time and come up with fifty different matches, but since there’s confusion, let me be clear: searcher and searchee teach at the same place, and neither of them wrote a piece for Slate about America’s deodorized fiction. Thanks.

On a 1930s Wifely Rating Scale, republished in the APA’s Monitor on Psychology, using slang or profanity alone nets you a motherfucking negative 5 points. (Via Crooked House; apologies if you already saw and laughed over this three weeks ago at Jezebel.)

Overall, I probably score something in the neighborhood of -105. And for the record, Caitlin Flanagan, my grandmother wouldn’t have done much better.
 

The test was created by a Northwestern University doctor “who ran a counseling practice, wrote a syndicated national newspaper column called ‘The Worry Clinic’ and started his own matchmaking service.” His “views on marriage were well-received at the time.”

Don’t forget, this was also the era during which women were encouraged to bathe their private parts in Lysol.

Maybe it’s me, but I’m thinking the Bedbug Bible Gang might want to consider rebranding for the urban market. Or, hey, if that’s outside the budget, at least drop the “just itching to” pitch.

The scene above is from Esther Fest, in which the “Bedbugs share the story of Esther in a royalty rousing episode.”

Texas Inmate No. 1385412 ordered a copy of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. When it arrived, the novel was rerouted to a relative in Austin, after a prison inspector determined that it might “encourage homosexual or deviant criminal sexual behavior” and be “detrimental to the offender’s rehabilitation.”

The disqualifying passage, which appears on Page 39, describes an oral-sex contest in a nightclub that ends when the champion vomits after nearly choking to death on the penis of a particularly sadistic and well-endowed customer.

It’s the kind of constraint that, in an alternate dimension, Bolaño himself could have been subject to. As Francisco Goldman noted in the NYRB last year, the author once “spent eight days in prison until, recognized by two guards who were former schoolmates, he was freed.”

A mid-November deadline looms, and between work and writing, I don’t have much steam left for books, email, or blogging. In fact, I’m at about 65% on the brain-deadness scale. Which translates into a whole lot of YouTube.

So while my mother-in-law, Jane, recently enjoyed all 3500 pages of In Search of Lost Time, then read a new biography of Proust’s mother, and now is halfway through Swann’s Way for the second time, the closest I’ve gotten to a masterwork lately is watching the All England Summarize Proust Competition. (Via the Rockslinga.)

You can read an excerpt from Madame Proust: A Biography here.

(Thanks to CAAF and The Mumpsimus for the flashbacks.)

Someone just forwarded me this unbelievable, but apparently actual Lysol feminine hygiene ad. “A man marries a woman because he loves her,” the copy reads:

So instead of blaming him if married love begins to cool, she should question herself. Is she truly trying to keep her husband and herself eager, happy, married lovers? One most effective way to safeguard her dainty feminine allure is by practicing complete feminine hygiene as provided by vaginal douches with a scientifically correct preparation like “Lysol.”

You can view more — equally horrific — examples here and here. (It’s easy to feel smug disdain toward the susceptible 1930s – 60s female target audience for these ads, isn’t it? For the three seconds before you start to ponder the current rage for “vaginal reconstruction,” and all women who’ve been scalpeled, in the name of sex appeal, into embalmed porn stars.)

Evidently the Lysol ad isn’t quite as straightforward as it seems on its face. Many contraceptives were banned in the 30’s — and words like “scientifically correct” and “feminine hygiene” were code for “safely prevents the formation of babies.” Which Lysol, of course, did not.

Why not get ahead of the curve — anticipate the next series? If you’ve got any nude photographs of yourself inappropriately fondling a housepet, go ahead and send them in. But do be sure they’re tasteful.

The New Times recently bought out The Village Voice. Here’s hoping new Village Voice editor David Blum resists these kinds of (yes, I’m going to say it) augmentations.

At Kentucky’s Creation Museum, which opens next spring, dinosaurs hang out with some giraffes, elephants, and flamingos near Noah’s ark. The “casting of a fossilized print is presented as a human footprint found among dinosaur footprints.” Never mind science; the place looks solely to the Bible for its evidence.

[T]he literal interpretation … contends God created the heavens and the Earth and everything in them just a few thousand years ago.

“If the Bible is the word of God, and its history really is true, that’s our presupposition or axiom, and we are starting there,” museum founder Ken Ham said during recent tour of the sleek and modern facility, which is due to open next year.

Stonings of rebellious children will be conducted in the courtyard daily at 11, 1, and 3 o’clock. (First link via GMB.)

Especially not in front of a fudge-packer.

More than twelve years after Rolling pled guilty, that tradition is still going strong.

The university police at Gainesville’s University of Florida have targeted a graduate student in the English program over his publication of a piece of horror fiction on his LiveJournal. The police have repeatedly visited the student and demanded that he submit his fingerprints and DNA to them so that they can compare the fictional murder he described in his story to evidence from any similar unsolved murders.

Philip Sandifer is a graduate student in U. Fla’s English program, and keeps a personal creative writing journal called “Pulp Decameron,” where he posts very short stories in the styles of various pulp genres. The stories are released under a Creative Commons license. One story, I am Ready to Serve My Country, is a first-person account of a murderer who executes two victims before applying to the military.

On May 12, detective Sanders of the University of Florida police left him a voicemail asking him to contact her. This began a series of meetings and calls with the University Police in which detectives repeatedly pressured him to allow them to fingerprint him, so that they could compare his prints to evidence from unsolved murders. They cited his publication of the horror fiction as the reason.

Has anybody at the campus police department read Harry Crews?
 

Update: The Stranger’s Brendan Kiley finds echoes of Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman, in which “a writer living in a police state … gets arrested and interrogated because he wrote stories about fictional murders that kind of resembled real-life murders.”

The blurb and review are also available a la carte, for $399. (Thanks to Katharine for the link.)

Cost for someone to come over to your house, stand behind your desk chair, and press your fingertips to the keyboard to form words: negotiable. (Ass-wiping services not included.)

Still, it delights me to imagine how he’d respond to “the BBC’s Big Bard Challenge,” in which 90 canvases will be combined to create a giant portrait of Shakespeare.

Amazon has removed the question. But Bookninja’s Kathryn looks up some other concepts offensive to the Christian Right, and finds that a search for “homosexual” brings up Loving Homosexuals As Jesus Would: A Fresh Christian Approach.

According to J. Peder Zane at the News-Observer, when Lyngstad contacted the magazine, “he was told that editors feared that including his name would ‘clutter’ the piece. After much back and forth, The New Yorker finally agreed to print a shortened version of his letter to the editor.” (Via a steamed Languor Management.)
 

Previously: CJR revealed The Secret Life of a Letter to the [New Yorker] Editor.