Mike and I signed the lease on a new abode earlier today. It’s a two-story Spanish duplex with a slightly ratty exterior; we get the entire ground floor and we’ll have neighbors with the same floor plan above. According to our landlord’s contractor husband (who has done an amazing job putting the interior in order), the stripper who just moved out of the upstairs unit had a dancer’s pole installed in the living room, and bolted into the ceiling beams nearby were not one but two sex swings. I can’t say I would have been thrilled to live below a total whore, but it could have provided some funny stories. Or sleepless nights. Whichever.

The biggest selling point for the property, besides the immaculate, spacious interior, is the location. It truly is in the heart of Northpark—Utah and University, to be exact. Please permit me to rattle off some approximate distances: 3 blocks to Scholari’s Office, 4 blocks to Buster Daly’s, 1 block to KFC (haha), 2 blocks to 24 hour burritos, 1 mile to the girls on Georgia, 1 mile to Livewire and Red Fox, 1.5 miles to the Whistlestop (along with the other decent Southpark bars), and a 3.4 mile bike ride to work downtown each day for me. Groceries, banking, haircuts from Amber, coffee shops and many, many other shops are also just a short jaunt away. It’s all going to be such a welcome change from University City.

In a story from the book of Genesis, divine law dictates that Onan plunge balls-deep in his brother’s widow and provide her with some baby batter, but Onan pulls out and unloads elsewhere when he realizes the child would be considered his late brother’s and not his own. For this, God smites him. Smites him dead. Ancient Jews and Medieval Catholics interpreted this as a condemnation of masturbation and coitus interruptus, and, in the case of those wacky Catholics, a ban on all manner of contraceptives. This superstition has managed to last the Catholics well into modern times. On the bright side, to this day we can still thank Onan for giving us the excellent word onanism, which is just about the most academic way to reference rubbing one out.

If, as Monty Python sang, “Every sperm is precious,” it seems that with what we know about human physiology today these religious zealots should be protesting more than just prophylactics—bicycle seats and tighty-whiteys can both decrease sperm production. (If they do enough harm to seriously impede fertilization might be a matter of debate, but every gamete seems to count to some people.) Bike saddles can crush and suffocate delicate undercarriage tissues, and men’s briefs prevent the scrotum from dangling far enough from the body to maintain the (if memory serves me correctly) 93 °F temperature that is critical to sperm production. These are both fairly serious sperm-killing operations. So where’s the outrage?

Oh, right, the outrage is focused on keeping condoms out of a continent overwhelmed with AIDS.

Fuck you, religious dogma.

There’s a film adaptation of Fast Food Nation coming out soon. The trailer seems interesting enough, although it appears to be an ensemble of some of the allegorical points from the book instead of a literal documentary. I’m okay with that, since it’ll give the message mainstream traction. Anything that informs all those parents with “I don’t know why they’re fat” fat kids that fast food for dinner five nights a week is wrong gets my nod. Quite the cast, too. It may not exactly be The Jungle, but anything with Luis Guzmán has got to be good.

In the broader perspective, the country as a whole can already be seen tipping rather quickly to the left. Hybrids are hot, Bush’s numbers are in the basement, and people seem to be catching on that this GOP Congress could put an armada of pirates to shame. We can look back through history and observe the liberal/conservative pendulum swing slowly back and forth, but what really pushes it to and fro? Are progressive books/movies like Fast Food Nation a symptom or a cause? Is it really all about gas prices, and is our society, on average, really that short-sighted? The cynic in me assumes that movies like FFN are just a matter of marketing, like all the flags and magnetic ribbon decals that appeared in late 2001 when xenophobia became the new black.

Looking forward, what kind of social movement can we expect over the next few years? People are extremely disillusioned with the Iraq situation right now, but has it captured enough of the public’s psyche to birth—god forbid—an echo of the hippie revolution that came from the disaster of Vietnam? Does this already describe the emo/hipster set, who have thus far only seen fit to co-opt the band buttons and t-shirts? Can we please try and do a little better than that?

Stephen Colbert has the biggest balls ever. (Skip to 50:10.)