LauraCatoe.com

I stumbled across the title Insufficient Mating Material on an Amazon search, and I thought the author was being ironic.

I was mistaken. Here’s the synopsis:

Commander Jason’s true identity as Prince Djetthro-Djason has been uncovered, and he’s forced to mate with the ruling prince’s sister, Martia-Djulia. But this is not the punishment it seems. Though Djetth and Martia’s one night of passion was mistakenly triggered by another’s scent, Djetth is rather fond of his high-maintenance bride-to-be. Unfortunately, she’s pining for his presumed dead alter ego–if only he can convince her she can love him regardless of his name.

Man, if I had a dime for every time I had a night of passion mistakenly triggered by another’s scent…

I dug up the image above from the 1998 version of my website, because I came across a Salon article today that reminded me how I used to feel about The X-Files.

Sure, Mulder was hot, and made you want to heal and help him and go with him to the Andes in search of the yeti or whatever it was he planning to do with his three-day weekend.

But the one I would have gone to the ends of the earth for was Scully. Patient, long-suffering, geeky forensic pathologist Scully, so short and tucked and tailored. Given such a tough role — as the woman brought in by the FBI to be the minder and school marm, as Mulder correctly says in the first episode, to spy on him — Scully was supposed to be able take away his toys and crush his dreams of ghouls and goblins.

Who wants to be the skeptic, the killjoy, the buzzkill? Gillian Anderson, plucked from obscurity in her early 20s to play Scully, should have initially petitioned for a special Emmy category that rewards excellence in the field of lip biting, sideways casting of the eyes and exasperated bowing of the head.

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The pairing, based mostly on the dynamic between actors Anderson and Duchovny, crackled, and the show had at its core a professional relationship that was not just sexually, but romantically, electric. Of course, back then, when we all walked a mile to school and programs started the season in September and finished them in May, slow-burn television relationships burned really slowly, especially in comparison with today’s short-attention-span theater, when an unrequited prime-time couple can maybe make it to sweeps before kicking off their panties.

Not only did the sparks between Mulder and Scully fly fast and far, but the drawing out of their relationship allowed their audience to fall for them too, despite the irritating imperfections of both character and plot.

Scully was a leading lady to fall for, a smart-girl icon who was (and would still be, alas) a rare television bird: professional, independent, unsentimental.

See the full text of “Scully Have I Loved” here. The article references two of my all-time favorite episodes, Clyde Bruckman���s Final Repose and Bad Blood.

Today is my husband���s 34th birthday. I don���t have a card, cake or present for him. He knows this and is fine with it, but I still wanted to do something.

So here���s the first photo I ever took of him.

Do you remember this day, Kristopher? It was a warm summer night and you���d driven up to Gadsden to visit House of Blue. As usual, a group of us had gone to Shoney���s afterward. The group dwindled down to you, me and Brad Condray in the parking lot.

I had a roll of film that I was trying to finish, so I took out my camera and asked if I could take a picture of your tattoo. You look tired, but serene. I scanned the photo and added your name to it in the barcode font and e-mailed it to you.

When I look at this picture, I think about the time it calmed me down. That summer, I was into turning photos of people into ���toons.��� There was a guy I went out with a couple of times, and I���d said I make him into a toon.

Only, when I opened up his picture on the computer, it made me nervous. (My only explanation is that I was really bad at dating.) Uncomfortable, I closed his picture and opened up some other files. When I opened up this image of you, your serene gaze calmed me down.

Thank you, Kris, for deciding to visit House of Blue that summer. For hanging out in the parking lot. For laughing at my jokes and falling in love with me. I still find comfort in your eyes.

Happy birthday.

NOTE: The above picture from Flickr is not an example of the ads mentioned below. It’s more like the previous alternative, I think.

Excerpted from the New York Times:

���We could talk about germs until we were blue in the face, and it didn���t change behaviors,��� Dr. Curtis said.

They discovered that previous health campaigns had failed because mothers often didn���t see symptoms like diarrhea as abnormal, but instead viewed them as a normal aspect of childhood.

Ghanaians used soap when they felt that their hands were dirty ��� after cooking with grease, for example, or after traveling into the city. This hand-washing habit, studies showed, was prompted by feelings of disgust. And surveys also showed that parents felt deep concerns about exposing their children to anything disgusting.

So the trick, Dr. Curtis and her colleagues realized, was to create a habit wherein people felt a sense of disgust that was cued by the toilet. That queasiness, in turn, could become a cue for soap.

A sense of bathroom disgust may seem natural, but in many places toilets are a symbol of cleanliness because they replaced pit latrines. So Dr. Curtis���s group had to create commercials that taught viewers to feel a habitual sense of unseemliness surrounding toilet use.

The commercials, which began running in 2003, didn���t really sell soap use. Rather, they sold disgust.

The ads had their intended effect. By last year, Ghanaians surveyed by members of Dr. Curtis���s team reported a 13 percent increase in the use of soap after the toilet. Another measure showed even greater impact: reported soap use before eating went up 41 percent.