David Rodwin writes about sex and baking. Who knew challa could be NSFW?

He laid her on the table
So white and clean and bare.
His forehead wet with beads of sweat
He rubbed her, here and there.
He touched her neck and then her breast
And her legs, low at first, then high
He was drooling now, “I love this bird”
He thought, as he felt her thigh.
He reached his quest it was wide and wet
Sort of dark and murky.
He rubbed his hands and stretched his arms
And then he stuffed the turkey!

Turkey for Beginners

Challah, wild mushroom and herb stuffing

A bottle of Loreal shampoo, $1000 in hair extensions, and a little Photoshopping and you too can have hair like Cheryl Cole’s!  And Herbal Essence shampoo will totally give you orgasms!

A spokeswoman for L’Oréal said she “did not know” whether Cole used human or artificial extensions. A company statement said: “Cheryl has worn hair extensions for some time. They are part of her look and are cared for in the same way as normal hair.”

Hey, it’s OK:  I wear wigs all the time. I’m blonde one day, red the next. Short for work, long for play. But one thing I’ll never do: Try to pass it off as my own. I’m happy to see that in the UK at least, advertisers put disclaimers in their shampoo ads to let viewers know that the models hawking their products are sporting fake hair.

If someone compliments me on my hair I typically say “Thank you. It’s a wig.”  Everyone acts shocked. “But it looks so real!”  Then I tell them I’m completely bald.* Kudos to my hairdresser for his ability to make a hairpieces look as though they sprout from my head.

I could just say “Thank you” to the individual doing the complimenting and leave it at that.  However I feel compelled to set the record straight, even though I know I’ll never see that person again.   I  have “don’t hate me because I’m beautiful” anxieties, even in middle age, due to unresolved baggage from my youth.  Girls are raised to have unrealistic beauty expectations and I hate the thought of women feeling bad because their hair doesn’t look like a freaking wig. Of course their hair isn’t going to look as fab as mine: Their hair is real! Mine is not, and I think they have the right to know.  Call it a sisterhood thing.

Now if only all women could be blunt about the crazy things they do to be pretty, even if to admit to the subtle and generic, “I’ve had work done.”  Or maybe we could just quit with the fakery . . . Uh . . . You go first.

*hair disease

We all know exercise lifts the mood, but did you know cells created during exercise are less resistant to stress in general?  Me neither! Excuse me while I go out for a run.

Researchers at Princeton University recently made a remarkable discovery about the brains of rats that exercise. Some of their neurons respond differently to stress than the neurons of slothful rats. Scientists have known for some time that exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells (neurons) but not how, precisely, these neurons might be functionally different from other brain cells.

In the experiment, preliminary results of which were presented last month at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in Chicago, scientists allowed one group of rats to run. Another set of rodents was not allowed to exercise. Then all of the rats swam in cold water, which they don’t like to do. Afterward, the scientists examined the animals’ brains. They found that the stress of the swimming activated neurons in all of the brains. (The researchers could tell which neurons were activated because the cells expressed specific genes in response to the stress.) But the youngest brain cells in the running rats, the cells that the scientists assumed were created by running, were less likely to express the genes. They generally remained quiet. The “cells born from running,” the researchers concluded, appeared to have been “specifically buffered from exposure to a stressful experience.” The rats had created, through running, a brain that seemed biochemically, molecularly, calm.

New York Times: Why Exercise Makes You Less Anxious