Teens Say Oral Sex
Not Really Sex

About one in five ninth-graders report having had oral sex and almost one-third say they intend to try it during the next six months, a study of teens at two California schools reports. The teenagers, whose average age was 14½, also say oral sex is less risky, more common and more acceptable for their age group than intercourse.

The researchers surveyed 580 ethnically diverse ninth-graders in two California public high schools. Girls and boys reported similar experiences and opinions about oral sex, which surprised the study’s lead author, Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, associate professor of pediatrics at University of California San Francisco.

“I think the stereotypes don’t exist as much anymore,” she said. “Girls and boys both see oral sex as not being a big deal.” The study appears in April’s edition of the journal Pediatrics.

Clueless adults
What’s known about the risk of oral sex is based largely on case reports and studies of HIV transmission in gay men.

While there’s little reliable data on the health risks, parents and health care providers can tell teenagers that there is a potential for getting herpes, hepatitis, gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis and HIV from oral sex.

The study, although limited by the small number of teenagers surveyed in only two schools, is still interesting, said Dr. Robert Blum of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He was not involved in the research.

“Adults are sitting there yelling at each other about abstinence, condoms, oral contraception and abortion, and kids have found their own path,” Blum said. “That’s the most important issue that underlies these data: Adults are more clueless than we would like to admit.”

In the survey, the teenagers were instructed to imagine themselves in a dating situation that included unprotected oral sex with a partner who had had previous sexual intercourse with other partners.

The teenagers were then asked to estimate the chance that they would get various sexually transmitted infections, including HIV, and the chance that they would experience social and emotional costs such as feeling guilty or getting a bad reputation.

More data on oral sex and teenagers is expected soon from the federal National Survey of Family Growth, which for the first time in 2002 included questions on oral sex, said David Landry, a researcher at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit group that studies reproductive issues.

Landry said the California survey is encouraging because it shows teenagers know that oral sex carries some health risk.

“Most adolescents also correctly recognized that oral sex is less risky than sexual intercourse,” Landry said. (From an AP report on April 4, 2005)

Credit Card Firms Charge The Dead
For Late Payments & Interest

Be sure and cancel your credit cards before you die. This is just so priceless and so easy to see happening customer service being what it is today.

A relative died this past January and Citibank billed her for February and March for their annual service charges on her credit card and then added late fees and interest on the monthly charge. The balance had been $0.00, now is was somewhere around $60.00.

I placed a call to Citibank:

Me: "I am calling to tell you that she died in January."

Citibank: "The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply."

Me: "Maybe you should turn it over to collections."

Citibank: "Since it is two months past due, it already has been."

Me: So, what will they do when they find out she is dead?"

Citibank: "Either report her account to the frauds division or report
her to the credit bureau, maybe both!"

Me: "Do you think God will be mad at her?"

Citibank: "Excuse me?"

Me: "Did you just get what I was telling you--The part about her being dead?"

Citibank: "Sir, you'll have to speak to my supervisor."

Supervisor gets on the phone:

Me: "I'm calling to tell you she died in January."

Citibank: "The account was never closed and the late fees and charges still apply."

Me: "You mean you want to collect from her estate?"

Citibank: (Stammer). "Are you her lawyer?"

Me: "No, I'm her nephew." (Lawyer info given)

Citibank: "Could you fax us a certificate of death?"

Me: "Sure." (Fax number is given)

After they get the fax:

Citibank: "Our system just isn't setup for death. I don't know what more I can do to help."

Me: "Well, if you figure it out, great! If not, you could just keep billing her. I don't think she will care."

Citibank: "Well, the late fees and charges do still apply ."

Me: "Would you like her new billing address?"

Citibank: "That might help."

Me: "Odessa Memorial Cemetery, Hwy 129, plot number 69."

Citibank: "Sir, that's a cemetery!"

Me: "What do you do with dead people on your planet?"

Party, Play and Pay

Multiple partners, unprotected sex and crystal meth. It's a deadly cocktail that has stirred new fears about the spread of HIV

This article, condensed from an article by David Jefferson in the February 28 issue of Newsweek, will make you cringe.

It's Saturday evening in Manhattan, and three dozen men are crammed into a one-bedroom suite in an upscale hotel across from Ground Zero. After shelling out $20 apiece to the man who organized tonight's event over the Internet, the guests place their clothes in Hefty bags for safekeeping and get down to business and pleasure. A muscular man in his mid-30s sits naked on the sofa and inhales a "bump" of crystal methamphetamine.

Within minutes, he's lying on the floor having unprotected sex with the host of tonight's sex party, whose sunken cheeks, swollen neck glands and distended belly betray the HIV infection he's been battling for years. In the bedroom, a dozen men, several of them sweaty, dehydrated and wired on meth, are having sex on the king-size bed. There's not a condom in sight. "It's completely suicidal, the crystal and the 'barebacking' [unprotected anal sex]," says one of two attendees who described the scene. "But there's something liberating and hot about it, too."

This is the ugly underworld of meth-fueled sex: "Party and Play," or PnP for short, as it's euphemistically called in Internet personal ads. News that a gay meth user in New York who had hundreds of unsafe sexual encounters may carry a virulent, drug-resistant strain of HIV has forced health officials and gay community leaders to take a sobering look at the growing role crystal methamphetamine is playing in the spread of AIDS. Doctors are unsure whether the new strain is an isolated case or the precursor of a deadly new wave of HIV. But it's clear that a dangerous nexus has formed between the nation's two big epidemics: AIDS and methamphetamine abuse.

The meth epidemic isn't new, nor is it just a gay problem. After exploding in the Southwest more than a decade ago, the relatively cheap drug has spread north and east; a 2003 federal study estimated that more than 12 million Americans have snorted, smoked or shot up meth at least once. But it is in the gay community that the link between crystal meth and unsafe sex is most alarming.

In a study of 1,600 men who have had sex with men, conducted by the L.A. County public-health agency in 2003-04, 13 percent said they'd used meth in the previous 12 months; those respondents were twice as likely to report having had unprotected sex, and four times as likely to report being HIV-positive. And as many as three quarters of new patients diagnosed with HIV by counselors at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center in New York each month say crystal meth played a role in getting them there.

Even before crystal became commonplace in gay sex clubs and at the roving bacchanals known as circuit parties, many men had begun to let safer-sex practices slip. The arrival of retroviral cocktails in the late 1990s made HIV a chronic but manageable disease for many, but it also gave uninfected men, especially younger ones, a false sense of security. Throw meth into the mix, and safe sex goes out the window: men high on crystal are four times more likely to engage in unprotected sex as those who aren't, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The powerful stimulant leaves many users feeling euphoric and hypersexual, resulting in binges with multiple partners that can last until the user comes crashing off the drug a few days later. Because crystal causes temporary impotence for many men (some pop Viagra to counter the effect), users are more likely to be the receptive partners in unsafe sex, where the risk of contracting HIV is greatest.

The Rambo Granny
Of Australia

Gun-toting granny Ava Estelle, 81, of Melbourne, Australia was so ticked-off when two thugs raped her 18-year-old granddaughter that she tracked the unsuspecting ex-cons down and shot off their testicles.

The old lady spent a week hunting those men down -- and when she found them, she took revenge on them in her own special way, said Melbourne police investigator Evan Delp. Then she took a taxi to the nearest police station, laid the gun on the sergeant's desk and told him as calm as could be:

'Those bastards will never rape anybody again, by God.' Cops say convicted rapist and robber Davis Furth, 33, lost both his penis and his testicles when outraged Ava opened fire with a 9-mm pistol in the hotel room where he and former prison cellmate Stanley Thomas, 29, were holed up.

The wrinkled avenger also blew Thomas' testicles to kingdom come, but doctors managed to save his mangled penis, police said. The one guy, Thomas, didn't lose his manhood, but the doctor I talked to said he won't be using it the way he used to, Detective Delp told reporters. Both men are still in pretty bad shape, but I think they're just happy to be alive after what they've been through.

The Rambo Granny swung into action August 21 after her granddaughter Debbie was carjacked and raped in broad daylight by two knife-wielding creeps in a section of town bordering on skid row.

"When I saw the look on my Debbie's face that night in the hospital, I decided I was going to go out and get those bastards myself 'cause I figured the Law would go easy on them," recalled the retired library worker. "And I wasn't scared of them, either-- because I've got me a gun and I've been shootin' all my life. And I wasn't dumb enough to turn it in when the law changed about owning one."

So, using a police artist's sketch of the suspects and Debbie's description of the sickos', tough-as-nails Ava spent seven days prowling the wino-infested neighborhood where the crime took place till she spotted the ill fated rapists entering their flophouse hotel.

I knew it was them the minute I saw 'em, but I shot a picture of 'em anyway and took it back to Debbie and she said sure as hell, it was them, the oldster recalled.

So I went back to that hotel and found their room and knocked on the door and the minute the big one, Furth, opened the door, I shot 'em right square between the legs, right where it would really hurt 'em most, you know.

Then I went in and shot the other one as he backed up pleading to me to spare him. Then I went down to the police station and turned myself in.

Now, baffled lawmen are trying to figure out exactly how to deal with the vigilante granny. What she did was wrong, and she broke the law, but it is difficult to throw an 81-year-old woman in prison, Det. Delp said, especially when 3 million people in the city want to nominate her for sainthood and a medal. (From various wire service reports.)