In Dallas (naturally), a parenting magazine discusses how easy it is for mommies who don’t like their post-child bodies to get surgery — and to have it financed! — to reverse the effects of time and childbirth. Don’t like what nursing has done to your na-nas? Doc has just the solution:
Doctors say some women, especially with breast augmentation, can see results very quickly. “It’s instant gratification. They wake up a different person,” offers Thornton. In fact, research shows that the five-year satisfaction rate for breast augmentation is 94 percent, reports Wilcox (80 percent of the implants he places are silicone-gel, which was approved again by the Federal Drug Administration in November 2006).
Bogdan also dispels a common misconception that implants need to be replaced every 10 years. “Implants are not perfect, and there are some issues that can occur with time, but if the breasts look good and feel soft, there is no reason to undergo implant exchange surgery,” he stresses.
In Austin, there’s long been a bumper sticker and t-shirt campaign saying, “KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD”. Some clever Dallas person came up with the Big D answer to that: “KEEP DALLAS PLASTIC”.
Wrapping up my four Beliefnet years, I was thinking about the posts that attracted the most attention and comment in that time. Without a doubt the most popular (in terms of attracting attention, not all of it admiring, to be sure) was the October 12, 2006, entry in which I revealed and explained why I’d left the Roman Catholic Church for Eastern Orthodoxy. At 5,000 words or so, it was probably the longest post I’ve ever written, and certainly the one that drew the most commentary. I wish I had been less melodramatic, but I wrote it in a single sitting, in an emotional outpouring. It is what it is, a snapshot in time.
The next day my daughter Nora was born, which occasioned this popular post about the mystical Marian connection to my marriage and that baby girl.
The BBC this morning reported on a bizarre case in Israel of an Arab man convicted of “rape by deception,” because he’d led the Jewish woman with whom he’d had consensual sex to believe he was Jewish. Ha’aretz has the story here. Plainly it’s a racist verdict, and a bizarre one — but there’s more to the story than Ha’aretz lets on. According to the BBC radio report I heard, Israeli courts have previously convicted a man of “rape by deception”, after he pretended to be a government housing official who offered help getting an apartment in exchange for sex.
This is crazy. You start putting men in jail for rape for lying to women to get into their pants, you’ll run out of prison space within two weeks. What happens if a cad tells a woman he loves her to convince her to sleep with him, but doesn’t really mean it. Is that rape by deception? How do you prove such a thing?
