All My Gettings

Due to the nature of book vendors, my accounts guy being on vacation, and general institutional inertia, my job right now consists mostly of trolling the web, making lists of magazines and books I'd like to purchase. This leads to some surprising discoveries. For instance, some dvds cost over 4 dollars a minute to purchase! Which makes me wonder, do I really want to spend over 700 bucks on a series that sounds interesting but may be tangential to the curriculum we teach here? And, where, exactly does PBS get off charging so much? I mean, I love PBS (seriously, I'd marry it if it were a person), but the cost is awfully high, don't you think?

I also get to stumble across little tidbits that I think are worth passing along. I'm not sure how I fell into towleroad.com (a premium site for modern gay men), but they have this story about a new levi's tv ad with two versions. In one, the guy pulls up his jeans to bring a sexy woman (and the entire street) through his apartment. In the other, the same actor pulls up a sexy man. Levi sees this as true equality, which may be true. Sex sells both ways, it appears.

On the Details blog (my library was supposed to consider which "men's lifestyle" magazine to subscribe to--answer? none.), there's a wacky, wacky story about an adult male pedophile posing as a 12-year old boy. The strangest turn in the story is that he doesn't seem to have gotten access to any victims through his charade, but he was being kept by two much older men who were under the impression that he was a pre-teen. There are so many freaky things about this. There is also the legal question of these older men. Can they be tried as pedophiles if they only thought their victim was 12? And, how did they not realize he was older? Not to get too graphic, but I feel like there's some significant differences between a naked sixth-grader and a naked 29 year old. But then, I'm not a pedophile. Read the full story here.

This is what I am paid to do. Well, either this or something very close to this.