I have a confession to make: I have deliberately ignored a remarkable story that has been growing in popularity across these Internets because I did not want anyone out there to get the wrong idea. You may have already heard about this somewhere else, but on the off chance that you have not I will indeed abide by the Blogger Code of Ethical Practice and share it with you. It is an issue about which I have serious reservations, but I am chastened by having been remiss in my duties and I hereby make amends. Let’s begin.

In 1988, a 15-year-old girl living in the small southern African nation of Lesotho came to local doctors with all the symptoms of a woman in labor. But the doctors were quickly puzzled because, upon examination, she didn’t have a vagina.

“Inspection of the vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple,” so doctors delivered a healthy baby boy via Caesarean, the authors wrote in a case report published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

Her birth defect — called Mullerian agenesis or Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome — didn’t necessarily surprise doctors, but her pregnancy did. Even the 15-year-old girl could not believe she was pregnant.

Yet by looking at her records the hospital staff realized the young woman was in the hospital 278 days earlier with a knife wound to her stomach. The average pregnancy lasts 280 days. After interviews, they gathered that “Just before she was stabbed in the abdomen she had practiced fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover. The fight with knives ensued.”

You can imagine where it goes from there: Scientists theorize that “spermatozoa gained access to the reproductive organs via the injured gastrointestinal tract.”

The story ends happily for most of those involved-”The young mother, her family, and the likely father adapted themselves rapidly to the new situation and some cattle changed hands to prove that there were no hard feelings.”-but I want you to listen and listen closely: Much as it pains me to say this, Science is wrong. You cannot get pregnant from a blowjob. In fact, studies have shown that giving blowjobs actually PREVENTS pregnancies. Also, it promotes weight loss and makes people pay more attention to you. There is no possible way that the act of performing oral sex-the most selfless yet rewarding act a person can perform-will result in your pregnancy. I don’t want you to believe this ridiculous medical curiosity story with its implicit anti-blowjob propaganda. I know that Science carries a lot of authority around here, and the facts of this case seem like something you’re just going to have to sit back and take in but that does not make a lick of sense. Readers, believe me: If you are going to swallow any organ’s load of information, it should definitely be mine.

Yes. It is that sacred day. May I point out that Ms. Hearst’s memoir, Every Secret Thing, is an absolutely excellent read. Really terrific. Me and John Waters will be all snuggled up, rereading it tonight. Not together, sad to say. [Warning: Memoir is written by a woman, is in the first person and includes details about her sex life.]

So, we redesigned the site! That happened! Do note that the changes were not merely cosmetic. We’ve also tried to make the site work better for you. It’s a work in progress-we have a pretty thorough list of things that we still want to improve-but here’s what we’ve done so far.

Improved The Way You Manage Your Profile
See that link up there on the right that says “Login”? (If you’re already logged in, it will say “Settings”) Well, if you click that you can add the information that goes on your profile page, change your avatar (LOL, ABADAH) and login/password info. No more Gravatar! (You probably don’t know what that is because most of you-understandably-could never figure out how to change your user icons on it! See, for example, Balk, and he works here.)

Aggregated Comments
Hey, want to see what other funny/not-funny comments another user has made? Click the commenter name and you’ll go to a page with all of their bons mots. Now your baseless judgments of other commenters will be a little baseless, because you can see their whole body of work! But probably you will mostly use it to reread your own. Hey, that’s cool! We don’t judge.

Organized Contributor Information
Although the link to this page is on our list of things to fix, we now have a contributors page where you can sort through all of the people who are writing for the site and also go to their individual contributor page that lists all of their posts.

Enhanced General Navigation Elements
We’re trying to make it easier for you to find the information that you want. Expect to see more of an emphasis on content organization, mostly by topic or author, thus helping you get from point A (where you are now) to point B (surrounded by things that you enjoy reading) with a minimum of fuss.

Added Twitter/Facebook Connect
Now you can login by way of other accounts you have on existing internet websites. That’s pretty much that. Do note that those will, obviously, leave comments under your real name (or whatever fake name you use on those sites).

So while that’s what we’ve done thus far, there’s still plenty we’re working on to make the site better-not to mention fixing the inevitable bugs that have come up since we launched the new site. In an effort to be completely transparent-we are all about transparency!-here’s what’s on our list of short-term goals and fixes:

• Make our RSS feed look normal again
• Resolve general paragraph and linespace formatting issues
• Improve the speed and loading issues of the site, which are making EVERYONE angry
• Work on the slugs-those green-arrowy things that help categorize posts by broad topic-and the way they function
• Enhance the ease of navigation between posts
• Fix the weather thingy (up top, on the right! See it?) so that it actually works

And those are just the issues that we’re aware of. You may be having a problem that we don’t even know about! Feel free to share, either in the comments here or our inbox. We’d love to hear from you.

Here is the preview to Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, a documentary which I will be seeing the shit out of.

Today’s exciting market plunge, with massive selling at open, appears to have hit bottom, but that was neat. (Also, may I point out that people are now using the phrase “a deteriorating jobs market” so very soon after they were using the phrase “end of the recession”?)

It is all like a Roland Emmerich movie up in the Accuweather™.

“Fuck!” the kid said, from the back seat of the car. They pick these things up from everywhere, the two-and-a-half-year-old children do. The child is like a runaway threshing machine rattling across the landscape of language, ingesting and scattering everything in its path: grain, chaff, string beans, feed buckets, chopped-up bits of mailboxes. How much of what your child says is understandable?

the developmental survey form asks. You mean articulate? Or comprehensible? “The greens are taking care of the eights,” he says. Or: “Welcome to Metro.” Or: “I want a toaster in my ear.”

Sometimes the kiddie-Joycean monologue defies untangling. “Musaka musaka iko,” he likes to say, or something that sounds like that. Followed by: “No! That’s J____’s line!” J____ is one of his day-care classmates. I tried to reproduce his thought processes with Google and got eggplant recipes. None of the day-care teachers could figure out where it had come from.

“Fuck!” was not one of the mysterious ones. He had it perfect. We were heading out to the airport, the two of us, and we’d burned most of our margin of error getting him into his coat and shoes. I’d hurried him through the apartment garage, buckled him into his car seat, and thrown the luggage into the trunk. I jabbed the key into the ignition, letting my eyes fall on the dashboard clock, and just as the numbers lit up: “Fuck!”-like a cue called out from the wings.

It’s not that I’d been about to blurt it out myself, right then. We weren’t running that late, yet. But I’d slipped up enough times before-missing a Metro train, yes, definitely-and he’d picked up the whole rhythm and logic of it, the moment when Daddy’s haste and frustration would crest. He could hear and echo the bad words even if I kept them inside my skull.

“Fuck!” he repeated, with rising merriment, as I put the car in reverse and looked over my shoulder. “Fuck!”

I tried not to meet his eyes. Take provocation in stride, the experts say. Deprive the child of any reaction, positive or negative, as if nothing interesting had happened. This is wonderful advice. If I had that much self-control, he would never have heard me cuss in the first place.

I don’t want to have a salty, transgressive mini-adult around. The joke is not that great. My parents raised me with rules and standards, which I gradually learned to break over time. I can remember my mother remonstrating with me, probably in the middle-school years, for my overreliance on “holy crap.” It was no doubt a relief to my father when I devolved into full foul-mouthed teenagerhood and he could go back to saying “dog-fucking son of a bitch” during Eagles games or whenever. But he didn’t try to speed up the process.

So it was guilty and mortified laughter that I was stifling, ineffectively. No one will mimic you more cruelly and accurately than your own child. “Daddy made a mistake!” is his favorite gag line of all. Daddy made a mistake! It’s not funny. It’s funny. Fuck! I mean, drat.

A friend of mine, when his daughter was two years old, got called in for a parent-teacher conference. The little girl had been bouncing around on one of those big rubber balls, happily saying “Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck!” in time with the bouncing. Yeah, he and his wife said, abashedly, she got that from us. The teacher was surprised. No parents had ever pleaded guilty before, she told them. They always said it must have been an uncle or something.

Or something. I do sincerely believe he picked up “It is SO fucking cold!” from somewhere else, for instance. And the “WEEE WILLL, WEEE WILLL…” of “We Will Rock You.” Not my fault. Influences are everywhere. The parent has to set an example.

Not long after the ride to the airport, at the end of a party with people we’d only just met, the kid-who’d been quiet all evening-suddenly felt moved to holler. “Oh, MERCY!” he yelled. “Oh, MERCY!” Those words had come out of my mouth only once, maybe a week before, at the sight of some Dutch elm disease damage. The kid had been up on my shoulders at the time, seemingly engrossed in an electronic greeting card he’d discovered, making it play a snippet of “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” over and over in my ear.

But now he was stomping around these people’s entrance hall. “Oh, MERCY! Oh, MERCY!”

The other people’s children were scampering here and there. Who says “Oh, mercy”? someone asked.

I do, I said.

Tom Scocca is finishing up Beijing Welcomes You for Riverhead and is at war with the machines in his spare time.

Also the Times, last year, laid off some copy editors. (Staf?) In any event, the news conveyed is that the Observer is launching a free weekly in Las Vegas. Duuuuuude. Also, may we amplify? Jared Kushner “has started a string of new ventures, like The Commercial Observer and a group of political news Web sites in several states [which he later shut down].” (via)

We’re semi-eagerly awaiting a decision out of Boston today, mostly because it is a story with no relevance beyond political spectacle, regarding the deportation of the President’s aunt. (Zeituni Onyango, who is a KENYAN, works as either a computer programmer or a public health advocate, or both, depending on what news outlet you are reading.) She was denied asylum in 2004; she is a member of the Luo minority in Kenya; by last year, as many as 600,000 people were “displaced” (that is, homeless) due to political and ethnic conflict. She has declined interviews. This retains my interest, I think, because it is one of those stories regarding which, the more you think about it, the less you are able to clearly summarize its news value.

In Britain, even the baby shoes come pre-packaged with knives.