I thought the witchcraft thing was pretty crazy. I mean the only spell I ever got to work was the first level Protection From Petrification spell. Though I haven't come across a basilisk or medusa to actually confirm that.

My parents never restricted my reading. But my sister freaked out when I was 12 and borrowed a horror novel of hers that featured graphic, violent sex scenes.

When I was about 13 or 14, I borrowed some books on witchcraft from the library (the one or two books that our small-town library had) and tried to do some of the stuff in them. My dad thought it was weird, but he thought a lot of stuff I did was weird, and my mom read a few chapters and said it seemed like meditation. A bunch of my friends and I went through phases of fascination with various sorts of mysticism and stuff like that, and the only time I can remember any of our parents objecting was when one mother said that her Jewish daughter could not wear an ankh because it looked too much like a cross. And then when the daughter explained that it was an Egyptian symbol, that didn't really help her argument. So, no ankhs for any of us.

tommy, I'm totally ignoring that post of yours. Too much trauma.

I just had to force an issue for gathering a requirement that everyone else was just shrugging about. It's a web app! Someone needs to define the HTML we're generating and the CSS tagging, and it shouldn't be the developers. Still couldn't pull a delivery date out of anyone, but at least the task is on the design team's radar and off ours.

I think my parents' key censorship is on what we can consume together. Which is fair. There's a Jamaican movie I almost saw with my father--but then we noticed the byline "Pumpum power" which is patois for "pussy power" so we just decided we'd see it separately.

Forever went around my English high school, but that was old hat. Some steamy Harold Robbins or the like went around the convent hostel where I lived when I was 18, but that was mostly so we could hide it from the nuns, I think. We were all old and jaded by then. The harridans went through our rooms. I'm surprised it was never confiscated, since they I got called to task for being a devil-worshipper for my SF drawings. Perhaps they didn't want to touch the tainty stuff. Or perhaps they just didn't know the author's rep. The cover was pretty innocuous--that was probably it.

When I was about 13 or so, I bought a paperback novel about the crew of a British Lancaster bomber on a night mission over Germany. I just left it around for a while, so my dad ended up reading it before I did. I was slightly paranoid that maybe he was "checking up on" what I was reading. Then when I read it there was a scene of a crew member fantasizing about the breasts of a woman he knew. Really tame stuff, but then I got all nervous whether my dad was going to say something (he didn't).

The only other stuff with sex in it that I can remember reading as a kid was stuff I read for school, like 1984. (There was tame sex in there, right?)

tommy, I'm totally ignoring that post of yours. Too much trauma.

Heh. I mean, sorry.

Washington Post disses Flav and Chuck D, then apologizes

From the department of "most ridiculous newspaper corrections evah," this from the Washington Post: "A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number."

Heh.

Also, for not!Hec: Glamourpuss: The Enchanting World of Kitty Wigs

I think my parents' key censorship is on what we can consume together. Which is fair.

I saw Mulholland Falls with my parents and am still traumatized by it. Though, damn, Jennifer Connelly had amazing breasts before she got crazy skinny.

My mother took me and my sister to see the infamous Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit when I was in high school

We may have been there at the same time! (I saw it 3 times -- once with one of my college classes [I was, quite conveniently, taking a class on the 1st Amendment at the time], once with my college roommate, and once with a friend who couldn't get anyone else to go with her.)

At 16, I sat next to my mom in the theater and watched Body Heat.

I was still blushing three weeks later.