The Secretary of State ended up with "an emerald and diamond necklace, ring, bracelet and earrings," reports AP — and that was before the end of January.

The box for those gifts was valued at $5,000.

Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah upgraded Rice from emeralds to rubies, and threw in a bracelet and ring. $165,000 in loot for one trip!

Of course it's just our own oil money, coming back to us. Uselessly, since it will sit in a General Services Administration warehouse, because no one gets to keep the gifts under federal law. What a hilarious way to waste money!

Rice made the best of it, though: She "forgot" until now to disclose a "$170,000 flower petal motif necklace," received from Abdullah in 2005. Ha.

The factors: stress, crazy jobs, keeping up with the boys, postwar equality ("As women ‘immigrated’ into the culture that was once unique to men,” says [a professor], “they picked up a lot of the same mores and attitudes and behaviors and ideas about what is socially acceptable that men had previously held.")

Not all of my female friends drink like Kate, but most of them do drink—and not just in a glass-of-wine-with-dinner way. Drinking is our go-to activity. Meeting a friend implies going to a bar. Having a meal implies a round of cocktails beforehand. A party implies a serious hangover. Drinking feels like our prerogative—if we want to get blasted at the company Christmas party or nurse a bottle of scotch through the holidays, no one should, or can, stop us.

Well... yeah! Is this wrong?

OH and then they quote an IM conversation (an IM conversation made into a blog post!) between "two editors at [our sister site] Jezebel.com":

"FEMINIST ONE: You would be proud of me. I drank alone last night!

FEMINIST TWO: I am proud! I should have called you. I was too drunk.

FEMINIST ONE: I opened a bottle of wine—a good bottle that I had been saving—poured some into a juice glass, and watched The Age of Love. My dad called, and he was like, “You know that drinking doesn’t solve things long-term?” And I was like, um, that’s a lie.

FEMINIST TWO: Hahahaha!

FEMINIST ONE: I know. I was so serious too.

FEMINIST TWO: Yeah, it solves things long-term, as long as you commit to drinking.

FEMINIST ONE: I told him booze was no different from Klonopin and it’s cheaper!

Unless you get the Klonopin generic!

"And so alcohol is our choice to soothe us in times of trouble, celebrate with us in times of joy, engage us in times of boredom. We use it to change our mood, to forget our problems, to give us courage, to access some essential, uncensored, better self," the article concludes, which means: OK, so, women like to drink for more-or-less the same reasons men like to drink! Is that so wrong? Please drink and metabolize your alcohol responsibly, everyone. Or whatever.

Watch Palin talk about her inevitable future political rival/running mate, and sexism, in the video above. Below, the Alaska governor talks about how she interpreted Katie Couric's questions about what newspapers and magazines she reads, and makes another dubious claim about why Alaska is a hotbed of international activity.

Back story: I'm lurking around one of the low-rent haunts of the highbrow magazine elite Wednesday and come upon a friend of mine, Jess, who introduces me to Donavan Hohn, a brilliant writer whose recent piece on a Hong Kong toy fair had inspired me to write a handjobby post about how much I love 'Harper's.' Anyway, like pretty much all journalists under 40 who bother with the whole "crafting exquisite paragraphs" thing anymore, Hohn has cash flow issues. So Jess suggests — naively, I'm assuming — he get into the celebrity profile racket. Her friend Mark Kirby does it! He just wrote a profile of Megan Fox for 'GQ' that was really actually a rewarding effort! And I'm thinking, "Oh Jess, guys like Donovan Hohn are just not wired to hustle celebrity profile assignments. Not least because guys like Donovan Hohn probably didn't know who Megan Fox even was when he saw her at a comic book convention at which he was busy jotting down the philosophies of some enchanting small-time hucksterpreneur, and plus, everyone knows celebrity profiles are the lowest form of hackery." Well shit, was I so totally wrong. Jess had just tipped me off to the best celebrity profile in years. Seriously, you know how the celebrity profile is totally dead? This profile could do for the genre what…Megan Fox does for impotence or something!

So she totally unloads on GQ. Kirby asks if Transformers 2 director Michael Bay plans to make the "robots seem more human" than in the original. “You weren’t concerned about them making the humans seem more human?” she asks. And, perhaps realizing "making preposterously hot superhero superbabe comic book character Terry Richardson-shot Megan Fox seem like a real person" it's a crusade she alone is going to take up, she:

1. Tells a story about her more youthful youth that suggests she is either a sort of sweet unlikely feminist hero or read Notes From Underground, either of which we'll take.

Well, that year my boyfriend broke up with me, and I decided—oh man; sorry, Mommy!—that I was in love with this girl that worked at the Body Shop [a strip club on Sunset Boulevard]. I decided that I was going to get her to love me back, and I went out of my way to create a relationship with this girl, a stripper named Nikita. I was there all the time—I would go there by myself. I bought her things—perfume, body spray, girlie stuff. I turned into a weird middle-aged married man. I felt like I had this need to save Nikita. I’d get lap dances so I could get to know her, and I’d give her what I thought were great little sound bites of inspiration—like You can do it, you’re better than this! I didn’t want her to be there.”

Why her?

“She smelled like angels.”

Seriously?

“No. Well, she did smell good. Like vanilla. She was sort of a tough badass, but she’d do these beautiful slow dances to Aerosmith ballads. She had really long stick-straight hair and was Russian. I just liked her. She was really sadistic and sarcastic and funny."

2. Makes up for bringing up the stupid stupid stupid stupid Miley Cyrus epitomeofstupid whydoweevenknowaboutthat "scandal" by saying "fuck" many times.

With any of the Miley Cyrus shit, or any of that Vanessa Hudgens shit—I would never issue an apology for my life and for who I am. It’s like, Oh, I’m sorry I took a naked, private picture that someone is an asshole and sold for money. I’m sorry if someone else is a dick. No. You shouldn’t have to apologize. Someone betrayed Vanessa, but no one’s angry at that person. She had to apologize. I hate Disney for making her do that. Fuck Disney.”

Can I get that on the record?

“Yeah. Fuck Disney.”

Followed by:

“Yeah, that was probably a bad move—they own everything. But it’s not right. They take these little girls, and they put them through entertainment school and teach them to sing and dance, and make them wear belly shirts, but they won’t allow them to be their own people. It makes me sick.”

3. Is just straight-up awesome.

I don’t understand why [some paparazzi shots of her fondling Brian Austin Green] are so scandalous. When they first came out, it was like, Megan Fox was giving Brian a blow job in pub—I mean, uh—a hand job in public. First: Who gives hand jobs? Who’s given a hand job since seventh grade? Not me. And who does it at a café on a public street? I touch him all the time. It’s just like, if you have a girlfriend, you grab her butt or whatever. That’s all it was, but it became a big deal. I don’t know why. For me, touching Brian’s dick for two seconds—that’s not part of our sex life. That’s me playing around; you know, you just cup it a little. For a few seconds.

4. And philosophical.

I get it. This is colorful, and you want something to write that people will want to read. I get bored reading typical celebrity shit also.

And yeah yeah yeah, it was not exactly as hard-won as "Frank Sinatra has a cold" but I am certain it is a lot better than any other Megan Fox profiles I have stopped reading after two paragraphs because I really have no idea why she's famous anyway.

Who doesn't want to give Rachel Maddow a makeover? Rachel Maddow is Every Girl's Best Friend Said Girl Would Love Just .01% More If Said Friend Would Layer Her Hair And Buy A Lipstick Already. I am that friend to a lot of people! Plus there is a storied tradition of anchorwomen celebrating their new jobs with makeovers. Greta Van Susteren got an eye job when she went to Fox, and I heard once that former Wall Street Journal reporter Becky Quick got carded at R-rated movies before she started appearing on CNBC every day in 2000. Oh, but she is a dyke icon you are telling me?

So what, she has to be the female Cojo or something? Last I checked dyke icons were still allowed to have haircuts I coveted. And of course Page Six is all over MSNBC for allegedly putting its "glam squad" on Maddow. The hypocrites! But Rachel Maddow, an ex-landscaper a few years fresh from a long career in left-wing activism, has spent her whole entire life not using her irresistible sexuality and expertly applied smoky eye to advance the media ranks. Maybe she wouldn't mind a little glam squad in her life just this one time. Maybe it could be kind of fun. So Rach, and I say this as an avowed enemy of the insecurity industry: fuck the haters, as long as they are paying you to take the day off and enjoy a little microdermabrasion, seize the opportunity. It is good for the economy I hear.

Photoshop makeover by Steve Dressler.

...she asked him if he thought a tourist could survive alone in the jungle.

"He laughed and told me I was nuts," says [Stephanie] Gerson, 27, who works part-time in online marketing for a chocolate company in San Francisco.

Then he told her that he'd grown up in the jungle in a nearby indigenous community. That was all Gerson needed to hear. Although she wasn't attracted to the guy, Gerson flirted right back in the hopes that he would be her jungle tour guide...

"It was amazing," Gerson says of her adventure in 2000. "We built our homes out of palm leaves, I saw animals I'd never seen before, he taught me the medicinal properties of all the plants, we picked fruit off the trees, we swam with and ate piranhas. And, of course, we had sex ... for almost two weeks."

Some might call that little arrangement "dating" rather than "bartering sex for stuff or services," as CNN does, but whatever. We're not one to pick nits where sweaty jungle sex is concerned, particularly since this was the only bona fide example the poor freelancer managed to find.

The story also includes a 39-year-old contractor who claims he is constantly hit on by his married clients. They find his toolbelt sexy! Maybe/probably true, but the guy doesn't actually take the women up on their offers, so he doesn't count.

The rest of the article is shamelessly padded — with quotes from a research scientist published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, a doctor at the Institute for Sex Therapy and an author with a book called "Will Cook For Sex." Also, a University of Michigan sex survey.

Boring! But oh, right, that stuff is necessary, because without it a collection of sex stories wouldn't be serious journalism, it would be porn!

[CNN]

(Photo via this video, which cannot possibly be an actual construction catalog.)

I read that you were once married to a Russian stripper. Is that true?
Actually, she was a Russian mafia prostitute stripper. As a teenager she was mistress to a Chechen warlord. I found this out because I worked at Kroll Associates. Are you familiar with them?

Foreign intelligence?
Yes. And through my contacts from them, what I learned from Russian military intelligence, is that she and her mother were and are connected with the Chechen Special Islamic Regiment.

So what happened to the marriage?
We got a divorce. I went through all the standard divorce horror: Restraining orders, she went to the police–

That’s standard for divorce?
Yes. If you’re an alien wife, and you want to become a citizen, you need a papertrail using VAWA.

[ed: VAWA is the Violence Against Women Act. Hollander contested it in his first Men's Rights lawsuit.]

She said, “My husband showed me a knife, my husband bruised me,” and then she got a temporary restraining order. The order was later dismissed. She filed a complaint with the police that I tried to extort her but she never went forward with the complaint because she never had to. All she needed was the documents, which you can use in immigration proceedings.

So the allegations were untrue?
Well, yes, basically. She came at me twice with a knife, but since I know martial arts, it wasn’t a problem. I probably did bruise her arm. But she, you know she twisted it around, the thing about the knife, and she got the restraining order. But what matters is that the court dismissed it.

No actually what matters is actually that he now picks up women in a hip-hop dancing class. And appears to have picked up some of the lingo!

Allow me to now read a quote you gave to another journalist, during your lawsuit against Ladies’ Night: “Now all I am looking for is superficial temporary escapades with pretty young ladies… It�s harder than it was when I was younger. I only go after girls who are in their athletic prime.” Mr. Hollander, I sense a rejection complex.
“Late teens or twenties,” is what I actually said. And, you know, I understand, this is exactly what my ex-wife did. See, she was a ho. I know this because she wrote about prostitution in her diary. She was a prostitute then, and for all I know, she’s a prostitute now. She did drugs without my knowledge, and she transferred the euphoria of the drugs to me. Now, I expect that from a pretty young lady who wants something. What I didn’t expect was the reaction of the government. She violated my rights, she violated the law, there’s a sense of justice involved, but the government didn’t care because it was me, a man, asking for justice against her, a woman, who was using VAWA.

But back to my preference. All I can say is, I do what mother nature tells me. I walk into a club, I’m standing there with my buddy looking for girls to hit on try to go out with them. If I see a girl, I’m going to go up and talk to her. I see a girl and I’m attracted to her, who knows what the reason is — there is a French poet who said “For men, love goes through the eyes” — and I talk to her, and she may look at me, and if she doesn’t want me to talk to her, she’ll make it clear. I can read demeanor. But I’m just going after who I’m attracted to. For instance, I take this hip-hop class, and sometimes a middle-aged lady comes to take it, but I’m not attracted to her.

And that is why he is voting for "O'Bama."

IvyGate

"The kind of language he uses and the kind of behavior he exhibits in the public domain toward women objectifies them and leads to bad things for our society and to domestic violence," the new group wrote in a comment (emphasis added) that has been mysteriously scrubbed from the original press release.

This, of course, is code for "Christ Matthews helped to destroy delicate Hillary Clinton's fragile shot at the presidency."

Here's a roundup of all the ways Matthews undermined the women of America:

• Called Clinton a "she-devil." [Times]
• Said Clinton only got where she as because her husband "messed around." [Ibid.]
• Once said "Hillary Clinton bugs a lot of guys, I mean, really bugs people — like maybe me on occasion." [Gawker]
• Accused staffers of treating him like "some rape victim" over teleprompter mishaps. [Ibid.]
• "She's looking down on me. What do you think? Howie, she's looking down on me, that woman. She thinks she's better than me." [Media Matters]

Those are the big ones, if there's another remotely awful quote we should be aware of, do let us know.

Whatever one thinks of Matthews, a sometimes blustery but generally quite keen political observer, silencing him will only add to the easily-curated historical evidence that Clinton arrogantly disdains the press and, really, any criticism or scrutiny whatsoever. Wouldn't, say, passing some actual legislation do more for Clinton and other women?

Ah, but then there would be no quick and easy free press.

[Soup Cans via Mediabistro]

... though women and men are creating blogs in roughly equal numbers, many women at the conference were becoming very Katie Couric about their belief that they are not taken as seriously as their male counterparts at, say, Daily Kos, a political blog site. Nor, they said, were they making much money, even though corporations seem to be making money from them.

This is exactly why some women won't sacrifice femininity for fame, whether blogging about typical "women's" topics, or doing so while looking typically womanly. Take Julia Allison as the illogical extreme: a woman more blogged about than who blogs herself, but who can't seem to launch a business without it being about Julia.

Allison and other me-bloggers far less shameless about their attention-grab are what drives women to disavow ladybloggers almost altogether. Yet these women find a home at BlogHer, as well — like Patricia Handschiegel, an entrepreneur who can both sell her smarts and get chatty on her personal blog about dresses, parties and similar froth.

Neither of these camps need be exclusive: ambivalence is one reason why women come out for things like BlogHer in the first place. No one should have to give up girliness to get ahead. But to produce the woman Kos, the woman Arrington? We'll have to let go of this blogging business being all about ourselves.

(Photo by Jessica Brandi Lifland/New York Times)

"Have you ever used casual sex (outside a committed or dating relationship) to get someone to assemble that Ikea shelving unit you just bought, help you move, do your taxes, edit your masters thesis, cut you a deal on the rent, or any other favor? Or have you seduced the UPS delivery guy/gal, contractor renovating your kitchen, or any other laborer working in your home (and perhaps even got a discount on the work they were doing in the process)? If so, I want to hear from you: did your bartering tactic work, how did you feel after the fact, and have you used sex as a bartering tool again?

I also want to hear from those whove had sex offered to them in exchange for a favor (even if you werent asked to do the favor until after the fact) or contractors, landscapers, and the like whove been hit on while doing a job in someones home. What was the outcome? Did you go for it? Did you do the favor or cut them a price break after the fact? Did this lead to any later headaches or did everyone come away with what they wanted?

HOWEVER: "No experts, please. And no anonymous sources."

Hot spots, according to the article: the ancient Russian & Turkish Baths on E. 10th Street:

“At first you’re on your stomach, so they’re just massaging your back,” said Trish, a 29-year-old marketing manager who frequents the Baths. “Then they turn you over, and [my masseur] started massaging my breasts. My nipples got erect, so that must have sent him a signal. He started rubbing me on the pressure points around my hips. I was wearing bikini bottoms, and he never actually touched my clitoris or vagina; it was just all around the area. I did [have an orgasm]; afterwards, people kept stopping me on the street to say, ‘Oh my God, you’re glowing.’”

The article reports that the boys of the Mandarin Oriental won't give naughty massages per se, but they have something called the "Vitality Room, which includes "pleasure jets." But the holy grail of naughty massages for girls is apparently the Cornelia:

"Then Joanna got a tip in the Mandarin’s plush relaxation room. “I started chatting with this woman in her mid-thirties, who looked like she went to spas all the time,” she said. “When I mentioned I was going to another spa tomorrow, she told me ‘Oh, you have to go to Cornelia. You should ask for Tron [definitely not his real name]; he’s fantastic.’ Her voice did not sound like she was describing a massage.”

Once at the Cornelia with "Tron,":

Kissing turned to heavy petting with a strong dose of grinding, until he was on top of her on the massage table. Joanna recalls the make-out session as being totally comfortable—at one point, they both started laughing—but after the first few minutes, she broke away, saying, “I’m sorry, this is so inappropriate.” His response: “Sweetie, you are my reward for the two men who asked me for happy endings earlier today. I told them no—but for you, I won’t tell if you won’t.”

The impromptu liaison went on for the rest of the hour, and another 30 minutes beyond. “It was very romantic and totally mutual—it didn’t feel like I was just being serviced,” she recalls. “He asked after a while if I wanted to have sex, but neither of us had a condom,” said Joanna. “I considered giving him a blow job, but then I was like, ‘I’m paying for this!’"

Well, whatever you're into! For better or for worse, this is a stunning example of fourth-wave femiladyism.

The Female "Happy Ending [Tango]

"You seem to cultivate a kind of wild-child mystique, even in your appearance. For instance, why don’t you use hair conditioner?

I do use conditioner!

I’m surprised. You’re the queen of split ends.

That’s very funny because I’ve just cut about eight inches off my hair because it was just too ratty-looking.

Seriously, are you trying to cultivate any sort of image, androgynous or otherwise?

I’m disinterested. I’ve always looked the same. Since I was a child, I hated having to deal with my hair. I hated having to change my clothes. As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that’s what I wanted to wear everyday."

But Patti has it right: the only way to respond to a hair-attack is with good humor.

Orlando's Local 6 really milks it with a 23-photo slideshow of a recent Florida attack found on YouTube, where five cheerleaders pound on one poor girl. The county sheriff noted that the girls had "no remorse at all."

We did a YouTube search and there are a lot of genuine girlfight videos up there: girls fighting outside a school, brass-knuckle-wearing girls fighting over a boy, or kicking each other on the sidewalk in front of a club. Girls, girls, girls.

What's the appeal of a girlfight? It's a great combination of straight-dude voyeurism, schadenfreude, dominant-chimp impulses, and the popularity of hit tv show Cops. It's also misery and conflict on parade: the entire premise of reality TV.