Hard

Take my penis

A Miami jury has awarded a former bartender $1.5 million in damages from two doctors the man said injured his penis while treating him for warts.
In his suit, Patrick T. O'Neill, 43, alleged the doctors who treated him provided negligent care in 1996 after removing three papilloma, the Miami Herald said. He had developed an infection and received treatment from the doctors, who assured him that there was nothing wrong, the newspaper said.
O'Neill ended up with a "disabling case of Peyronie's Disease, among other things," the suit says. Peyronie's Disease is scarring along the penis shaft and may interfere with an erection.
In addition, O'Neil was in constant penile pain, and endured curvature and a condition that caused his penis to decrease in size, the suit contends. He has been undergoing treatment for the past 10 years, the newspaper said.
After deliberating for about an hour Monday, the six-person jury awarded O'Neill $1 million for past pain and suffering; $490,000 for future pain and suffering, and $10,000 for past medical expenses.



Sex in Space

This year's Space Frontier Foundation's NewSpace 2006 Conference tackled a topic that left speakers at break-out sessions on topics like rocket payload and Tang recipes faced with empty seminar rooms. The hot issue: What's it like to have sex in space?

NASA engineer Jim Lindstrom said the agency has an official "don't ask-don't tell" policy on the subject, but "that never stopped anybody from fooling around." The topic was broached by others, however, including author Linda Myers whose book "How to Flirt in Space" is due out next month, and novelist Bonita della Rosa, whose novel "My Passionate Flight" mixes space exploration, romance and time travel in a bodice-ripping page-turner that reads like a model rocket instruction book on Viagra.

Some of the possibilities that panel members bounced off of each other at a free-wheeling, anything-goes, no-holds-barred session included the following:

- Ordinary condoms may not fit aliens that women encounter during space travel.

"You remember the cantina scene in Star Wars?" Lindstrom asked. "We have no idea what those guys have in their pants, or what shapes they come in." Kleiner-Smith Pharmaceuticals, the leading U.S. manufacturer of "family planning" products, says it is working on a corkscrew model.

- The physics of zero-gravity sex will make Velcro-trimmed space gear a necessity.

"In order to stay connected, partners must be anchored to the walls of their spacecraft or they float away. How to do it is the question, and Velcro is the answer," said Vince Jackson, who manned vendor display space #168 for Sticky Space Styles, a Dubuque, Iowa, manufacturer of work clothes and uniforms that hopes to get a jump on its intergalactic competition.

- Space sex will be hotter, wetter and grosser than on Earth, because in zero-gravity environments people perspire more and the moisture produced by exertion during intercourse would pool as floating droplets. "Imagine a locker-room full of sweaty football players, and what's coming out of the shower heads is more perspiration," della Rosa warned.

- George Costanza-like "shrinkage" will be commonplace. Humans experience lower blood pressure in microgravity, which can reduce penis size in much the same way that swimming in the ocean affected the Seinfeld character.

- Couples will need to reduce the intensity of foreplay in order to avoid motion sickness that could ruin the rest of the evening. "This is the exact opposite of life on earth," said Lindstrom, "where dinner and a movie and who knows what else is the cost of doing business for most guys."

When all these factors are added up, scientists say, sex will become less frequent, less spontaneous, and less enjoyable for even the youngest and most adventuresome couples.

"Basically," says Myers, "it will be like married life on earth."



BRAD PITT has teamed up with NIP/TUCK creator RYAN MURPHY to produce a new TV show about the life of a transsexual married sportswriter.
The new series, titled 4 OZ, refers to the average weight of a man's penis.
Murphy and Pitt will both be executive producers on the show, Pitt's first foray into television.
Murphy has begun writing the pilot and hopes to being shooting on the series early next year (07).
He says, "The first season deals with the revelation of his secret. In the second season, he begins dressing like a woman.
"The third covers the surgery, and his inherent doubts about going through with it, and by the fourth season, he's living as a woman and attempting to find love." Murphy directed the film RUNNING WITH SCISSORS which made with Pitt's Plan B production company, and the firm is also producing DIRTY TRICKS, a drama Murphy wrote about eccentric Watergate scandal figure MARTHA MITCHELL, who will be played by MERYL STREEP.