This town needs an enema!

Well, what headline would you write?

Eduard Korniyenko reports for Reuters:

A health spa in Russia has unveiled a bronze monument of three cherubs carrying an enema, a design inspired by the 15th century Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.

Around 100 hospital staff and patients at the spa in south Russian cheered when balloons lifted a red drape into the sky unveiling the oversized version of the pear-shaped medical instrument.

“We administer enemas nearly every day,” said Alexander Kharchenko, the head of the sanatorium which specializes in treating illnesses of the digestion tract.

“So, I thought, why not use our sense of humor and give it a monument,” he said of the bronze statue that stands about 1.5 meters high.

The monument, designed by Svetlana Avakova, cost around $42,000; the artist says she looked to Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars” for inspiration:

“The irony is that the little infants steal the weapons of Mars. They joke with him, with the god of war, and war is a tragedy.”

“Likewise, an enema is an unpleasant procedure as many of us may know. But when cherubs do it, it’s all right.“

Further irony is that, in the fifteenth-century masterpiece, Mars is actually asleep; the cherubs are joking with or talking to Venus. But, hey, the end result is a line for the ages.

When cherubs do it, indeed. Strange as the work may seem, I admit I like it.

Seeking solidarity: The pregnancy pact

What? The latest trend, maybe?

When I was in college, my girlfriend told me about how parents in her high school had worried that Basic Instinct might make their daughters turn lesbian. And, of course, in a small town with nothing for the kids to do, apparently it seemed like a good idea. And the boyfriends, she said, didn’t seem to mind. They were hoping to get some extra action.

Ah, such halcyon days, when girls sharing orgasms was something for parents to worry about. We might wonder if parents in Gloucester, Massachusetts are wishing that was their concern.

Right. Kathleen Kingsbury broke the story for Time:

As summer vacation begins, 17 girls at Gloucester High School are expecting babies—more than four times the number of pregnancies the 1,200-student school had last year. Some adults dismissed the statistic as a blip. Others blamed hit movies like Juno and Knocked Up for glamorizing young unwed mothers. But principal Joseph Sullivan knows at least part of the reason there’s been such a spike in teen pregnancies in this Massachusetts fishing town. School officials started looking into the matter as early as October after an unusual number of girls began filing into the school clinic to find out if they were pregnant. By May, several students had returned multiple times to get pregnancy tests, and on hearing the results, “some girls seemed more upset when they weren’t pregnant than when they were,” Sullivan says. All it took was a few simple questions before nearly half the expecting students, none older than 16, confessed to making a pact to get pregnant and raise their babies together. Then the story got worse. “We found out one of the fathers is a 24-year-old homeless guy,” the principal says, shaking his head.

Okay. Right. Did you catch that?