After countless summers as an essentially aquatic creature in my childhood, I know my way around a pool.  You can always tell which kid has the potential to use your watery paradise as their personal toilet.  And by “which kid,” I mean all kids.  Hell, I’ll admit, I’ve raised the temperature in a pool or two (I was young, okay??).  What I didn’t do was go swimming with diarrhea (grossgrossgrossgross), or drink the pool water (hey, I was peeing in it, why would I drink it??), or do any of the other things that health officials warn against.

In my day, peeing in the pool got you a shrill “ewwwww” from the rest of your playmates, but then you moved on and kept playing Marco Polo or whatevs until the next one of you decided that drying off, running to the bathroom and then trying to pull that wet one-piece back up was far too much work.  Gross? Yes, but apparently not gross enough to keep people from doin’ the in-the-pool-pee-pee.

So, we want do know: do you pee in the pool? Don’t worry, we won’t tell anyone.

If it sounds just a little creepy, that’s because it is. There’s nothing wrong with fathers taking an active role in their daughters lives, and I don’t even see anything wrong with fathers talking frankly to their daughters about sex and the consequences — but there’s just something inherently weird about a daughter pledging to her father that she will remain a virgin until marriage for him.

“Kylie Miraldi has come from California to celebrate her 18th birthday tonight. She’ll be going to San Jose State on a volleyball scholarship next year. Her father, who looks a little like Superman, is on the dance floor with one of her sisters; he turns out to be Dean Miraldi, a former offensive lineman with the Philadelphia Eagles.

When Kylie was 13, her parents took her on a hike in Lake Tahoe, Calif. “We discussed what it means to be a teenager in today’s world,” she says. They gave her a charm for her bracelet–a lock in the shape of a heart. Her father has the key. “On my wedding day, he’ll give it to my husband,” she explains. “It’s a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector. He becomes like the shield to my heart, to love me as I’m supposed to be loved.”

Okay, on one hand — how sweet, her dad is pledging to protect her until her husband takes up that role, but on the other hand — this girl, and girls engaging in Purity Balls with her, are basically telling themselves and the world that men are the determining factors in their lives. Daddy will “control” my virginity until my husband comes along and takes that “control”.

I’m not here to bash anyone’s religion, and even though Purity Balls are a Christian thing, it’s not the praying and the whole “I’m doing it for God” that rubs me the wrong way; it’s the complete lack of feminist thought. If girls were simply promising themselves to wait until marriage to lose their v-card, then why make their fathers part of the pact? Why not make a promise to their mothers that they’ll stay strong women together? I know that Conservative Christianity usually allows the man more power than the woman, but if these fathers really love their daughters the way they say they do, why not pledge to allow them to become their own woman on their own time?

The CNN article doesn’t really touch on the heavy-handed patriarchal thought process that goes into Purity Balls, but that’s the exact part of the ritual that frustrates me. People can believe what they want and pray to whom they choose and promise to stay virgins until the cows come home — but when women sign away control of their own bodies to the men in their lives, that’s when I want to call bullsh*t.

Larry Craig, who until Monday was a key player in Massachusetts’s governor Mitt Romney’s 2008 presidential bid, recently separated himself from the campaign for being a possible “distraction”.

Why would old Mr. Craig be a distraction?

Well, it seems that in June, he was apprehended by a plainclothes officer “investigating complaints of lewd behavior in an airport men’s room”.

The officer reported that the 62-year-old Republican “lingered outside a restroom stall where the officer was sitting, then entered the stall next door and blocked the door with his luggage.” The officer went on to explain that Craig then “tapped his right foot”, which is apparently a signal “used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct.”

To make sure he got his point across, Craig “touched the officer’ foot with his foot” and “proceeded to swipe his hand under the stall divider several times” after which the plainclothes officer put his police identification on the ground, no doubt causing Craig to lose any sort of pocket party he may have been fostering.

The father of three and grandfather of nine completely denies having homosexual tendencies, and even though he pled guilty earlier in August, now says that his bathroom actions were misconstrued.

Maybe the guy just needed some toilet paper, and thought rubbing the foot of his stall mate would be a lot easier than just asking for some. I mean, I often “swipe my hand” under a stall divider “several times” when I’m faced with an empty roll.

Wait a minute, no I don’t.