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Season 2 of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic picks up where the pilot episode left off, with equally mixed results.

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photo by Tiffany Woods

Brandy Martell

I am a woman of Hispanic descent. My parents came here from Colombia and Cuba. Throughout my life, I never really faced discrimination as a Hispanic. I've faced more adversity for being female. During the 2008 election, I picketed against Proposition 8, in San Luis Obispo (where I lived at the time) during a Thursday night farmer's market. One night, a man approached me in a hostile and aggressive way, getting right up in my face. I don't remember what his line of reasoning was, but I do remember him yelling "you people."

"You people are what's wrong with this country!" he yelled.

I realized what he hated about me: He thought I was one of them -- one of the gay, lesbian, queer, bisexual, or transgender people who have filled my life since I was a child. At that moment I realized what a hate crime was and just how ugly ignorance makes people. I bring this up because a hate crime recently happened and I have to talk about it.

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For most of us, the inside of a jail or prison is a mythical, albeit unpleasant, holding ground for those deemed by the state unfit to coexist with the rest of society. What we never really know is what it's like to be inside: strip searches, gang fights, overcrowding to the point of suffocation -- that is, until local author Charles Shaw's Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics, and Spirituality, which is released this week. The memoir tells the gruesome story of an inmate at Cook County Jail in Chicago -- a vast facility that holds nearly 10,000 inmates and has been home to figures such as mobster Al Capone and serial killer John Wayne Gacy.

Shaw was convicted of possessing MDMA -- you might know it as ecstasy (and even after his third arrest, Shaw continues to think of it that way) -- and spent a year in the facility. Much of the book retells his experience from inside the walls of the jail, but the self-proclaimed drug activist does frequently plead his case to the reader -- that he was using ecstasy not recreationally, but as treatment for his post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by cocaine addiction.

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Admiral General Aladeen: Kill 'em with kindness.

After slaying international audiences with his Ali G and Borat characters, Sacha Baron Cohen's latest feature film The Dictator finds him in a new role as Admiral General Aladeen, the surprisingly lovable leader of the Republic of Wadiya. It's a comedy capable of inducing raucous laughs, particularly for people who recognize the sick humor in totalitarian regimes masquerading as democracies.

There might be some slight spoilers ahead, but without giving away too much of the film, here are the five lessons real tyrants could learn from the machinations -- or bumblings -- of Aladeen:

1. Change all key words in the mother tongue to be that of the leader's surname.

It might be a confusing (and frequently deadly) proposition to narrow down millions of terms to just the one, but starting your assertion of total dominance with the country's basic lexicon shows that you really mean business.

2. Make sure all weapons of mass destruction look as menacing as they actually are.

One simple tip to remember: Pointy corners on missiles are scary. Round ones, not so much.

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Benjah-bmm27

The testosterone molecule

You can blame it on my gender or my graduate degree from Sarah Lawrence, but I never really got testosterone. Lately, however, the idea has been hard to avoid, what with so many professional athletes using anabolic steroids and other drugs that mimic testosterone's effects. The bigger controversies involving Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Roger Clemens aside, Giants relief pitcher Guillermo Mota was recently suspended for a second time for testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs, while Manny Ramirez of the Oakland A's (another two-time offender) is due to reach the end of a 100-game suspension later this month.

Digging deep into the recesses of my memory, I remembered that an adult male produces seven to eight times more testosterone than does an adult female. It's associated with a wide spectrum of physical development and aggression, including the kind baseball players would need. I would assume, then, that Mota and the always colorful Ramirez produce plenty during a competitive game.

All these suspensions pose a rather basic question: Don't most men -- particularly professional athletes -- naturally produce bountiful levels of testosterone on their own?

Not necessarily.

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photo by Mark Richards

Marilyn Wann

Today our nation relapses into what might be our worst case of fat fearmongering yet. The current source of our infection with pseudoscientific sensationalism is something called Weight of the Nation, a highly contagious conference/book/series/website onslaught backed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and delivered tonight and Tuesday (May 14-15) via ocular injection on HBO.

I attended the first, government-sponsored Weight of the Nation conference in 2009. I didn't pay or anything self-defeating like that. I just walked in (with a brave friend or two) and delivered plastic-wrapped fortune cookies to the fancy luncheon tables where major stakeholders were about to chew on the alleged "obesity" problem. If the professional food scolds took a cookie, they got messages like these:

• The war on "obesity" is a war on PEOPLE!

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When I was 17, my then-boyfriend's little brother threatened to kill me.

They are sneakier than they look.

The family's apartment was small, so his brother's desktop computer sat directly beside the television. From where I usually sat on the couch, I could see everything his brother was typing, which was usually about homework or vampires. But one evening he decided to expand his repertoire.

"Hey you," he wrote, typing the words over and over until I was sure to have seen them. "Yes, you. The blonde on the couch. You need to stop doing your laundry here and eating all of my food. I am going to kill you."

By this point, I had begun to realize that my boyfriend was deeply disturbed -- a sociopath, even, who seemed blissfully unaware of the concept of "feelings." So when his little brother threatened me, it became suddenly obvious that the whole family was crazy. A wave of hot terror rushed over me as I retreated to the bathroom, where I hid until he had gone to bed.

Was he joking? I don't know -- I never stepped foot in that apartment again when he was awake. And I hadn't thought about the incident in years until I started watching Game of Thrones. Now I suddenly want revenge, just like nearly everyone vying for the throne in Westeros. I want to use my superior internet stalking skills to find out where he lives and cover his car with bologna in the night.

I also keep having dreams that I'm fending off the rapey, groping advances of creepers like Dagmer Cleftjaw and Lord Vargo Hoat. Also, "goathelm" is now a word in my vocabulary. This is my brain on Thrones.

On to the awards. This week's go to...

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Howard Chaykin and Steve Leialoha

In the ever-expanding supernova of subsidiary content in the Star Wars universe (action figures, Lego sets, video games, novels, TV movies, cartoons, and theme park rides), comic books hold a special place. One reason is because the first of Marvel's six-issue comic adaptation of the original film hit stands just a month after the movie was released.

Marvel made a good bet on Star Wars. The 107-issue series continued for nearly 10 years. Despite pauses to adapt the stories of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, most issues contained original stories -- the first body of derivative Star Wars story material ever released.

Two key contributors to the early days of this run, penciller Howard Chaykin and inker Steve Leialoha, appear tonight at the Cartoon Art Museum for the event Celebrating 35 Years of Star Wars Comic Books to mark the 35th anniversary of the first issue's release.

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Back in the day, I had fuck buddies. No strings, no ties. I considered them my "disposables." Before I found a sex-positive community, I never thought happiness could be found in relationships. I was convinced that people cheated as a matter of course, so I never had a boyfriend. Enter "Jake," as we'll call him. He was a bouncer at a well-known dance club in San Luis Obispo; we each attended Cal Poly at the time. What started as a one night stand turned into a year of a whole lot of sex.

However, we began to tread the lines between just sex and a relationship. Granted, we each saw other people, and we were honest about that. Eventually Jake and I approached the point where what we had would either turn into something else or it wouldn't.

I was about to turn 30, and my father had just gotten very ill. I was at a hospital one morning while my dad was having a procedure, and my phone rang. I looked at the screen and saw that it was Jake. I let it go to voice mail.

When I checked the message, however, it was not Jake's voice I heard. It was the voice of a very angry woman. She said her name and identified herself as Jake's long-suffering girlfriend of five years. Then she got hysterical.

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