Poland, Brazil and the "World Sex Championships" (as well as ruminations on parentheticals)

Okay, this was interesting:

Warsaw's mayor battles sex industry over "World sex championships"

I'm torn--since this article appears on Yahoo news, I know full well that it's going to be removed eventually (after a week? two weeks?), and so I'm inclined to reprint the whole thing here. But that would be a violation of fucking copyright laws I suppose. Or at the very least, a violation of the Blogger TOS.

So I will restrain myself. I do want to quote (and quibble with) one paragraph, though:

Poland, where more than 90 percent of the population is Catholic, is a conservative society but pornography and sexual services are openly on sale.

Brazil is also Catholic, and I doubt that anyone could make the same implication about it: namely, that being Catholic implies being conservative. Anyone with the means (i.e., an internet connection) can obtain videos and photographs of Brazilian women (and men, presumably) performing acts that would surely result in obscenity prosecution in the U.S. (and Poland, too, I imagine). I guess an interesting question would be, what makes the two countries so different with respect to this? And why are both of them more permissive than the supposedly "free" United States of America? (end of rant)

Anyway, there's a photo associated with this article that is not to be missed. :-)

(Apologies for all the parentheticals in this post--I had an expository writing teacher in high school who claimed that good writing style does not include parentheticals. I've always agreed with that sentiment, although I find that my brain tends to be so associative that it's difficult to cram in everything I want to say without using them. The teacher's point, though, was that writing isn't just about what I want to write, but also about what the reader wants to read. And parentheticals are a pain in the ass to read through.)