Look beyond the name (which sounds like a spam email subject line), watch an episode or two, and you'll discover The Midwest Teen Sex Show is the most honest, funny, and accessible program about sexuality available. Rather than cloaking their discussion of sex and relationships in a confusing mess of cutesy words or accurate (but clinical) terminology, MTSS presents a short (5-6 minutes each) episode on a single topic through a mix of factual and genuine explanations from Nikol Hasler and hilarious sketches featuring Britney Barber and a cast of talented actors playing a wide variety of roles.

A huge part of the show's hook is its complete lack of prudishness. Episodes have dealt with topics ranging from birth control to STDs, first times, homosexuality, and how to cope with a break-up. While the subject matter is often sexual, it's never being shown to arouse the audience. The cast walks a fine line between funny and sexy but stays focused on the concept that MTSS is a not a show promoting teen sex, it's a show promoting a discussion of teen sex.

The Midwest Teen Sex Show should be required watching for anyone old enough to have questions about sex (you know who you are.) You'll get answers to things that you were too embarrassed to ask and you might even learn how to explain some of them to your mom and dad (in case they need some answers too.)

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Sometimes the silliest things ring truest for me, particularly on the Internet. A site featuring photos of cats and semi-literate captions hinting at an entire cultural universe of inside jokes can bring me to tears of laughter. Similarly, an online game in which a polar bear wallops a penguin as far as possible to score points kept me entertained for a good hour and a half one rainy afternoon. There is no end to the hilarity scattered across the Internet if you know where to look. One such treasure trove is weebls-stuff.com, the home of (among many, many others) Magical Trevor.

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The most catastrophic worst-case scenarios concerning global climate change usually include a significant rising of sea levels. If this occurs, anyone who owns beachfront property will be understandably concerned about the ocean now sloshing around their knees (or, if things get really bad, around their armpits) every time they head to their vacation property on the coast. Thankfully, architect Vincent Callebaut has found the proverbial silver lining in this potential crisis: Lilypad.

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Flash enables artists to produce visually arresting animation, especially when the art style makes the most of the vector graphics. Personally, I find the clean lines and smooth shading of the Flash format very appealing, and combining this look with crisp motion and excellent sound design creates inspired animation. One superb example of this style is Drum Machine by tokyoplastic.

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One of the occasional frustrations I encounter with Art is feeling woefully uneducated when it comes to understanding the significance of a given piece. In art museums, for example, I often think I’m really not getting the underlying intent of the artist and/or that I’m missing the context and therefore only shallowly grasping the artist’s vision. By contrast, I feel a stronger connection to installation art, especially when the artist is willing to share his or her vision in a medium that I can comprehend without an art degree of my own. The increased tangibility of real things in real space helps me to connect with the visual or experiential component. An excellent example is the One Day Poem Pavilion by Jiyeon Song that presents a poem to the public in transitional stages over the course of a day.

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Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I’m a pretty big fan of the Internet. Besides the obvious communication medium, shopping, and rich landscape of information, an element I truly appreciate on the Internet is the webcomic. By shrewdly shifting venue from print media to online, artists and writers can reach an enormous and self-selected audience of fans without the hassle of fighting for space in a newspaper or magazine. While I’ve been lucky enough to stumble across several excellent webcomics during my online adventures, one of the best is Questionable Content, by Jeph Jacques.

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