Size does matter in bed. Not necessarily in length, but definitely in girth.

You sex partner may not want to deflate you ego given that you already have a small shtick to play with already. Or she just wants to get off and to hell with size for this time.

Some women may even convince themselves that it really doesn’t matter or keep on wishing that, with constant and frequent use, it will grow. Sorry, guys, a big schlong will always win out in the end. Don’t believe Maxine? Then why are you so self conscious of it?

To back up our position, Scottish psychologists studied the sexual appetites of 323 women and found that most reach orgasm more easily when their lover’s manhood exceeds the average size of 5.8 inches.

“This might be due . . . to greater ability of a longer penis to stimulate the entire length of the vagina and the cervix,” researcher Stuart Brody, a psychologist at the University of West Scotland, told the website Live Science. Brody said the research showed that women who had sex with well-endowed partners had the most vaginal orgasms.

He added, “Male anxiety about penis size may not reflect internalized, culturally arbitrary masculine stereotypes but an accurate appreciation that size matters to many women.”

It seems that the myth that small men have been telling themselves for years is not exactly true.

If this study gets out and into the minds of men there is going to be an extreme rise (pun intended) in case sof penis envy with males around the world.

Millionaires have been made and millions more have died from dependence on that simple, innocent potato. Here, then, is the story of the spud, which reached its crowning achievement only once it had been paired with oil.

The potato seems to us today to be such a staple food that it is hard to believe that it has only been accepted as edible by most of the Western world for the past 200 years. Our story begins thousands of years ago, in South America—Peru, Ecuador, and the Northern part of Chile, to be exact—where the Andean Incas friespotat1.giffirst discovered potatoes growing wild in the highlands, and were cultivating them as early as 750 BC.

As well as being their staple source of food, the Incas also used potatoes for telling time, treating illness and injury, and divination. They worshipped potato deities, and when potato crops failed, the noses and lips of a few unlucky Incas would be mutilated in ceremonies designed to appease the potato gods. Although the Incas did many things with their potatoes, they did not fry them. Instead, their most popular potato dish involved laying them out in the sun for a period of weeks, then trampling on them with their bare feet to get all of the liquids out. Yummy.

Potatoes were a well-kept Incan secret for thousands of years, as were the Incas themselves, until, in the early decades of the sixteenth century, the Spanish conquered the Incan empire and brought some of the strange little tubers back to Spain with them. The Spaniards, however, were not too keen on consuming what they called an “edible stone.” Nevertheless, the invading soldiers in South America used the vegetable as emergency provisions, and it was there that the English were introduced to the charming spud. In 1596, Englishman Sir Francis Drake, setting sail for England after having successfully battled the Spanish in the Caribbean, grabbed up some potatoes for the trip, and made a stopover in Virginia to pick up some homesick British colonialists. One of these passengers took a sample of this intriguing plant to his horticulturist friend, John Gerard. Gerard mistakenly believed the potatoes to have come from Virginia, and, described them to the world in his 1597 Herball as Virginia potatoes. In fact, it was not for another century and a half that the potato would even set foot in Virginia, which it did only after having crossed the Atlantic ocean once more, finally arriving in North America in the hands of Irishmen settling in New Hampshire.

In fact, overseas, nobody but the Irish were willing to actually eat this hearty little vegetable. Sir Walter Raleigh was cultivating potatoes on the Emerald Isles as early as 1576, but when he presented them to Queen Elizabeth, it was a disaster: the cook served the greens to the Queen and threw away the tubers. She was not pleased, and rejected the disgusting meal. Although this was bad news for the struggling staple, it was not the only negative publicity it was to receive in Europe. The Scots found no mention of the potato in the Bible and deemed the vegetable unholy; horticulturists discovered it to be in the same family as such plants as belladonna and feared that it was poisonous; the innocent potato was even thought to be a cause of leprosy when it was found that a substance in the tuber (solanine) could result in a skin-rash. The Irish, however, could not afford to be so cautious. They were suffering from inadequate food supplies, and the tuber grew fabulously in their climate. Possibly as a result of it’s popularity in Ireland and concurrent population explosion, the misunderstood potato even became known as an aphrodisiac. In 1733, the English seedsman Stephen Switzer summed up popular opinion of the potato as “that which was heretofore reckon’d a food fit only for Irishmen and clowns.”

The potato arrived in Germany in 1588 and was considered suitable only for livestock and prisoners, until 1744 when King William ordered peasants to plant potatoes to save them from famine. He distributed potatoes and instructions for planting them to the lowly folk, and threatened to cut off the nose of anyone who disobeyed.

It was in Germany, too, that the potato met it’s greatest ally. Antoine August Parmentier was a French chemist who served as a soldier in the Seven Years War, and was fed only potatoes while in captivity there. When he returned to France, he made it his mission to popularize the tuber, which he felt had beenfriespotat2.gif unjustly rejected by his countrymen. A skillful public relations man, Parmentier published a thesis, “Inquiry into nourishing vegetables that at times of necessity could be substituted for ordinary food” in 1773, and soon afterwards brought a bouquet of potato flowers to the birthday party of King Louis XVI. Graciously accepting the gift, the King promptly placed the flower in his lapel, and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, wore them in her hair, and potato flowers quickly became a fashion among the aristocracy. Still, Legrand d’Aussy wrote of the potato, in his 1783 Histoire de la Vie Privee des Francais (History of the Private Life of the French) “The pasty taste, the natural insipidity, the unhealthy quality of this food, which is flatulent and indigestible, has caused it to be rejected from refined households.”

Parmentier, however, was on a roll. He began throwing parties for the French upper-class, at which he served as many as twenty dishes at a time, all containing potatoes. Then, in a display of marketing genius, Parmentier obtained permission to plant an acre of potatoes in the French countryside. He had the plot fastidiously guarded by day, but at night left the land unsupervised. Acting exactly according to his predictions, the peasants assumed that anything watched so closely must be valuable, and they stole the plants by night. Soon, potatoes were being planted all over France. It became a staple food as well as a status symbol, and by 1813, almost one hundred and fifty years since it’s introduction, the potato finally gained acceptance in Scotland, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Italy. Thanks to the French, potatoes were finally deemed chic enough to eat.

The Irish dependence on potatoes not only accounts for their great immigration to the United States after the potato famines of 1845, but also resulted in Irishmen making their way to these shores in the mid 1700′s, when a crop failure resulted in the deaths of one fifth of the Irish population. These earlier immigrants brought their beloved spud to America but it received little attention. It was not until an adventurous farmer and admitted Francophile—Thomas Jefferson—began to cultivate them that Americans developed a taste for the tuber, although some were still insisting that they were poisonous.

It was not long after this widespread embracing of the potato that some genius decided to drop slices of it into a pot of boiling fat. The identity of this individual is unknown; the friespotat3.gifFrench claim it was one of their countrymen, while the Belgians fiercely hold that it was one of their own who first frenched a fry. Expert opinion on this matter is divided as well. Whatever the case, by the 1830′s deep fried potatoes had become a popular taste sensation in both France and Belgium. It took another hundred years for them to become a fast-food staple in the United States. Although Thomas Jefferson is rumored to have served them in Monticello as early as 1802—a daring thing to do at the time, since tubers were still believed to lead to death unless the poisons were boiled out of them—it was American soldiers, having been stationed in France (or Belgium, depending on who you ask) during World War I who brought back a hunger for the fried potatoes they had eaten while overseas. Although today fries are commonly eaten in many other countries, they are only associated with the Gallic culture here in the U.S.

French fries were born to be fast food. Deep frying foods in large vats of (expensive) fat is a smelly and messy task that was impossible for most people to carry out in their humble friespotat4.gifkitchens. At the beginning of their popularity, one’s only chance to obtain the delectable treat was at a restaurant, whose cooking facilities were better equipped to handle such a procedure, or from street vendors in Paris and Brussels. (The first place in Paris to do this was by the bridge Pont Neuf, and thick-cut fries in France are still known as pommes de terre Pont Neuf). To this day, in Belgium, where pomme frites are considered a national treasure, they are still prepared from fresh potatoes and sold on the streets from numerous french-fry shacks, known as a fritures or frietkoets.

Given the difficulty of preparing the perfect fry, it is truly a wonder that McDonald’s manages to turn out millions of them each day. But that, too, was a process that took decades to perfect. A long, long time ago, when the McDonald brothers opened their first restaurant in Des Plaines, Iowa, the fries they served were made from fresh potatoes, but unlike today, they were not all uniformly yummy. Sometimes limp, sometimes greasy, sometimes too dark on the outside and not cooked enough on the inside, the path to total fry perfection constantly eluded them. The little restaurant quickly developed into a large food chain, but the brothers remained frustrated with their fries. They began pouring millions of dollars into research. At first, they tried to establish the perfect temperature for frying. What they found was that different batches of potatoes would reduce the temperature of the oil they were hurled into by different amounts. Fixing the frying equipment was not going to help this problem. Instead, they discovered that the variance was due to how long the potatoes had been stored before they met their fate in the fryer. The spuds that had been waiting for longer periods cooked up better than those that went immediately into the fryer. Curing potatoes for exactly three weeks prior to frying them became standard practice, allowing for enough of the spuds sugars to be converted into starches. Without this waiting period, the sugars in the potato make the fry turn brown too quickly.

But McDonald’s potato predicament was far from over. There were questions about the best shortening to use, how to cultivate the right breed of potato that would contain the friespotat5.gifperfect amount of solids to water ratio, and whether to switch over to the two-step frying method (which had been used in Belgium for years). In 1957, the company even opened a research lab dedicated to turning the production of fries from an art into a science. The labs developed a potato computer, used to this day, which could monitor the temperature of the frying oil and notify the operator when a batch of fries was perfectly cooked. Flawless French fries had finally become a reality.

Today, French fries account for more than one-fourth of all potatoes sold in the U.S. market—over six million pounds of potatoes are processed into frozen fries annually. Twenty-five percent of kids report eating French fries instead of other vegetables, and the average American eats thirty pounds of the greasy things in a year. The potato has come from being reviled to being revered, and is now the second most popular staple food in the world. So the next time someone says, “You want fries with that?”, take a moment to remember the long, hard journey of the poor little spud. And answer, “Yes, thank you.”

The publication quotes a source that claimed the couple was bickering earlier in the evening — pointing to tension with party host Chris Paciello, Vergara’s ex-boyfriend — and that Vergara suffered a major wardrobe malfunction in the midst of the fight. “Sofia stepped in to try to calm the situation, but somehow she ended up getting pushed and shoved also. Her strapless dress was torn or pulled down in front of other people and her son Manolo who was so offended he left the club. It was crazy,” the insider said.

Loeb was later escorted out of the club by security, with Vergara following him. He is reported to have left with bruises on his body.

The Colombian-born Vergara and longtime boyfriend Loeb became engaged in July, when Loeb whisked Vergara off to a resort in Riviera Maya, Mexico, for a 40th birthday celebration with her sitcom cast mates Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Julie Bowen and Sarah Hyland.

Sofia Vergara ‘exposes her cleavage when her revealing dress is torn after fiancé Nick is thrown out of Miami club following jealous scuffle’

When it comes to doing the deed, the more you know, the better sex is. We collected surprisingly wild info that puts the Q in sex.

There’s one ultimate goal during sex: to be as sensually stimulated as possible. The secret to achieving that blissful state? Having lots of steamy info at your disposal. As they say, knowledge is power…and pleasure. So, we found a ton of just-discovered facts—some make it easier to orgasm, others will help you please him, and the rest…well, they’ll make great convo starters.

1. Women place a higher importance on looks than men do when looking for a casual sex partner….

2. …But that may not be smart. One poll found that computer nerds make the best lovers, with 82 percent of IT geeks claiming they put their partner’s pleasure above their own.

3. Sadly, only 41 percent of fitness professionals were as selfless.

4. Peyronie’s disease is a condition in which a man’s penis curves. A drug used to straighten bent fingers is now being tested to fix it.

5. Get it on the night before you need to bring some great ideas to the office. According to anthropologist Helen Fisher, PhD, sex triggers brain chemicals that can improve creativity at work.

6. It’s the sweet stuff that really gets females hot. A study found that women were more turned on watching a man kissing a woman than having sex with her.

7. Don’t wait to feel turned on before you make a move. Most women experience arousal after the fun has already begun.

8. Strippers earn more money when they’re ovulating. Scientists suspect it’s because of the pheromones their body releases.

9. People who have sex about three times a week are perceived to look four to seven years younger.

10. Men might think that women want them to go all night, but it turns out that women want intercourse to be about four minutes shorter than men do.

11. Physically, it takes men and women the same amount of time to get turned on: about 11 to 12 minutes.

12. When women orgasm, the areas of the brain associated with fear shut off.

13. Single women are more attracted to men who are taken than to those who are available.

14. One study found that men on the prowl are more likely to spend money on luxury items for themselves than those who aren’t searching for a mate.

15. Watch a short skin flick (porn) before hopping in bed. Research found that 58 percent of men and women who regularly watch it felt more comfortable with their sexuality and tending to their partner’s sexual needs.

16. Take time to really figure out your feelings—it could help you in the bedroom. See, women with high emotional intelligence experience more orgasms.

17. A survey done on FHM.com.ph showed that 82 percent of men prefers women to swallow.

18. Scientists believe that some women have a more active G-spot than others.

19. In the same Cosmo poll on FHM.com.ph, 45 minutes came out as top answer for men’s ideal time length for a longer sack sesh.

20. Men take more risks when they know hot women are looking.

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With rows of bras in every shape, size and colour in the shop, Pam Needham felt her heart sink as she realised, yet again, nothing was going to fit her.

As a 32G — with a narrow back and larger than average breasts — NHS manager Pam, 54, was used to spilling out of cups, having straps dig into her skin, and being told she was different sizes in different brands.

‘My lingerie drawer was stuffed full of ill-fitting bras,’ she said.

Made to measure: The new Optifit bra is based on three-dimensional measuring techniques

‘The worst ones squished my boobs into my armpits but I had just learned to live with it because of the size and shape that I am.

‘I also had pain on and off in my neck and shoulders, which I thought was to do with sitting down at the computer for too long at work.

Pam’s experience is not unusual. The UK’s lingerie industry may be worth a staggering £3.6bn a year, but most women have a drawer full of bras that simply don’t fit — and so do not do the job they’re designed for.

And, according to experts, lack of lift, bulging back-fat and chafing straps are the least of a woman’s worries. Wearing the wrong bra can actually cause serious health problems — from bad backs and neck pain, to digestive problems, headaches, heartburn, shortness of breath and dizziness.

Currently up to 80 per cent of women wear the wrong bra, but that could soon be a thing of the past with the arrival of the Optifit bra, a radical new bra which is based on sophisticated three-dimensional measuring techniques.

Tested on 10,000 women with positive results, the Optifit —developed by surgeon Atul Khanna and bra specialist Sue McDonald  — supports breast tissue instead of compressing it.

It was designed using measurements similar to those required for assessing breast enlargements or reconstructions after mastectomies.

The three separate measurements are taken using a special tape measure which stretches and moulds to the body to gauge depth, as well as the length and volume of the breast.

The Optifit bra comes in more than 500 size combinations, and the sizing is very different to standard bra measurements. Body depth is related to a colour, breast height to a size — small, medium, large  — and volume to number.

So, for example, a woman who is normally a 32DD might find herself wearing an Optifit bra that is a Red, Small, 4.

Size matters: Nearly 80 per cent of women wear the wrong size bra – something Optifit believes they can change.

The Optifit also works in a different way to conventional bras. Rather than breasts being contained in underwiring and squashed to the chest wall, it hugs the body from the back, cradles the breast from underneath, lifts the breasts and lengthens the abdominals.

Tests have revealed that as well as making women appear slimmer by banishing bulges, the Optifit also eases tension headaches, neck and shoulder strain, and makes breasts look more pert by lifting them in a way that normal bras don’t.

It was the brainchild of bra fitter Sue McDonald, who came to bra designing after 20 years working alongside NHS hospitals in Manchester, helping mastectomy patients and breastfeeding mums.

After resorting to cutting and stitching clients’ bras to try to get them to fit properly, Sue eventually studied underwear design at university in an attempt to understand why most conventional bras are so uncomfortable.

She was shocked to discover that standard measurements, still in use today, were formulated in the years after the First World War using a male dummy with breasts stuck on — hardly a good guide to the proportions of a real woman.

Breast volume and height, the position of the nipple and the degree of sag in a breast are all key factors which she says should be taken into account, but which are overlooked by standard lingerie measurements.

So 10 years ago Sue calculated and patented her own method of measuring the breast, developing a prototype of the Optifit bra.

Relying on word-of-mouth for custom, she employed two seamstresses to make the bras.

At a clothing industry conference in 2010, she met consultant plastic surgeon Atul Khanna.

After hearing many of his patients complain about ill-fitting bras causing headache and neck pain, he was keen to create a bra based on a more precise system of measurement and teamed up with Sue to share his expertise.

Mr Khanna, a member of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons, explains the breast is a complex area of the body which varies from woman to woman in volume, width, height, projection, tissue density, composition, shape and position on the chest.

Yet these differences are not taken into account with conventional bras and can lead to severe discomfort.

Mr Khanna says: ‘Pressure on the top of the back and the bottom of the neck caused by ill-fitting bras can lead to a migraine-type headache with pain across the forehead and behind the eyes.
‘Traditional bras fix the breasts to the chest wall.

‘Tightening the bra straps pulls the shoulders down, while underwires dig into the ribs.
‘This creates an imbalance in posture which sets up a domino effect throughout the body, resulting in neck, shoulder and back pain.’

The Optifit bra went into production in South Wales and Manchester and now comes in several different designs and colours — including a sports bra and a sexy ‘shades of grey’ lace model.
Visiting the Bra Spa — the specialist shop and fitting service selling the Optifit brand, in Uppermill, near Oldham, Manchester — certainly proved a turning point for Pam Needham.

Sue McDonald fitted her for the Optifit bra. It has to be put on slightly differently to a standard bra.
Rather than putting it on and fiddling around with the back clasp to do it up while standing, Sue advises leaning forward and ‘pouring’ the breasts into the cup, slipping the shoulder straps on one at a time while still leaning forward.

The back of the bra is pulled further down the back than on standard models, to ensure that the weight of the breasts are supported not by the neck and shoulder muscles, but by the back muscles.
Pam was amazed by the results and over the past 18 months she has ditched her ill-fitting lingerie and now only wears Optifit.

‘My breasts feel not only comfortable and supported, but friends kept asking if I had lost weight,’ she says.

‘The pains that I used to get in my neck and shoulders stopped as well.’

Mr Khanna says it’s time to take a radical new look at how to make the bra comfortable and effective for the millions upon millions of women who have to wear one every day of their adult lives.

‘We have made vast progress in breast augmentation techniques and surgical reconstruction of the breast in the last two decades.

‘Now, surely, it is time for the lingerie industry to change its attitude to the female body.’

An artist who bought used Motorla V3 Razrs off an Ebay seller in Sugar Land, Texas, has publicly documented the phones’ personal contents, which the past owners thought had been erased.

When Kyle M.F. Williams, based in New York, realized that more than half of the ‘needs-repairing’ Razrs he originally bought to make a sculpture still worked, he decided to publish what he found in a book called Razrs.

Without the permission of the previous owners, the book features nude images, raunchy text messages and personal momentos of 44 used Razrs from 2008 to 2011.

In November 1979, militants stormed the US embassy in the Iranian capital, Tehran. During the attack, 52 American citizens were captured and held hostage, their lives hanging in the balance.

Only six people managed to evade capture, fleeing to the nearby Canadian embassy. Every day, they faced the possibility of being discovered and very publicly executed by US-hating militants.

The American response? To come up with “the best bad idea” in CIA history: an audacious and incredibly dangerous rescue mission.

The story – now turned into a film by Ben Affleck – is almost too preposterous to be believed. Which makes for what has got to be one of the most thrilling, compelling and downright amusing movies of the year so far.

An all-star cast made up of Affleck, as CIA agent Tony Mendez, Alan Arkin, Bryan Cranston and the hilarious John Goodman, manages to do what is an incredible true story justice.

Argo is proof, if ever any was needed, that truth is far, far stranger than fiction.

Photo Courtesy of Richard McLaren / Lifetime

The Twittersphere pretty much exploded last night with funny, silly, and downright bizarre Tweets about Lindsay Lohan’s performance as screen icon Elizabeth Taylor in Liz and Dick, the Lifetime movie about Liz’s topsy-turvy relationship with two-time (and two-timing) husband Richard Burton.

Here are some of our favourite zingers, divided by object of ridicule. (And don’t hate us.)

Her acting:
I’m going to ask Lifetime to televise my VHS of my high school musical performance in Anything Goes from 1991. It’s better.

Her makeup:
They use less makeup at the Gathering of the Juggalos.

The scenery:
I didn’t realize most of Liz Taylor’s life was deleted boat scenes from the “Jenny From the Block” video.

The movie itself:
Did they call it Lifetime because that’s how long their movies feel?