If you follow baseball, it’s probably come to your attention that the Yankees under the Steinbrenner family are one of the most conservative and “wholesome” teams in the sport. When first baseman Jason Giambi left the Oakland A’s to join the Yankees for the 2002 season, there was a whole big story about whether he would cut his facial hair off to meet the Yankees’ ridiculous 1950s-era standards. (He did.)

But it wasn’t always so: the Yankees were once the most out-there team in the league. They had freethinker Jim Bouton in the early 1960s; his 1970 memoir Ball Four is one of the essential baseball reads—Bouton would do things like ask his teammates if there were really a good reason for the U.S. to be in Vietnam—rest assured that he was one of the few guys in conservative major-league clubhouses to be wondering about such things.

But in 1972 the Yankees set a whole new standard in terms of departing from regular family values, because that was the year that lefthanded pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich swapped not just wives but their whole families.
 

 
Kekich and Peterson were very close. They both pitched for the Yankees, and they became inseparable friends in 1969. They both lived in New Jersey, and their families did things together all the time, like go to the Bronx Zoo together. In 1972, the couples went out together to see The Godfather, and someone brought up the subject of wife swapping. That summer, after a party at the home of sportswriter Maury Allen, Marilyn Peterson and Susan Kekich agreed to go home with the other woman’s husband. By October it was definitely official, the two men had traded houses, but the news hadn’t reached the media—that would have to wait until spring training the next year. On March 5, 1973, Peterson and Kekich made the announcement to the press. “We didn’t trade wives—we traded lives,” said Kekich. They swapped not just wives, but children, houses, cars—even pets. Lee MacPhail, general manager of the Yankees, joked (probably through gritted teeth) that “we may have to call off Family Day.”
 

Story from the Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1973
 
In David Fischer’s book 100 Things Yankees Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die, Jake Gibbs, a catcher for the Yankees and caught both pitchers, is quoted as saying, “They were fun-loving guys. Fritz and Mike were good friends. They were really close, and their families were close. I guess we just didn’t know how close. … Of course, they were both left-handers. You can never tell about lefties.”

Fritz Peterson and the former Mrs. Kekich—named Susan, who had two daughters at the time of the swap—are still together to this day; they have had four children together. Mike Kekich and the former Mrs. Peterson—named Marilyn, who had had two sons with Fritz—didn’t last as long. According to Dan Epstein’s book Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging 70s (which looks like an awful lot of fun), Kekich said later, “All four of us had agreed in the beginning that if anyone wasn’t happy, the thing would be called off. But when Marilyn and I decided to call it off, the other couple had already gone off with each other.” Susan Kekich said, “A lot of people get divorces. We didn’t do anything sneaky or lecherous. There isn’t anything smutty about this. We were all attracted to each other and we fell in love.”

Around 2010 there were stories that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were planning to do a movie version of the Peterson-Kekich story called The Trade, but Affleck decided to win a few Oscars and take on the role of Batman instead. Honestly, I can’t figure out why HBO didn’t make this movie ten years ago.

There’s hardly any coverage of this on YouTube, but here’s Fritz Peterson pitching in the 1970 All-Star Game, giving up a base hit to Willie McCovey—Roberto Clemente and Earl Weaver also appear in the clip.
 

 
The ABC of Sex Education for Trainables was produced by Planned Parenthood in 1975 to instruct teachers and caregivers on the administration of sex education to people with intellectual disabilities, and for all its awkwardness, it’s kind of awesome. It’s incredibly dated, of course. The creepy opening scene feels a bit like the beginning of a slasher flick, and they’re using the démodé terms “trainables” and “retardate.” Regardless, with a pedagogical emphasis on “training” and repetition (rather than traditional classroom structures), the flick is actually really forward-thinking, in a super hippy-dippy way.

For one, the very notion of teaching sex ed to people with disabilities is still somehow controversial. When phrases like “the mind of a child” are used to describe a low IQ, people tend to equate disability with sexlessness. (As someone who worked for a non-profit that facilitated services for people with disabilities, I can assure you, they have the exact same ranges of sexuality as the abled, and many of them have sex.) Second, the movie covers sexual subjects germane to the specific audience. For example, people with disabilities are statistically more likely to be targeted by sexual predators by a wide margin. Extra conversation about safety and boundaries may be necessary (which is what I assume the weirdo art-house first scene was supposed to signify). Third, the film really adamant that explicit, shame-free language be used, and insists teachers rise above “the guilt and embarrassment from our heritage.” There’s even a (very awkwardly acted) sequence that talks about masturbation as a positive—just don’t do it in public!

It’s kind of amazing to hear the narrator insist that teachers refrain from moralizing about sex. That engaged, sympathetic, matter-of-fact tone the teachers are expected to maintain is a stark contrast from a lot of the right-wing sex education in public schools today (and certainly better than the abstinence-only “education” I got in middle America). So while the cinematography and acting are a little wonky, and the soundtrack sounds like a Cat Stevens impersonator, The ABC of Sex Education for Trainables is pretty far out.
 

 
Apparently a sound sculpture in a public park in the Netherlands that’s supposed to play delightful sounds of birds was hacked, and now plays the hot-n-heavy sounds of people doin’ the nasty.

According to the YouTube description, the 2009 art installation by Bill Fontana, is located in Enschede and was recently hacked. Passers-by reactions have varied from this is “funny” to this is “evil.”

The city has no idea who is behind the hack.

Is this a clever fake viral video? I do not know. The sound sculpture (with the bird songs) is real, however.

 
Via reddit

 
First up, a “trash compactor” cut of the incredibly earnest Christian anti-porn film, Every Young Man’s Battle.

My favorite part comes when the fat kid invites the guilty ginger… er, wanker (not that he seems like a bad person, I’m just being descriptive here) over to his [most assuredly no girls allowed] porn-watching party and then excuses himself to pick up “some special buzz juice, if you catch my drift...”

Oh, but we do.
 

 
If that taster wasn’t enough for you, please feel free to watch the entire thing below. Dig the football coach guy explaining to the boys how to go on the defense against yanking their cranks. And that sublime Ted Bundy interview conducted by Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, on the very day before he was executed in 1989.

Porn leads straight to death row! Heavy-handed much? Nah!

Every Young Man’s Battle was produced in 2003, but it’s so dated that it seems like something made ten years earlier. It’s worth mentioning that many Bundy biographers cite multiple instances of him saying that he had almost no interest whatsoever in pornography. The Dobson interview is considered by many to be Bundy’s final chance to manipulate the public’s perception (and why Dobson, specifically, was granted the interview). Bundy also blamed alcohol and brainwashing by the TV as reasons why he became a serial killer, so take his confession here with a hefty dollop of salt.
 

 
Via Christian Nightmares

 
The Walt Disney Company sure made a lot of crazy-ass public service films. Everyone knows about anti-fascist Donald Duck (ironic, when you remember Uncle Walt’s purported Nazi sympathies and participation in anti-Semitic organizations). My personal favorite was the one on menstruation.

That is, until now!

This extremely vague cartoon on family planning deals with a far more controversial subject than der Führer or female puberty, and yet somehow skirts giving out any specific information. I guess whatever remnants of prudishness were left in 1968 still demanded you avoid explicit conversation about birth control, then euphemistically referred to as “family planning”:

Family planning means, that without affecting normal relations as man and wife, you can decide in advance the number of children you will have, and when you will have them.

Informative! The weird thing about this weird little piece of propaganda is that unlike the previous examples, it’s intended neither to boost national morale, nor to educate children—it’s literally Donald Duck telling grown-ass men to wear condoms or look into hormonal birth control. And you even have a doting, whispery little wife using her husband as a proxy to ask questions about her own health—it goes without saying that this is primarily aimed at men, and the film doesn’t have much insight into the economic incentives for having a lot of children if, for example, you operate entirely on a traditional agrarian economy.

Given Disney’s supposed Nazi sympathies, one has to wonder if the motivations behind the film are based in an authentic investment in public health education or the Malthusian racism that lead so many eugenicists to fear they would some day be “outnumbered” by other races and cultures.

And come on, if any Disney character is a racist, you know it’s gotta’ be Donald.
 

 
Nutella + banana = ‘nuff said.
 

 
Gee, I wonder how this one is going to turn out?

Actually, it’s quite amusing to see—in action—how the female and male brains are hard-wired so very differently. The woman only had to ask a mere fourteen guys to achieve a 50% success rate. Had she asked 100 men if they were down for the nasty (like the hapless male in the companion video asked 100 women) I wonder what her final numbers would have been like?
 
Below, woman asking for sex:

 
Now, a male asking for sex:

 

 
These beautiful photographs of transgender women in Paris from the late 1950s and early 1960s were taken by Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm, who traveled to the city in the late-fifties in the hope of creating a new kind of night-life street photography. Strömholm lived in the Red Light district around Place Blanche and Pigalle where he made friends with many of the young transgender women who worked the streets and hotels to earn a living.

In 1983, Strömholm collected many of these photographs together for his book Les Amies de Place Blanche, for which he wrote an introduction explaining his interest in photographing these women:

“This is a book about the quest for self-identity, about the right to live, about the right to own and control one’s body.

...These are images of people whose lives I shared and whom I think I understood.

The whole collection can be seen here.
 

 

 
More photographs, after the jump…
 

 
Michel Foucault: Beyond Good and Evil, director David Stewart’s superb 1993 portrait of the social theorist of power in history manages to squeeze a lot of information into its short 42 minutes and provides a pretty adequate introduction to Foucault’s life and work.

Foucault’s acid trip at Zabriskie Point watching the sun set over Death Valley listening to Stockhausen (which the philosopher described as the greatest experience of his life) is recreated, as is a 1947 performance of Antonin Artaud’s Theatre Of Cruelty. Foucault’s drug use, his participation in the sadomasochistic San Francisco leather scene and death from AIDS in 1984 at the age of 57 are also covered.

In various languages, but there are English subtitles when it’s necessary.
 

 
Apparently Daft Punk is teaming up with Durex to make their own line of “Get Lucky” condoms. Okay. The logo on the box will feature the iconic image of Daft Punk, Pharrell, and Nile Rodgers in front of a sunset. Super.

Diplo received some of these promotional condoms, posted them on Instagram and wrote, “Thank god I had those daft punk condoms last night.”

Aren’t we all, Diplo… aren’t we all? I hope you had two in case you needed “One More Time” and thanks for over-sharing!

Below, Daft Punk unmasked at secret gig: