Cornflakes (invented by John Harvey Kellogg) and Graham’s Crackers (invented by Sylvester Graham) were both specifically designed to discourage masturbation.
[Found in Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn. See also Wikipedia on Cornflakes]
This week’s accumulation of leaf-mould …
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
[Martin Luther King, Jr]
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
[Steven Weinberg]
What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.
[Anthony Robbins]
The idea of monogamy hasn’t so much been tried and found wanting, as found difficult and left untried.
[GK Chesterton]
The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful.
[Carl Jung in a letter to Freud, 30 January 1910]
Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?
[Susan Squire, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage]
If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.
[Peter Ustinov]
When we were kids, our mums used to write our name in our school uniform. Now we are adults, we have other peoples names on the front of our clothes!
[Thoughts of Angel]
An educated person would be expected to have an active vocabulary of about 30,000 words, whereas to read The Sun newspaper you require a vocabulary of just 800 words.
from AC Grayling, The Form of Things
Some odd bedfellows this week …
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
[Robert Louis Stephenson]
Your car is Japanese. Your vodka is Russian. Your pizza is Italian. Your kebab is Turkish. Your democracy is Greek. Your coffee is Brazilian. Your movies are American. Your tea is Tamil. Your shirt is Indian. Your oil is Saudi Arabian. Your electronics are Chinese. Your numbers are Arabic, your letters Latin. And you complain that your neighbour is an immigrant? Pull yourself together!
[Seen on Facebook]
‘chav’ (vogue label of 2004, originally a traveller’s term of address or endearment, from a French nickname for a young fox), who represents an imagined social grouping, a troublesome, truculent, feckless, shameless underclass delighting in petty criminality and conspicuous consumption (of, inter alia, illicit substances, electronic stimuli, pimped technology and ‘bling’).
[Tony Thorne, Jolly Wicked, Actually]
An eye for an eye makes the world go blind. A tooth for a tooth gums up everything!
[Thoughts of Angel]
Sex was an expression of friendship: in Africa it was like holding hands … It was friendly and fun. There was no coercion. It was offered willingly.
[Paul Theroux quoted in Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn]
I had a friend at university who used to propound this latter theory that sex was (and should be seen as) not necessarily more than an expression of sincere friendship and that why should one not have sex with ones friends just as one might have a beer with them. Not sure he ever managed to put it much into practice though.
This week something for the cat lovers amongst you …
Another collection of oddities from the catalogue of our local auctioneers. Not such an interesting-looking sale this time around but as so often it’s a combination of the curious descriptions and the odd juxtaposition of items in the lots which amuses.
First off, who is sitting on whom? …
A boy in a Tyrolean hat holding a monkey seated on a step with three dogs, by W A Richards, signed, oils, gilt framed … and a vacant picture frame.
A shelf full of interesting items including a barometer, binoculars, a model economiser invented by Robert Sterling 1816, a bondage mask, games, etc.
An I.C.A.N. calibration gauge for airspeed corrections, a whisky flask, a Turkish coffee pot, binoculars, and an old camera.
A set of Diplomatic costume by Moss Bros, early 20th century, including frock coats, trousers, boots, bicorn hat and sword, the etched blade marked Scott Son & Claxton, 31 George Street, Hanover Square, London, in original tin carrying box.
6 glass demijohns and a set of golf clubs.
A quantity of garden tools, a Pogo stick, a signed copy of ‘Double or Nothing’ by Thelma Frye, 3 LG mobile telephones and 2 shelves of miscellaneous items, ornaments, miniature coffee cups, a desk blotter, magazine rack, vases, miniature pictures, hand mirror, carriage clock, knick-knacks, etc.
One is left wondering “Why?”.
Here’s this week’s usual eclectic and eccentric mix …
Biologists and philosophers have pondered for generations the ways in which our modern lives may be disconnected from our pasts, out of synch … When you look beside you in bed, you notice no more than one animal (alternative lifestyles and cats notwithstanding). For nearly all of our history, our beds and lives were shared by multitudes.
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]
The moment that made us human in that series of happenings was not the language, the gods, or even the ability to draw Rubenesque women in stone. It was when we decided that when a leopard stalked the cave, we ought to go after it and kill it. When we decided to kill a species not for food or in self-defence, but instead in order to control what lived and did not live around us, when we did that, we were then fully human.
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]
Grasses and cows were not the only species we favored. We also came to choose species that were beautiful to our senses … tulips and other flowers are shipped around the world at huge expense. Goldfish live in houses in nearly every country. Dogs, which appeal to our social sense of appeasement and connectedness, were brought into our beds. (Cats – well, no one can explain them.)
[Rob Dunn, The Wild Life of Our Bodies]
Anyone offering subtitles for the following?
[It’s] amazing how the secondary endosymbiosis has left its signature in the topography of plastid membranes like in dinoflagellates and cryptophytes.
[“fer” in a comment at The Loom]
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
[GK Chesterton]
There are more fools in the world than there are people.
[Heinrich Heine]
Is it true that cannibals don’t eat clowns because they taste funny?
[Thoughts of Angel]
Here’s one for the geeks amongst you …
