Category Archives: amusements

amusements, beliefs, personal

Ten Things

Here we are again with his month’s off-the-wall ten things …
Ten Concepts I Try to Live by:

  1. Treat others as you would wish to be treated yourself
  2. If it harm none, do as you will
  3. Nude when possible, clothed when necessary
  4. Gender, colour, race etc. are irrelevant to ability and worth
  5. Sex and nudity are normal
  6. Openness and honesty in all things
  7. Say what you mean and do what you say
  8. Don’t worry about things you can’t change
  9. Pro bono publico, nil bloody panico
  10. Zen Mischief
amusements

Middle-aged?

I spotted this somewhere the other day. I feel sure it’s been around for a while, but it made me chuckle.
How to know when you’re Middle-Aged:

  1. You don’t understand what young peasants are talking about
  2. You struggle to read Chaucer in weak candlelight
  3. You hate rowdy taverns
  4. You constantly worry that you might have the Black Death
  5. You don’t know or care who Blondel is sleeping with
  6. You tell your wife that Crusaders seem to look younger every year
  7. You struggle with new technology such as the heavy plough and the longbow.
  8. You find Gothic architecture too modern
  9. You keep forgetting who the King is
  10. You dream of buying a second hovel in France
amusements

Ten Things

Again this month we have something slightly different …
Ten Colours which are also Surnames:

  1. Black
  2. Brown
  3. Green
  4. Grey
  5. White
  6. Blue
  7. Pink
  8. Orange
  9. Lavender
  10. Scarlet
amusements, science

The Conceptual Penis

Anyone who needs cheering up on a Sunday afternoon, could do worse than read Jerry Coyne’s blog post A new academic hoax: a bogus paper on “the conceptual penis” gets published in a “high quality peer-reviewed” social science journal – and the papers to which it refers.
If you don’t understand a word of it, that’s fine, because the paper being described, The conceptual penis as a social construct in Cogent Social Sciences, is a total and elaborate hoax which even the authors admit they don’t understand! Just as a small example:

Nowhere are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change. Climate change is driven by nothing more than it is by certain damaging themes in hypermasculinity that can be best understood via the dominant rapacious approach to climate ecology identifiable with the conceptual penis.

The paper was designed to expose the trendy opaque nonsense of much of the social sciences. And it succeeded as it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The paper’s text sort of makes superficial sense – and I could see it becoming a radical feminist meme – but it is actually complete bollox. Enjoy it!