Category Archives: current affairs

beliefs, current affairs, freedom of speech

Obscenity?

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So, the US claim to have removed Osama bin Laden permanently from the game, something they have wanted to do since George W Bush came out of his log cabin looking for bears after 9/11. They got their man. The man supposedly** responsible for a large swathe of anti-western terrorism.

So now America, a devoutly Christian country, is whooping and hollering in celebration that they killed another human. Aren’t these supposed to be tolerant Christian people who love their enemies and abhor the taking of life, any life?

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of what al-Qaeda have done, and of the US murdering Osama bin Laden, does anyone else find the partying and celebration going on right now in America obscene?

** I say “supposedly” because the only evidence we have is what the US (and its allies) care to release to us. We do not (know that we) have enough information to be able to make a correctly informed judgement. I wonder if anyone actually does?

amusements, current affairs, nudism

OMG!

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I’ve just been looking at some of the photographs from the royal wedding so here are a few thoughts. Links to the photos where possible — the first few are from BBC News (you’ll have to page through the BBC sets). There are duplicate/alternative pictures in some of the sets. So …

  • Why are we allowed an illegal number plate?
  • Kate does look rather good, although she could do with a little more flesh on her (not a lot, just a few of pounds) — bet the bloody royal machine has been making her diet like they did all the other recent brides.
  • As has been commented elsewhere, sister Pippa had the nicer frock. And apparently Prince Hal spent a lot of the time making eyes at her — sensible boy!
  • For a pair of trained military men neither of the princes can stand up straight. Both deserve a dressing down from their Drill Sergeants.
  • Whoever thought it a good idea to let the Princess Royal out looking like Widow Twanky’s char lady on a day out?
  • How does David Beckham come to look like the young Clint Eastwood? And WTF is Mistress Beckham wearing on her feet?

And now for a few (more) of the guests from BBC News …

  • What a frightful pink coat!
  • Another of Beckham looking like a Hollywood cowboy.
  • Oh dear, Elton! Which side of the bed did we get out of?
  • Rowan Atkinson as Greek shipping magnate.
  • Blimey what an unflattering picture of a bump.
  • Ah, Mistress Beckham’s twin sister lookalike (aka. Tara P_T) in electric blue.
  • Thought Sam Cameron looked rather stylish, unlike Mrs Clegg’s hat.
  • I like Prince Felipe of Spain’s naval frock coat.

And these few from The British Monarchy‘s official photostream on Flickr …

Mmmmm, cake!

beliefs, current affairs, history, quotes, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

A huge selection this week, even with ignoring the royal wedding.

To most Christians, the Bible is like a software licence. Nobody actually reads it. They just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree”.
[Unknown]

Science has never drummed up quite as effective a tranquillizing agent as a sunny spring day.
[W Earl Hall]

Hey you! Yes, you, stop being unhappy with yourself, you are perfect. Stop wishing you looked like someone else or wishing people liked you as much as they like someone else, stop trying to get attention from those who hurt you. Stop hating your body, your face, your personality, your quirks, love them, without those things you wouldn’t be you, and why would you want to be anyone else? Be confident with who you are. Smile, it’ll draw people in, if anyone hates on you because you are happy with yourself then you stick your middle finger in the air and say screw it, my happiness will not depend on others any more. I’m happy because I love who I am. I love my flaws, I love my imperfections, they make me me. And ‘me’ is pretty amazing.
[Unknown]

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of 80 and gradually approach 18.
[Mark Twain]

A lie is a lie even if everyone believes it. The truth is the truth even if nobody believes it.
[Unknown]

A fortune teller told me: Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a tea-house watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread — a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you just met — and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity. The goldmine is exactly over there where you are.
[Tiziano Terzani]

Why am I an atheist? I ask you: Why is anybody not an atheist? Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated, I resent anyone pushing their religion on me. I don’t push my atheism on anybody else. Live and let live. Not many people practice that when it comes to religion.
[Andy Rooney]

Go now and live. Experience. Dream. Risk. Close your eyes and jump, enjoy the free-fall. Choose exhilaration over comfort. Choose magic over predictability. Choose potential over safety. Wake up to the magic of everyday life. Make friends with your intuition. Trust your gut. Discover the beauty of uncertainty. Know yourself fully before you make promises to another. Make millions of mistakes so that you will know how to choose what you really need. Know when to hold on and when to let go. Love hard and often and without reservation. Seek knowledge. Open yourself to possibility. Keep your heart open, your head high and your spirit free. Embrace your darkness along with your light. Be wrong every once in a while, and don’t be afraid to admit it. Awaken to the brilliance in ordinary moments. Tell the truth about yourself no matter what the cost. Own your reality without apology. See goodness in the world. Be Bold. Be Fierce. Be Grateful. Be Wild, crazy and gloriously free. Be you. Go now, and live.
[Unknown]

Every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.
[Evelyn Waugh]

But adults aren’t rational. I’m unsure why we expect adolescents to be.
[Prof. Kate Clancey]

War is a series of catastrophes that result in a victory.
[Georges Clemenceau]

A rumour without a leg to stand on will get around some other way.
[John Tudor]

Life is a comedy to those who think, A tragedy to those who feel, And an incomprehensible to those who think they feel.
[Graffito found on a university door when I was a student, circa 1973]

The written word sings in silence through the caverns of the mind.
[Victor Stok]

Her breasts were two lovely promontories. Wherever one looked one discovered soft open spaces, alluring estuaries, pleasant glades, hillocks, mounds, where pilgrims could have lingered in prayer, where they could have quenched their thirst at cooling springs.
[Gabriel Chevallier, Clochemerle]

[I]n all her splendour, with the rich abundance of her lovely milk-white flesh, her bold sweeping contours, her magnificent projections of poop and prow … a frightful incarnation of lewdness, a satanic vision, convulsed and writhing in the shameful pleasures of guilty love.
[Gabriel Chevallier, Clochemerle]

It must be strange being Prince William or Prince Harry on a stag night, shoving pictures of your gran into a lap-dancer’s bra.
[Origin Unknown]

amusements, beliefs, current affairs, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s selection of quotes.

You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing.
[Arnold Bax]

Good judgement comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgement.
[Rita Mae Brown]

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
[Galileo Galilei]

If you believe in the existence of fairies at the bottom of the garden you are deemed fit for the bin. If you believe in parthenogenesis, ascension, transubstantiation and all the rest of it, you are deemed fit to govern the country.
[Jonathan Meades]

Christianity: one woman’s lie about an affair that got seriously fucking out of hand.
[Monica at Monicks Unleashed, http://monicks.net/]

The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered:
“Man … Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
[https://neilperkin.typepad.com/only_dead_fish/2011/03/something-to-remember.html]

I’d call you a c**t but you lack the warmth and depth.
[Amy Sedaris]

By nature a woman is an angel, but if her wings get broken she learns how to fly on a broom.
[unknown]

amusements, current affairs, history, topographical

Bales of Straw – Only in England!

Between about 18th and 30th April, if you are in central London, it may be worth visiting Tower Bridge for an unusual sight.

The details are in the Port of London Authority Notice (PDF file). Basically work is to be done on a couple of arches of Tower Bridge by men on ropes dangling from the the arches which will on some days be closed to navigation. At other times the arches may still be open to navigation but with reduced headroom when the byelaw requires that the Bridge Master hang a bale of straw “large enough to be conspicuous” from the centre of the arch by day (and a white light by night).

And of course one must not forget that Tower Bridge is officially registered as a ship.

Surely only in this country do we have such arcane, and legally enacted, requirements!

Hat-tip: Ian Visits

beliefs, books, current affairs, history, people, thoughts, topographical

Quotes of the Week

Another good selection this week as I’ve been catching up on all sorts of bits of reading.

Tax is imposed by parliament, people and corporations do not pay it voluntarily. The state coerces as much money as possible in the form of tribute to pay for the services and goods the state feels that it requires.
[brianist in a comment at http://www.badscience.net/2011/04/anarchy-for-the-uk-ish/]

The [fifth] duke [of Portland (1800-1879)], a notable eccentric landlord, gave each of his workmen a donkey and an umbrella, so they could travel to work in all weathers. He insisted that they should not salute or show him the slightest deference, and had a roller-skating rink especially constructed for their recreation.
[Mike Pentelow & Marsha Rowe; Characters of Fitzrovia; Pimlico Books (2001)]

Divorced, unemployed, and pissed
I aimed low in life – and missed.
[Prof. Ray Lees quoted in Mike Pentelow & Marsha Rowe; Characters of Fitzrovia]

Then we got softer clay and both of us turned out some quite nice little bowls and pots. It’s fearfully exciting when you do get it centred and the stuff begins to come up between your fingers. V[anessa Bell] never would make her penises long enough, which I thought very odd. Don’t you?
[Roger Fry to Duncan Grant quoted in Mike Pentelow & Marsha Rowe; Characters of Fitzrovia]

My dear, could you advance me a quid? There’s the most beautiful Gl passed out stone cold and naked as a duck in my kitchen.
[Nina Hamnett quoted in Mike Pentelow & Marsha Rowe; Characters of Fitzrovia. The image on the right is a torso of Nina Hamnett by sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska now in the Tate Gallery; Modigliani is supposed to have said (and Nina Hamnett oft repeated) that she had “the best tits in Europe”.]

Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.
[Will Rogers]

Relax. There are no gods and you are not going to burn in hell.
[Atheist in America at www.flamewarrior.com]

Each age finds in its favourite crimes images of what it would most love/hate to do. Our own generation of overworked, guilty, child-dominated couples makes of child-abduction the ultimate horror, perhaps because with a dark part of themselves they wish their children dead. The favourite Edwardian murder was undoubtedly centred upon adultery in the suburbs.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

If any demonstration was needed that the battles of Ypres, Mons, Verdun, the Somme had been lunatic, it was provided in summer 1917 at Passchendaele, when Sir Douglas Haig launched an attack against the Messines Ridge south of Ypres. It was a repeat performance of the other acts of mass-slaughter: 240,000 British casualties, 70,000 dead, with German losses around 200,000. By a second attack, in November 1917, on Cambrai, Haig took the Germans by surprise and gained about four miles of mud. Ten days later the German counter-attack regained all their lost ground. If ever there was an object lesson in the folly of war, the sheer pointlessness, here it was shown in all its bloodiness.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

arts, current affairs, history, memes, personal, photography, topographical

[13/52] Magnolia

[13/52] Magnolia
Week 13 entry for 52 weeks challenge.

This is the magnificent magnolia in the churchyard outside St James’s, Piccadilly, London. Taken against the backdrop of the church, which was designed by Sir Christopher Wren but much restored.

The church also contains a small memorial to the poet, artist and mystic William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) who was baptised there on 11 December 1757.

The churchyard of St James’s hosts an Antiques Market on Tuesdays and an Arts & Crafts Market on Wednesday to Saturday. I’ve not been to the former, but the latter is definitely worth a visit if you’re present hunting and especially in the run-up to Christmas. There is also a coffee shop and the church itself is almost always open.

beliefs, current affairs, freedom of speech, pleasures, quotes, science, sexuality, thoughts, topographical

Quotes of the Week

A good selection of amusements amongst this week’s quotes …

The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.
[William Gibson]

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
[Thomas Jefferson]

Society places a great deal of importance upon “being concerned” about this, that or the other terrible thing going on somewhere in the world. I agree that a bit of this concern is useful in helping alleviate suffering in those places. But it strikes me that the vast majority of what we call “being concerned” involves getting into our own heads, turning over the information, imagining whatever we want to imagine, working up our emotions, wallowing in our feelings like a pig in mud. For some reason I’ve never been able to comprehend very clearly this makes us look good socially, like we’re doing the right thing. But I’m unable to see how watching endless reports […] about a disaster really helps anything.
[Brad Warner at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/]

You can keep a dog; but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.
[George Mikes, How to be Decadent]

Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.
[Jeff Valdez]

Life is fragile. You and I are living lives just as precarious as those people who got swept away into the ocean last week. We just fool ourselves into believing otherwise. But that’s not a reason to live in fear. Life is a terminal disease.
[Brad Warner on the Sendai Earthquake at http://hardcorezen.blogspot.com/2011/03/japan-earthquake.html]

Every mountain; every rock on this planet; every living thing; every piece of you and me was forged in the furnaces of space.
[Prof. Brian Cox; Wonders of the Universe; BBC2 TV, 13 March 2011]

I hear the argument, and it is an ingenious argument only a lawyer of his brilliance could make …
[David Cameron replying in House of Commons to Sir Malcolm Rifkind]

Never play with a dead cat and above all never make friends with a monkey.
[Osbert Sitwell, quoting his father in Tales My Father Taught Me. Thanks to Katyboo for this one.]

The natural world is a living erotic museum filled with variations in male genitalia, illustrating how natural selection has paid nearly as much attention to the male member as Catholic priests have.
[http://zinjanthropus.wordpress.com/]

To you , I’m an atheist; to God, I’m the loyal opposition.
[Woody Allen]

“Are there circumstances in which the government might …?”
“Well there could be circumstances. To answer your question in any other way would preclude all possibilities.”
[William Hague, UK Foreign Secretary, answering a question from the Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee; 16/03/2011]

amusements, current affairs

Committee Decisions

Excellent letter in yesterday’s Times:

Sir, Professor John Murrell has been given the wrong definition of a committee. I always understood that a committee was a group of people who individually could do nothing, but collectively decided that nothing could be done.
Campbell Sylvester