Category Archives: pleasures

beliefs, food+drink, memes, pleasures, quotes, sexuality

Listography – Top Five Keywords

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As regular readers will know I don’t always do Kate’s weekly Listography — sometimes because I just don’t get time and sometimes because the subject doesn’t fire me with enthusiasm. But this week Kate is asking us something simple: list the top five keyword searches on your weblog (excepting the name of the weblog and keywords like “blogger”). So I can hardly refuse, especially as whenever I see anyone listing the searches used to find their weblogs they’re usually either a scream or completely unbelievable!

Will mine be any different? In a word, No …

At we have pheasant. Yep really. Four times the number of hits of its nearest competitor! Everyone seems to have liked my December 2009 recipe for Pheasant Casserole.

is the quite shocking pussy porn. I guess, guys, you were sadly disappointed to find this, this or this.

is perhaps the equally worrying, and equally disappointing, dumb blonde.

At we have another search for pornography: osho on porn. But this time it is a serious article.

Finally at #5 we go from the sublime(?) to the ridiculous with the search woodpecker feet. Well, yes, I really did write a post about woodpecker feet!

In the words of JBS Haldane:

The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

memes, personal, pleasures

[40/52] Recycled Cat

[40/52] Recycled Cat
Week 40 entry for 52 weeks challenge.

It seems that, at least as for as Harry the Cat is concerned, the place to sleep at the moment is in the paper recycling box in the study. It’s nice and dark and quiet and secluded. Even better, it’s a box. And we all know how cats are irresistibly attracted to boxes.

He was so sound asleep, that he didn’t move a whisker when I took this! In fact he’s still sound asleep some 20 minutes later.

To quote Garfield: “Eat and sleep. Eat and sleep. There must be more to life, but I do hope not”.

amusements, books, current affairs, memes, pleasures, quotes

Quotes of the Week

Well let’s start this week’s selection where we left off last week, with something from John Aubrey …

Even the cats were different, and Aubrey could recall when ‘the common English Catt was white with some blewish piednesse sc gallipot-blew, the race or breed of them are now almost lost’ … Aubrey says that Archbishop Laud had been ‘a great lover of Catts. He was presented with some Cypruss-catts, our Tabby-catts, which were sold at first for 5li a piece. This was about 1637 or 1638’. Tabbies are still called ‘cyprus cats’ in Norfolk.
[Anthony Powell, John Aubrey and His Friends]

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”.
[Isaac Asimov in Newsweek, 21 January 1980]

I discovered books and music while everyone else got into drugs. Books and music were my drugs. What I read and listened to then shaped and changed my life forever.
[Katy Wheatley on her weblog]

I find being middle aged rather liberating. I wear what I like. I eat what I like. I listen to and watch what I like. I do not  feel ashamed of anything that makes me happy and makes my life feel richer, better and more joyous.
[Katy Wheatley on her weblog]

Katy, dearest, how many more times do I have to tell you that you aren’t middle aged? You can’t be middle aged — you’re younger than I am! Anyway I’m not having it, if only because if you’re middle aged then I’m senile and I ain’t ready for that yet.

To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as an easy way to avoid doing something that’s even more important.
[John Perry, University of Stanford, Winner of the 2011 Ig Nobel for Literature]

And finally, confirmation from an unknown source of what we all suspected …

Bureaucracy is the art of making the possible impossible.

photography, pleasures

More Pussy Porn : Rosie

Meet Rosie …

Rosie
She is our next door neighbour’s young Persian cat who is currently being fed and watered by Noreen.

She is also about to drop a bundle of kittens. The owners get a female cat, don’t have her spayed and then wonder why every tomcat in the area comes to call. They then bugger off on holiday for 3 weeks – although to be fair they have gone “home” to Lebanon because the husband’s father is seriously ill. So Noreen has had to man the breach. Fortunately they’re due back today, although who knows if that will materialise!?

Rosie
Fortunately Rosie is a placid and amenable pussy, although that lovely soft, long fur needs a lot of brushing to stop it getting matted. I love her Hobbit feet – in this second photo you can just see the tufts of fur between her toes.

photography, pleasures

Pussy Porn : The Lodger

Meet “The Lodger” …

The Lodger
She appears to have been abandoned (she’s been around for some months) and decided about a week ago she wanted to adopt us. She was clearly starving hungry and is very friendly and easy to handle. Sadly our current two felines are very not impressed, so she’s having to live in a box in our front porch for the time being. After a week she is still hungry but is already looking in much better condition.

The Lodger
This morning we took her to the vet (we were taking our two as well for their injections) to get her the once over. It turns out she has been chipped and the registered owners live a few streets away. She’s clearly in reasonable health and as there is no sign of kittens she’s likely been spayed. The vet reckons she’s probably about a year old.

The vet is going to try to contact the registered owners and see what gives; he’ll also hopefully contact our nearest vet’s where she may be registered. If there’s no dice in a week or two we’ll get the OK for her to move in with us @ndash; the present two permitting. It would be nice if she does move in as she’s a lovely, friendly small cat who deserves a good home.

Meanwhile she’s doing sentry duty at our front door.

amusements, medical, pleasures, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week

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]