Category Archives: thoughts

beliefs, nudism, thoughts

Me No Understand

This morning saw both of us off to see our doctor for our (all too frequent) check-ups.

While waiting there were two African Muslim ladies (say in their 30s) sitting to my right. Both were wearing coloured but sombre floor-length dresses/robes. The one nearer me was also wearing a loose headscarf and rather nice but sensible shoes and socks. The one further from me had a headscarf which was tight about her face. However on her feet she had nothing but a pair of flip-flips.

How can it be unseemly to display one’s head but perfectly OK to have nude feet?

Me no understand.

amusements, books, current affairs, quotes, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

A mixed bag of quotes this week …

When the British government set up the loss-making groundnut scheme in Africa in 1947, a law was passed which contained a paragraph that read: ‘In the Nuts (unground) (other than ground-nuts) Order, the expression nuts shall have reference to such nuts, other than ground-nuts, as would but for this amending Order not qualify as nuts (unground) (other than ground-nuts) by reason of their being nuts (unground).’
[Nigel Cawthorne; The Strange Laws of Old England]

We can reject everything else: religion, ideology, all received wisdom. But we cannot escape the necessity of love and compassion … This, then, is my true religion, my simple faith. In this sense, there is no need for temple or church, for mosque or synagogue, no need for complicated philosophy, doctrine or dogma. Our own heart, our own mind, is the temple. The doctrine is compassion. Love for others and respect for their rights and dignity, no matter who or what they are: ultimately these are all we need. So long as we practice these in our daily lives, then no matter if we are learned or unlearned, whether we believe in Buddha or God, or follow some other religion or none at all, as long as we have compassion for others and conduct ourselves with restraint out of a sense of responsibility, there is no doubt we will be happy.
[Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama]

If we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities.
[Voltaire]

‘A long time ago.’
‘I didn’t have white hair in those days,’ said Granny. ‘Everything was a different colour in those days.’
‘That’s true.’
‘It didn’t rain so much in the summer time.’
‘The sunsets were redder.’
‘There were more old people. The world was full of them,’ said the wizard.
‘Yes, I know. And now it’s full of young people. Funny, really.’
[Terry Pratchett; Equal Rites]

[S]he was opposed to books on strict moral grounds, since she had heard that many of them were written by dead people and therefore it stood to reason reading them would be as bad as necromancy.
[Terry Pratchett; Equal Rites]

Horse sense is the thing a horse has which keeps it from betting on people.
[WC Fields]

I screwed in the first one. I realised how hot it really was that day. I screwed in the second one. Now I was sweltering, and my wrist ached like I’d manually pleasured a rugby team.
[Antonia at http://yetanotherbloomingblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/my-darlings.html]

environment, history, links, music, personal, pleasures, sexuality, thoughts, topographical

Weekly Interesting Links

OK guys & gals, so here’s another weekly, but doubtless occasional, new series — links to interesting sites I’ve come across during the week but which haven’t made it into a full posting.

An article by my friend Potter-san on the Soul of Okinawan Music. The music of Okinawa (the southern-most tropical islands of Japan) is a fun eclectic mix of their native music and just about anything they can import. Try it! I was surprised how much of it I liked.

Also advance information on the London Okinawa Day 2011 on Saturday 25 June. I’ve never managed to get to this annual event but it sounds like it should be a fun day. Anyone want to get together a party of us?

On a totally different subject, a thought-provoking item Should Young Teens be Prescribed Hormonal Contraception? by Prof. Kate Clancy. All the more powerful because Clancy is American and her stance is totally contrary to the prevailing American ethic of total teenage abstinence.

If you are interested in your family history and have forebears who worked on the railway you might be interested in the Railway Ancestors FHS.

In view of the week’s biggest event (at least here in the UK) history buffs may be interested in Medieval Weddings.

One of the most misunderstood areas of the law as it affects anyone involved in literary or artistic ventures is copyright. Fortunately the British Library describe the duration of UK copyright in one easy flowchart. But I suspect I shall have to continue to explain intellectual property law even to our literary society trustees. 🙁

And finally, here’s a super eco-idea: use cardboard packaging impregnated with seeds to rejuvenate the environment. No sorry you can’t have the idea, it’s already been done by Life Box.

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]

ramblings, thoughts

It was ever thus …

We are currently in the throes of having our bathroom completely gutted and rebuilt. Not fun but bearable although being down to a lavatory pan, bucket and tap in the corner for several days was a bit of a trial — though better than many of our forebears would have had.

At the same time we have embarked on a massive house clearance exercise. (I was going to say “house tidying” but that is to underestimate the 30 years of rat’s nest we inhabit.)

So yesterday we were going through the very top shelf over my desk and in the farthest corner I found my old notebook of quotations etc. started when I was a final year undergraduate in 1972. In it I found the following editorial from Phoenix, the then student newspaper of the University of East Anglia, dated 15 January 1976.

Boredom

We’re only three days into the Spring Term at this writing, and already the complaints about boredom are beginning to surface. On one level, this is within the realm of the perfectly normal, and something we accept without really noticing. On another level, the boredom and frustration students mention regularly indicates a problem that has been long overlooked. There is no reason for boredom, but the structured nature of teaching methods is resistant to change, and there is little immediate likelihood of anything new appearing.

We wonder from time to time about the rationale behind the endless booklists, tiring and too often fruitless trips to the library, and papers that demand not creative thought, but merely the cataloguing of odd bits of data from the mountainous collection of esoteric journals. If the university is to be something more than a cloistered society of pedestrian academics, it must stimulate students to think creatively and constructively, rather than mass produce a stream of individuals whose greatest accomplishment has been to take a degree without wondering why.

Scary that nothing changes and that students at this date were already aware of the futility of what some of their peers were doing.

What’s even more scary is that I suspect (no real evidence) this was penned by one of my friends, three of whom — Pete Cadwallader, Ged Sursham (hope I’ve remembered the spelling correctly) and Joe Beals — were as I recall at that time the editorial and production team of Phoenix.

Oh and in the way of student things, the paper was called Phoenix because it had risen from the ashes of the previous paper, Twice, which had in turn risen from the ashes of its predecessor Once.

beliefs, food+drink, people, quotes, science, thoughts, topographical

Quotes of the Week

Here’s this week’s selection of words that have caught my eye in the last week …

We’ve replaced the time we used to spend cooking food with watching people cook food on TV.
[Fiona Yeudall quoted in “Foodies: Are food crazies getting their just desserts?”, The Globe and Mail, 19 March 2011]


“No data yet,” he answered. “It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgement.”
[Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes]

It is important to reflect on the kindness of others. Every aspect of our present well-being is due to others’ hard work. The buildings we live and work in, the roads we travel, the clothes we wear, and the food we eat, are all provided by others. None of them would exist but for the kindness of so many people unknown to us.
[Dalai Lama]

London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.
[Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes]

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
[Richard Feynman]

I grew convinc’d that truth, sincerity and integrity in dealings between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life.
[Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography]

If it’s not fun, you’re not doing it right.
[Bob Basso]

Marshall’s corollary to the last: If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.

nudism, sexuality, thoughts

Good Willie!

3 Comments

Continuing our theme of normalising nudity and sexuality, I have an intriguing question. Well I think it’s interesting anyway.

My friend Katy has recently been to see the National Theatre production of Frankenstein starring Jonny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch. You can find her post about it here. At the end of it she says:

Still, at least I got to see Jonny Lee Miller’s willy […]
Good, but still nothing to beat Ian McKellen’s just in case you were wondering.
I’m doing a survey. Famous Theatrical Willies Wot I Have Known.

And it made me wonder … What makes a “good” willie? What is “good” for you? Size? Shape? Surrounding hairiness, or lack thereof? Some vague aesthetic beauty?

And here I’m talking in a non-sexual context; not about what makes for great sex with a specific partner — although they could be the same, of course. This is the willie to look at and appreciate aesthetically, and perhaps desire to know better (regardless of your interest in its owner); in the way you would appreciate Michaelangelo’s David, sans figleaf.

And for those of you who like yoni … What makes a good yoni? Again, what is good for you? Aesthetically.

Intriguing isn’t it? And surprisingly difficult. We have enough trouble saying what we like in a face, and we see hundreds of them every day. And we’ll happily discuss what we like about faces and other body parts. Lads in the pub may even discuss the finer points of boobs. Yet we never, at least in my experience, discuss the aesthetics of genitalia. And yet we all know they’re there. And we’ve all seen a few (although even the most diehard genital observer would probably never come close to seeing as many as they do faces). So why shouldn’t we discuss their aesthetics as well?

And, yes, I’m going to have to go and think about my likes and dislikes too!

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]

freedom of speech, nudism, sexuality, thoughts

Aspects of Censorship

1 Comment

What’s wrong with these two pictures?

That’s right. Nothing.

But they show male and female naughty bits! And to find the likes of them on the internet is increasingly difficult: one either has to steal them from the nether reaches of sites like Flickr or go to X-rated sites. Not even most stock photograph or medical sites carry wholesome photographs of real people in the nude. This is ridiculous. Indeed it is increasingly censorship by the back door.

Malcolm Boura, British Naturism‘s (BN) Research and Liaison Officer writes a useful short article in the latest edition of BN’s members’ magazine with a longer, more detailed briefing document on the BN website.

Here, in Malcom’s words, are some of the salient points from his article:

Until a couple of years ago, I was proud to live in a country which valued freedom of speech but then I started to dig below the surface … There are an enormous number of censors but most of them operate behind a veil of secrecy …

A worrying development in recent years is the exporting of American prejudices to us by corporations such as Facebook and Apple … why should a US businessman dictate what we are allowed to see? …

Films on television are frequently cut but have you ever known a broadcaster admit to it? … Usually, the censorship is to placate those who preserve the memory of the late Mary Whitehouse, not for any rational reason, so it suits them to keep quiet about it …

So what harm does it do? If a social worker tries to obtain child protection documents from the BN website, they will probably be stopped by the council’s web-filtering software. The message is clear – naturism is so dangerous that even adults must be protected from it.

That reinforces prejudice and that could be catastrophic for any naturist family with whom the social worker is working …

Censorship has been vastly more effective at preventing access to wholesome pictures of the body than it has in preventing access to pornography. Should pornography really be the main way by which children and young people find out what people look like? Even worse, should it be the main way they find out how people behave in a sexual relationship? …

Why is it that so many people just assume that nudity must be harmful to children? Why is it that politicians just assume that people will support moves towards greater prudery? … The excuse … is “Think of the children” but as happens far too often, nobody is bothering to actually think … It is just an appeal to assumed popular prejudice. I say ‘assumed’ because I doubt very much if it really is that popular.

If you’re interested in censorship, the extent to which its tentacles reach into daily life, how it affects society and ways in which the naturist movement may be affected, then I commend the Malcolm’s briefing document.

And if censorship reaches so far into the realms of nudity, body image, sexuality etc. you can be sure it is there in may other areas as well.

We need to remain ever on our guard and fight this creeping paralysis. It’s hard because much of the censorship is not formalised and is totally unaccountable. But to maintain a civilised society freedom of speech and human rights must be upheld. And to do that nudity and sexuality need to be normalised, not marginalised and criminalised.

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]