Category Archives: thoughts

amusements, pleasures, science, thoughts

Mapping the Cat Brain

Oh, yes. Cat’s certainly do have brains. They have very well developed, subtle and devious brains. In fact it has been shown recently that Cats Adore and Manipulate Women. They do it to men as well, but either they don’t like men as much or we’re more immune to it.

The bond between cats and their owners turns out to be far more intense than imagined, especially for cat aficionado women and their affection reciprocating felines, suggests a new study.
[…]
The researchers determined that cats and their owners strongly influenced each other, such that they were each often controlling the other’s behaviors. Extroverted women with young, active cats enjoyed the greatest synchronicity, with cats in these relationships only having to use subtle cues, such as a single upright tail move, to signal desire for friendly contact.

And then today I came across this mapping of the cat’s brain at CatStuff.

In the light of this latest research the diagram clearly ought to contain a tiny gland for sniffing out male humans and a much larger gland for detecting females.

Oh come on lads, you already knew we stood no chance!

amusements, books, history, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

OK, here’s this week’s selection of oddities encounter in the last few days …

‘Look at the bird.’ It was perched on a branch by a fork in the tree, next to what looked like a birdhouse, and nibbling at a piece of roughly round wood it held in one claw.
‘Must be an old nest they’re repairing,’ said Lu-Tze. ‘Can’t have got that advanced this early in the season.’
‘Looks like some kind of old box to me,’ said Lobsang. He squinted to see better. ‘Is it an old … clock?’ he added.
‘Look at what the bird is nibbling,’ suggested Lu-Tze.
‘Well, it looks like … a crude gearwheel? But why —’
‘Well spotted. That, lad, is a clock cuckoo.’
[Terry Pratchett; Thief of Time]

Hindsight, the historians’ parlour-game, can lead from false premise to false conclusion. Because we see the fateful consequences of our forebears’ actions, we can wrongly suppose that, had they done differently, things would have been better.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

The clergy were seldom rich, but they were treated as if they were gentlemen: very often they were. Nearly all of them had degrees. High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, they were disseminated throughout the land. If they were even half good at their jobs, they and their wives and families mixed with everyone in their parish. They were extraordinary agents of social communication. It meant that almost everyone in England was within five miles of a man who could read ancient Greek.
[AN Wilson, After the Victorians]

Snow fell, east winds blew, pipes froze, the water main (located next door in a house bombed out and long deserted) passed beyond insulation or control. The public supply of electricity broke down. Baths became a fabled luxury of the past. Humps and cavities of frozen snow, superimposed on the pavement, formed an almost impassable barrier of sooty heaps at the gutters of every crossing, in the network of arctic rails.
[Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room]

In the highbrow world you “get on”, if you “get on” at all, not so much by your literary ability as by being the life and soul of cocktail parties and kissing the bums of verminous little lions.
[George Orwell]

In a mad world only the mad are sane.
[Akira Kurosawa]

beliefs, quotes, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

OK, guys & gals, here’s this week’s selection of wacky words …

Come on, Milhouse, there’s no such thing as a soul! It’s just something they made up to scare kids, like the Boogie Man or Michael Jackson.
[Bart Simpson]

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
[Philip K Dick]

Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what’s right.
[Isaac Asimov]

I’ve come to believe quite strongly that monogamy is not at all the natural condition of human beings, despite what we’ve been told for so many years. For some people it comes effortlessly. For others it is absolutely impossible. I think for most of us it is possible, but extremely difficult. When I hear that someone has failed at it I am never shocked or surprised.
[Brad Warner; at http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/02/disrobing-genpo–brad-warner/]

Like childhood, old age is irresponsible, reckless, and foolhardy. Children and old people have everything to gain and nothing much to lose. It’s middle-age which is cursed by the desperate need to cling to some finger-hold halfway up the mountain, to conform, not to cause trouble, to behave well.
[Sir John Mortimer, Murderers & Other Friends]

We will have to build … devices that will store and release time to where it is needed, because men cannot progress if they are carried like leaves on a stream. People need to be able to waste time, make time, lose time and buy time.
[Terry Pratchett; Thief Of Time]

Most people have some means of filling up the gap between perception and reality, and, after all, in those circumstances there are far worse things than gin.
[Terry Pratchett; Thief Of Time]

current affairs, medical, science, sexuality, thoughts

Pubic Hair Removal – Why?

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An interesting article in the Guardian on Friday (11 Feb) by Bidisha in which she asks why women are these days removing their pubic hair. Her contention is that it’s a fashion (almost certainly) and that it is generally a bad idea, psychologically, for both men and women. I’m not sure I entirely agree with this, but it’s an interesting argument:

Are women so ashamed of their bodies’ natural beauty, so unaccepting of things as they are that they will do anything at all, even if it’s degrading, to get some willy time? A man who withholds his attention and affection according to the follicle count of a lady’s crotch doesn’t deserve intimacy with a real-life woman. A man who likes a woman without pubic hair despises adult women so much that he wants us to resemble children […]

I worry about these men too […] They are now in danger of returning to a Victorian naivety. They may well believe that […] women naturally do not have any body hair. Upon seeing some real hair on a real woman for the first time they may well vomit or faint, or both […]

As for the women, don’t you have anything more interesting to do than dutifully coif your cassoulet?

You can find the full article here.

current affairs, food+drink, sexuality, thoughts

Love in a Dish

Yesterday’s Times reprinted an interesting essay written by one Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher under the title Love in a Dish. As the introductory blurb says: “Couples who delight in food will delight each other: it is as true now as it was when food writer MFK Fisher wrote this essay on cookery and intimacy in 1948”. Although the article is now deeply un-PC (and American) the essential sentiment is indeed still relevant today.

As the article is hidden behind a paywall (so I can’t link to it) here are a few key extracts.

Brillat-Savarin,who amused himself in his old age by writing The Physiology of Taste […] concerned himself mightily with the problem of married bliss. He wrote many paragraphs and pages on the importance of gastronomy in love, and told […] that happiness at table leads to happiness in bed.

A mutual enjoyment of the pleasures of the table […] has an enormous influence on the felicity that can and should be found in marriage. A couple […] who can share this enjoyment “have, at least once every day, a delightful reason for being together […] have an unfailing subject of conversation; they can talk not only of what they are eating, but also of what they have eaten before and will eat later, and of what they have noticed in other dining rooms, of fashionable new recipes and dishes, etc. […]

Brillat-Savarin felt […] that a man and woman who share any such basic need as the one for food will be eager to please and amuse each other in the satisfying of that need, and will do what they can to make the basically animal process enjoyable. “And the way in which mealtimes are passed […] is most important to what happiness we find in life.”

[…]

It seems incredible that normal human beings not only tolerate the average American restaurant food, but actually prefer it to eating at home. The only possible explanation for such deliberate mass-poisoning, a kind of suicide of the spirit as well as the body, is that meals in the intimacy of a family dining-room or kitchen are unbearable.

[…]

At home, fatigue and boredom would sour the words they spoke and the food they ate, and the words would be hateful and the food would be dull as ditchwater and drearily served forth. […]

And having failed so completely to satisfy in harmony one of their three basic needs, it cannot be wondered that the other two, for love and shelter, are increasingly unfulfilled. There can be no warm, rich home-life anywhere else if it does not exist at table, and in the same way there can be no enduring family happiness, no real marriage, if a man and woman cannot open themselves generously and without suspicion one to the other over a shared bowl of soup as well as a shared caress.

[…]

A healthy interest in the pleasures of the table, the gastronomical art, can bring much happiness. […]

In Richardson Wright’s Bed-Book of Eating and Drinking, he wrote in a discussion of the delights of supping in the kitchen, that more meals served on oilcloth by the stove might be one way to “stabilise our American marital status. I hold to the lowly belief,” he went on, “that a man never knows the sureness of being happily married until he has… cooked a meal himself”.

[…]

“The first sign of marital trouble is when a man or woman finds it distasteful to face each other at table. … I am convinced that a man and wife with congenial appetites and a knowledge of foods and cooking have the basis for lasting happiness.”

[…]

Even steak and potatoes, when they have been prepared with a shared interest and humour and intelligence, can be one great pleasure which leads to another, and perhaps — who knows — an even greater one.

In fact I would be tempted to go a step further and suggest that anyone who cannot enjoy food cannot truly enjoy life.

MFK Fisher’s Love in a Dish and Other Pieces is due for publication by Penguin in April 2011; it can be pre-ordered from Amazon.

amusements, music, personal, sexuality, thoughts

Tasmanian Liberation

Just today (where have I been?) I came across this song from Amanda Palmer & The Young Punx. It’s catchy. But more than that, the lyrics (at the bottom of this page on Amanda Palmer’s website if they’re not clear) are a hoot. (And they mostly accord with my view of the way the world should be. Hehe!)

There’s the background to the song (if you need an explanation) and a video of her original rendition on Amanda Palmer’s blog. And comment on SPIN amongst other sites.

Enjoy … but it’s probably NSFW!

[youtube

OMG! I’m turning into a punk rapper! At my age!?!? OMG!!!!!

food+drink, thoughts

A Week in Food

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As mentioned a couple of days ago, we seem to have eaten particularly well this week. By that I don’t mean that we’ve been especially lavish with 27 course meals of caviare, asparagus and hen’s teeth in aspic. It’s just that our single course, evening meal has, each day, been a proper and usually interesting repast; none of this “ploughman’s stuff” (good though bread and cheese can be).

Here’s what we’ve eaten as “meal of the day” over the last week:

  • Sunday: Haggis (as described before)
  • Monday: Kidney Bean & Chorizo Risotto
  • Tuesday: Vegetable Curry with Lemon Rice; accompanied by Banana & Avocado
  • Wednesday: Sausage & Pasta in Tomato Sauce; with flaked Parmesan
  • Thursday: Cheese, Chorizo & Mushroom Frittata; Ciabatta Rolls
  • Friday: Stir-Fried Beef & Pasta Salad with Avocado, Tomato & Lamb’s Lettuce
  • Saturday: Beef Madras with Lemon Rice; also accompanied by Banana & Avocado
     
  • And tonight promises Roast Chicken with Baked Potato, Steamed Buttered Savoy Cabbage & Fennel and Garlic Sauce.

The curries were washed down with industrial quantities of Gin and (low calorie) Tonic; the other meals with wine.

The two beef dishes on Friday and Saturday were because I bought a good, reduced price (because of short use by date) piece of organic beef at the supermarket on Friday. This made me amend my original plan for Friday of Smoked Salmon and Pasta Salad.

Like all our cooking these dishes were made from fresh ingredients and in our own idiosyncratic way designed to be healthy(-ish), and quick & easy to do on the hob at the end of a working day. No buggering around with difficult cream sauces, 29 steps, three ovens, a grill and spun sugar. Good food doesn’t have to be difficult, over fancy or time-consuming; and quick food doesn’t have to be unhealthy.

Just as well, mind you, that we’ve eaten so well this week as I shall be condemned to survive of gutless rubbish next week as I have a series of medical tests (postponed from 2 weeks ago) which mean I have to have a special diet for a few days. Bummer!

(Recipes available on request.)

amusements, beliefs, history, personal, quotes, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s selection …

There is no moral precept that does not have something inconvenient about it.
[Denis Diderot]

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.
[Dalai Lama]

[…] meeting at the College of Arms [with] Clarenceux King of Arms to discuss what might be appropriate [on a] coat of arms […] He suggests that though some people like to incorporate a play on their name in their Arms he was not sure a champagne bottle was on their approved list.
[Sir Stephen Bubb; http://bloggerbubb.blogspot.com/2011/01/arms-and-church.html]

In the movie Stardust Memories, Woody Allen meets some aliens and starts asking them all the Big Questions About Life. They tell him, “You’re asking the wrong questions. If you want to make the world a better place, tell funnier jokes!”
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality]

The next two are quite deep philosophically, but absolutely right logically …

I don’t know what’s waiting at the end of our lives. No one does. But it’s not the future that matters. Right now is what counts. If you want to believe in reincarnation, you have to believe that this life, what you’re living through right now, is the afterlife.
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality]

The present moment is eternal. It’s always there. It is unborn and it cannot die. And it does not reincarnate.
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality]

A guy walks up to a Zen master and asks, “Is there life after death?
The Zen Master says, “How should I know?”
The guy replies indignantly, “Because you’re a Zen master!”
“Yes,” says the Zen master, “but not a dead one.”
[Brad Warner; Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth about Reality]

You cannot find reality inside a computer!
[Nishijima Roshi]

amusements, food+drink, sexuality, thoughts

A Difficult Question

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OK, so here’s a really hard question for everyone which I saw being discussed on the internet a few days ago.

Which would you rather give up forever … cheese or oral sex?

And no, you aren’t allowed to negotiate restrictions and loopholes. It means all oral sex, both given and received. And it means all cheese: from cheddar to Camembert and Gorgonzola to cream cheese.

Although it is interesting to speculate why one might ever have to make such a decision, it is a hard question, isn’t it?

I think I have to agree with the apparent majority and elect to forego oral sex. As one person has remarked: there are lots of ways to have an orgasm but only one way to eat pizza, macaroni cheese or deep-fried brie.

What would you choose – and why? (And no you don’t have to make your decision public if it embarrasses you!)