amusements

The Amusements of 2015

There have been so many hilarious things in 2015 — even leaving our benighted politicians aside — that it’s hard to know where to start. So I’ll follow the scheme of the last couple of years.

Product of the Year
Two examples of Indian food tie for this year’s gold medal:
Chicken Tikka Yorkshire Pudding on the market care of frozen food chain Iceland.
Indian Lasagne. Marinated chicken tikka lasagne bound in a mild massala sauce served with garlic naan and hand cut chips. This delicacy appears on the menu of the Boar’s Head Hotel near Sudbury, Derbyshire.

Auction Item of the Year (from our local auction house)
This year’s three winners are:
Third: A large ouzo decanter in the form of a Greek gentleman in national dress
Second: A vintage rhinoceros foot worked as a plant pot, circa 1900, an old whale tooth and a section of mammoth tusk
First: A collection of antique oddments
[Yes, that really is what they catalogued as a lot!]

Name of the Year
One always comes across some excellent names, but I think this year’s winner has to be Satchidananda Panda, a biologist who was mentioned in Scientific American back in February.

Best Neologism
The prize here has to go to whoever perpetrated the reality-based community.

Best Oxymoron
We have two winners here:
Gluten-free beer
[I’m not at all sure that it’s beer if it isn’t brewed with grain containing gluten; certainly the Germans wouldn’t recognise it as such.]
Precisely simulate
[My heart sinks whenever I see some set of scientists supposedly proving something using a simulation, or as we experts like to call it “in silico analysis”.]

Best Book Title
As always there are many contenders, but for me pride of place has to go to:
Advanced Pavement Research: Selected, Peer Reviewed Papers from the 3rd International Conference on Concrete Pavements Design, Construction, and Rehabilitation, December 2-3, 2013, Shanghai, China, edited by Bo Tian
[I think what clinched it for me was the idea of pavement rehabilitation.]
The runners-up, but only by a short head were:
Diana Rajchel, Divorcing a Real Witch: For Pagans and the People That Used to Love Them
Kaz Cooke, Living with Crazy Buttocks

Best Academic Paper Title
There was only ever going to be one winner: Flaccid Mechanics: From Penis-Size Statistics to Penis-Size Physics

Best Folk Custom
The winner here is the Annual Ceremony of the Christmas Cheeses.

Most Unusual Sport
This award has to go to Elephant Polo [see below]

Outstanding News Headlines
I could have overfilled this category in the first month of 2015 so here is just a selection of the many, many contenders. If I had to pick a winner it would be between the first two.
Idaho lawmaker asks if women could swallow cameras for gynaecological exams before abortion; Boing Boing, 23 February 2015
Masturbation will make your hands pregnant in the afterlife, televangelist warns; Independent, 26 May 2015
Southall Man Jailed For Sex Assault on Bus; Ealing Today, 9 June 2015
Three jailed for garden fork murder; BBC, 24 July 2015
[I’m still trying to work out how you murder a garden fork, or rape a bus.]
Singing tampons follow dancing genitals on Swedish kids’ TV; Guardian, 14 October 2015
Old Mice Drinking Champagne Three Times A Week Navigate Labyrinths Better; IFLScience, 9 November 2015
[Don’t we all?]
EFG Switzerland wins Elephant Polo Championship; Kathmandu Post, 27 November 2015
Stockholm clinic hands out penis measuring tapes; Guardian, 30 November 2015
Stolen circumcision ambulance found after tip-off; Evening Standard, 3 December 2015

Best Photograph
This guy on the London Underground clearly doesn’t realise his shopping isn’t properly bagged.

exposed

Best Press Release
There is only one real contender here: National Hot Dog and Sausage Council Announces Official Policy On ‘Hot Dog as Sandwich’ Controversy

And finally we come to …
Do what?
Where we celebrate the intelligibly unintelligible. Again we have two winners:

Wordsworth seems to uphold affective mind transmuting partial objects into a sublime whole, but in actual poetry parts ARE wholes.
[Nick Birns on Twitter, 09 January 2015]

Aerial images of bombings translated into abstraction, along with notions of purity constructed then consumed by its own consumerist culture; very real things, which mutate into some hyper-real coded symbolism in the work of Ian Parker and Srinivas Surti. The beauty and elegance of the work belies the twisted, contorted and inverted translations taking place. These two artists are pushing the gooey mess of their source material, 20th century photographs including bombsites and male figures (for Parker), and retail branding architecture (for Surti), through multiple mesh filters, separating, folding, splicing and reconfiguring them to arrive at a sort of ‘new brutalist’ abstraction. What’s striking in this transformation is that modernist structure and process have been replaced by transcription and interpolation.
[Quoted by IanVisits @ Facebook; 10 January 2015]

Let me know your favourite amusements of the year — and don’t forget to start collecting for 2016!

amusements, arts

Oddity of the Week: Pencils

A train on tracks, carved delicately out of graphite pencil lead, emerges from inside a carpenter’s pencil …


More details at Colossal and Laughing Squid.
Yes, there are other proponents of this art, see for instance Dalton Ghetti and Cerkahegyzo.
As someone who can’t even sharpen a pencil properly by hand (just one of the many things which made my woodwork master tear his hair out), I find these absolutely incredible.

photography

Weekly Photograph

This week I bring you (again) Tilly the Cat reclining on Christmas Day. It’s amazing what one can do with art effects to make and not very good snapshot look tolerable.

Painted Pussy
Painted Pussy
Greenford, Christmas Day 2015
Click the image for larger views on Flickr

amusements, books

Book Review: 100 Great Books in Haiku

David Bader
One Hundred Great Books in Haiku
Viking, 2005
I was given this little book as a Christmas stocking filler. In his Foreword the author says:

In the fifteenth century, Gutenberg … revolutionized the world of publishing. Previously, books had been so scarce that it was not uncommon for a library to have only a handful of bound Latin manuscripts, chained to a desk. Beach reading … required furniture movers. After Gutenberg, millions of books … were published … This in turn led to eyestrain, paper cuts, deforestation and adult reading groups.
In Japan, meanwhile, the seventeen-syllable haiku began to emerge. Developed by Zen monks possibly suffering from attention deficit disorder, these poems were packed with keen insights on frogs and cherry blossom yet short enough to be recited in a single breath. Japanese readers could experience and savour the finest haiku of Basho in its entirety (three lines), while Western readers of, say, John Milton’s Paradise Lost (10,000 lines) were still staring at the title page.
This collection attempts to combine these two breakthroughs … The formal requirements of haiku … have, admittedly, made it necessary to cut some things, such as characters, plot, dialogue and descriptive passages. Still, these are small sacrifices in view of the huge savings in time and shelf space.

bader1This is indeed what the author has done — and done rather successfully — to produce an easy read version of his selected books. Although of course one won’t necessarily agree with his entire choice of “great books” (What no Anthony Powell? No Lewis Carroll?)
The book is easy enough reading for those last 10 minutes in bed; in fact I read the whole book in bed in about 30 minutes. But it is something one will be able to dip into once in a while for light amusement. For instance here are three entries which caught my brain …

THE TALE OF GENJI
Lady Murasaki Shikibu
Two wives, ten consorts —
under the wisteria,
many warm futons.
… … …
FINNEGANS WAKE
James Joyce
Riverrun on and
by Jaisus s’dense! Bien alors,
scribbledehobble.
… … …
METAPHYSICS
Aristotle
Substance has essence.
Form adds whatness to thatness.
Whatsits have thinghood.

There’s no real arguing with any of that!
So yes, this book is a quick read, but an amusing one, and a well worthwhile stocking filler.
Overall Rating: ★★★★☆

ramblings

Advent Calendar 24

An Advent Calendar
Some of My Favourite Images from Other Photographers on Flickr
Click the image for larger views on Flickr and details of the photographer

Note that this image is not mine and is copyright the original photographer
who may be identified by following the link to Flickr

current affairs, sexuality

Safer Sex Work

Today I’m going to return to one of my perennial subjects: prostitution.
A couple of weeks ago New Scientist (12 December) carried an Opinion piece by Clare Wilson under the title Safer Sex Work. As I’m not sure if the linked article is generally accessible on the New Scientist website, I post here the core of the article.

Evidence suggests nations should legalise, not ban, prostitution
Do we help sex workers most by legalising or criminalising what they do? …
A proposed bill [in Scotland] that would decriminalise prostitution there has just finished its consultation stage. In the UK, selling sex isn’t illegal but related acts are, such as soliciting, kerb-crawling and working in a brothel. These would be allowed under the Scottish bill.
In 2012 [MSP] Jean Urquhart favoured a form of criminalisation. Then she went to a debate involving sex workers. What she heard … has led her to “come full circle”. [The] bill is modelled on a 2003 New Zealand law … backed by [WHO] …
… if what you do is illegal, it is harder to work with others or hire guards — that’s classed as working in a brothel. If you get attacked you dare not go to the police. And you are less likely to use services that provide free condoms and treat sexually transmitted infections …


Some opponents of legalisation want the “Swedish model”, where it is illegal to pay for sex but not to provide it, to avoid penalising sex workers. But a sex worker whose customers get arrested will quickly have no customers at all. So it still forces them to operate in secret, leading to the same problems.
As one sex worker says, the debate tends to revolve around feelings about men who pay for sex and what that says about society. She wants to scream: “What about our safety?”

Despite many opinions to the contrary (and despite being totally illogical), we know that the “Swedish model” doesn’t work: see for instance here and here. Unlike in New Zealand which has gone the opposite route to general acclaim.
I remember reading about this Scottish bill some while back and it did seem to me to be the most sensible and logical way forward. Prostitution isn’t going to go away. So legalising, or at least decriminalising, it seems the best approach: the sex workers can be protected, registered and have regular medical checks; that protects their clients as well; and once something is legal and regulated it can be taxed (and what government doesn’t want money for nothing?).
That looks like win-win-win to me.