books, topographical

Listography – Last Week

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In this week’s Listography Kate is asking us what we did last week. So …

1. Spent Sunday morning driving round London testing a coach tour I’m conducting in under two weeks time. Can I get a coach in there? What is there interesting to say about this boring street?

2. Had coffee with a TV Producer and lunch with a publisher the same day. No not as exciting as it sounds, deals to pay me loads of dosh were not being done, nor did it relate too …

3. Sent off the (I hope) final proofs of my book. It should be out in October. Watch this space.

4. (Finished) reading four books.
Steve Burgess; Famous Past Lives. Very interesting, even if one isn’t totally convinced. Can’t put it down!
Christopher Ryan & Cacilda Jethá; Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships . Although interesting and makes a lot of sense it could have been much more tightly written. In the words of Ambrose Bierce “the covers of this book are too far apart”.
Tony Thorne; Jolly Wicked, Actually: 100 Words That Make Us English. Curate’s egg-ish; by turns interesting and dull; mostly dull.
Anthony Powell; Caledonia: A Fragment. Spoof pastiche poem, written in 1930s (and privately printed) which takes the piss out of the Scots unmercifully. Now publicly published as an entity in its own right. Introduction by the Earl of Gowrie.

5. Went to see my hypnotherapist. Yes, we’re making progress but it’s slow. Come on subconscious … LET GO!

And in between all that lot I was working full time getting everything ready for the conference I’m organising in 10 days time. Busy. Busy. Busy.

memes, personal, photography

[33/52] Small Glum Child

[33/52] Small Glum Child by kcm76
[33/52] Small Glum Child, a photo by kcm76 on Flickr.

Week 33 entry for 52 weeks challenge.

One from the archive. Here’s a small very glum-looking child. Yes, it’s me. I must be about 5 or 6, I guess, so we’re talking around 1956/7. I also guess it was taken by my father somewhere in Hertfordshire, Essex or Kent – most likely somewhere in the Lea Valley. Beyond that have no idea where or exactly when.

Sartorial elegance never was a strong point of mine!

amusements, arts, beliefs, medical, quotes, science, sexuality, thoughts

Quotes of the Week

This week’s accumulation of leaf-mould …

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
[Martin Luther King, Jr]

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
[Steven Weinberg]

What we can or cannot do, what we consider possible or impossible, is rarely a function of our true capability. It is more likely a function of our beliefs about who we are.
[Anthony Robbins]

The idea of monogamy hasn’t so much been tried and found wanting, as found difficult and left untried.
[GK Chesterton]

The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful.
[Carl Jung in a letter to Freud, 30 January 1910]

Why does society consider it more moral for you to break up a marriage, go through a divorce, disrupt your children’s lives maybe forever, just to be able to fuck someone with whom the fucking is going to get just as boring as it was with the first person before long?
[Susan Squire, I Don’t: A Contrarian History of Marriage]

If Botticelli were alive today he’d be working for Vogue.
[Peter Ustinov]

When we were kids, our mums used to write our name in our school uniform. Now we are adults, we have other peoples names on the front of our clothes!
[Thoughts of Angel]

medical, science, sexuality

Fact of the Week

Because fit is so important in the effectiveness of condoms, World Health Organization guidelines specify different sizes for various parts of the world: a 49-millimeter-width condom for Asia, a 52-millimeter width for North America and Europe, and a 53-millimeter width for Africa (all condoms are longer than most men will ever need) … According to an article published in Nature, Japanese and Chinese men’s testicles tend to be smaller than those of Caucasian men, on average. The authors of the study concluded that “differences in body size make only a slight contribution to these values.” Other researchers have confirmed these general trends, finding average combined testes weights of 24 grams for Asians, 29 to 33 grams for Caucasians, and 50 grams for Africans.
[Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, Sex at Dawn]

So there you are girls … Negroes really do have larger equipment. And the Chinese remain inscrutable. Not exactly PC but then that’s science for you!

medical, memes, science, thoughts

Listography – Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

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As this seems to be confessional time, here is Kate’s Listography from last week that I missed doing. It’s Things I’d Change About Myself … but more specifically characteristics I’d change. (Apparently the vanity of how I look is not allowed.) Hmmm…

My Weight. What do you mean this counts as looks? No it doesn’t. I’d look like a sack of spuds whether I was twice the size I should be or not. I have this characteristic which means I eat too much. Not necessarily the wrong things. Just too much. And if I’m not careful I drink too much beer as well. And I seem to be unable to switch it off. Why can’t I be down to fighting weight and sexy? Even hypnotherapy has so far only succeeded in chipping odd bits off the corners. And it’s all linked to …

Depression. Wouldn’t I love to get rid of my depression. It is so destructive. And I suspect I’ve had it since childhood. I also suspect that, although it is probably multi-factorial there is a genetic component; my father and his father were both depressive. I do seem to have made some progress here as a result of the hypnotherapy. My depression is now much less (giving up work helped a lot!) and I’ve halved the dose of my anti-depressants. Maybe that one is amenable to being smacked on the head.

Patience. I admit I’m not patient. I never have been. Although again I’m a lot better than I used to be. I hate being late. I hate others being late, or dithering, or being stupid, or disorganised. I hate standing in queues. I hate it when things don’t go my way; I get annoyed and sweary. Gggrrrrrrr! Just get a life and relax will you! NOW!

I’m not quite sure how to sum up this next one. But I would like to be less prone to having my arse stuck in my chair, doing more around the home, helping and generally being more engaged. I don’t mind being inept with my hands and having ten left thumbs for fingers (after all my father had twenty left thumbs and he survived to be 86). It’s partly down to the depression, but I feel that is really only an excuse. But I would appreciate being able to make myself do more; things might get done then. And I know Noreen would appreciate this too.

Finally, I need to be able to let go; be less “in control” all the time. Everything I do and say seems to be controlled; thought out; calculated. There isn’t enough spontaneity; not enough emotion. I seem to be frightened of being emotional, letting my emotions out and just allowing my self to relax into things and go with the flow. And for some strange reason it feels as if it has gotten worse recently. Or maybe I’ve just become more aware of it. Definitely something I need to work on.

food+drink, memes, personal, sexuality

Listography – Guilty Pleasures

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I haven’t done Kate’s Listography for the last couple of weeks — one has to have a break sometimes! One of the weeks I missed was because the subject (kid’s films) does nothing for me at all: I don’t have kids and I don’t do films. The other I just never got round to doing. So I’ve come back in this week on a really difficult topic: guilty pleasures.

What makes this the more difficult is to interpret what the topic means. Kate’s definition of a guilty pleasure is something that you shouldn’t really like but you actually do. But that isn’t quite my understanding, which is more like something you like (regardless of whether you should or not) but which you don’t normally talk about in public (for whatever reason).

So my five choices are going to be a mix of the two. Here goes …

Fried Food. Bad. Hideously bad. Both in calories and cholesterol. Just what is it about fried food that make it so good, and means it’s comfort food? There’s nothing quite like good fish & chips, or sausages, or full English breakfast. Then again there’s … chips! I do try to resist. Honestly, I do! But I usually fail. It’s no wonder I’m the size I am!

Dr Alice Roberts. Well if all you girlies are going to drool over a half-baked men like Tom Jones and Andrew Marr, then I can have a girlie. A real, sexy and frighteningly bright one at that: Dr Alice Roberts. Formerly of Time Team and latterly of Coast. As I say, not just sexy and frighteningly bright, she’s a talented artist, a medic, teaches anatomy and is no mean anthropologist and archaeologist. There seems to be nothing this girl can’t do! Geek girls are definitely sexy.

Plane Crashes. Yeah, ghoulish. Well no, not really. I would never wish a plane to crash nor for anyone to be involved. But they do. And I take a forensic interest (albeit from my armchair) in why they crash; what happened. I do the same with train crashes and other disasters like the demise of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power facility in Japan. I like working out what happened and why.

My PA. [NSFW warning] No idea what I’m talking about? See here for an explanation. And no you don’t get a picture — not publicly anyway.

Onanism. This is squarely in the “we all do it but guiltily we never talk about it” category. Why don’t we talk about it? Why is it such a taboo? It’s normal, natural and healthy. We all do it, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, relationship status etc. So where’s the problem?

So what would you own up to?

beliefs, history, memes, words

Word of the Week

Dzong.

A religious and/or governmental centre in one of the Buddhist kingdoms of the Himalayas (Bhutan and Tibet). A Buddhist monastery. The architecture is massive in style with towering exterior walls surrounding a complex of courtyards, temples, administrative offices and monks’ accommodation.