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]

memes, natural history, personal, photography

[7/52] Crocuses


[7/52] Crocuses, originally uploaded by kcm76.

Week 7 entry for 52 weeks challenge.

Our lawn and fruit border are full of crocuses, mostly in shades of purple. I know we’ve planted some, but they must be spreading as I’m sure (like these in the fruit border) they’re in places we wouldn’t have planted them. And they seem to be doing well despite the waterlogged clay soil of the lawn.

natural history

Squirrel

There’s a Grey Squirrel sitting almost in the top of our Silver Birch tree. It has been there since about 1015 this morning. It is now 1545-ish and beginning to get dark. Apart from turning round two or three times it has been stock still, as if asleep. I find it hard to believe that a healthy squirrel would choose to sleep for this long in broad daylight, in the open, in the rain and in the top of a bare tree being blown hither and yon by a freezing wind. Maybe it is ill and dying. If so it can’t be long before either it falls out of the tree or the carcass is taken away by the crows. This is (a crap photo of) the fellow at about 1030, soon after I first spotted him …

… and he’s still there!

Interesting times we live in. We’ll have lions whelping in the streets next!

amusements

Auction Oddities

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Another in our occasional series highlighting the oddities which turn up at our local auction house. In reading this remember we are talking suburban London, not seaside.

A square of South African grass weaving in yellow, brown, black and orange, size 25″x25″ approximately.

A canteen of plated cutlery for not quite six.

A stuffed gull in a glass case.

A mixed lot including Wallace & Gromit teapot, a pair of large oriental vases, bejewelled scent bottles, wind-up tin-plate Mickey Mouse, a pair of china horses, mottled glass basket, figurine in Highland dress, etc.

A Black Forest gateau carved cuckoo clock, embellished with stag head, hare, game bird.

A fishing creel with leather straps and handle.

A vintage ear trumpet, with telescopic stem, of tortoiseshell appearance.

A vintage model of a goat, in goat fur and simulated horns.

An old wooden box containing old packaging, Fairy toilet soap, old matches, old tins, and a box of old bulbs and Aladdin 2″ wicks, Delsey toilet tissue, soap, etc.

A pair of moulded concrete garden flower pots and a pottery elephant stand.

A baby bath full of old saws, secateurs and similar, an old Ransomes hand push lawn mower and four boxes of old tools, mainly chisels, hammers and spanners.

I’ll just leave your minds to boggle quietly. Although having said that they are also selling a lot of rather nice sounding 18th & 19th century silver and a few valuable Chinese vases. I guess that’s the joy of a “provincial” auction house.

current affairs

So They Think It's All Over, Do They?

As readers will know I rarely comment on politics and international affairs, but I have to be honest and say that the situation in Egypt (and indeed in Tunisia) is worrying.

The Egyptian people (the demonstrators anyway) seem to think that having got rid of Hosni Mubarak it’s all downhill.

Well maybe not. As I read it, all they have done is manage to force Mubarak into an orchestrated military coup. Mubarak bought himself enough time to get his money to a safe haven and is now in the process of following it having handed power to the military. Let’s not forget that the military senior officers are almost certainly all Mubarak’s men; as such they have little interest in change even if their junior officers and men don’t share their views.

What would you read into these headlines from BBC News today?

Egypt army tries to clear square. There is a stand-off in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as protesters who have camped there for 20 days thwart army efforts to clear the area.

Egypt’s army dissolves parliament. Egypt’s military authorities say they are dissolving the country’s parliament and suspending the constitution, two days after taking power.

Superficially this looks to me like the actions of the average military dictatorship:

We do not want any protesters to sit in the square.

Hundreds of policeman – who had become hugely unpopular for their violent attempts to suppress the uprising – had entered the square.

Military statement said the current government and regional governors would “act as caretakers”.

The higher military council said it would stay in power six months, or until elections … saying it would suspend the constitution and set up a committee to draft a new one.

Main priority was to restore the country’s security … if instability continued there could be “obstacles”.

It is all the right noises, but they are the noises all newly installed military rulers make: “We’ll stay in power until we can arrange elections”. And so often those elections never come.

It all sounds to me like the beginning of a repressive military dictatorship. For everyone’s sake I just desperately hope I’m wrong, and that this …

… doesn’t turn into this …

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.

memes, personal, photography

[6/52] Hospital Cruise?


[6/52] Hospital Cruise?, originally uploaded by kcm76.

Week 6 entry for 52 weeks challenge.

These sails are “decoration” in the atrium waiting area at our local BMI (private) hospital (Clementine Churchill Hospital, Harrow). I’ve been meaning to photograph them for years and remembered to take my camera today! I suspect they’re a fancy way to try to provide some share for the reception desk which is underneath them and right below what is a huge “conservatory” roof. They must need some shade because it is over-heated in there at the best of times and unbearable in the summer.

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.

memes, personal

Ten Things – February

The second in a monthly series of “Ten Things” for 2011. Each month I list one thing from each of ten categories which will remain the same for each month of 2011. So at the end of the year you have ten lists of twelve things.

  1. Something I Like: Cats
  2. Something I Won’t Do: Sailing
  3. Something I Want To Do: Take a Trip on Orient Express
  4. A Blog I Like: Emily Nagoski :: Sex Nerd
  5. A Book I Like: Brad Warner; Sex, Sin & Zen
  6. Some Music I Like: Beatles, Abbey Road
  7. A Food I Like: Pasta
  8. A Food or Drink I Dislike: Carrots
  9. A Word I Like: Crenellate
  10. A Quote I Like: When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives. [Joseph Campbell]