northbysoutheast

In a reversal of the old line, apparently, lots of folk are as interested in what goes between the legs of blogsters, as between their headphones. I know I've been quite amused and rather delighted at some of the handsomer members hanging around the blogosphere. Or standing as the case may be. In retrospect perhaps there should have been categories - hard, limp, cut, un. And special awards for loveliest, most lickable and the member one would most like to take home to mother for a good meal. One in particular reminded me of something I'd seen on the box this past week. After gnawing away at my memory, I finally remembered that this particularly slugly pic (no I won't say which - you can see for yourself) could've been a still from a doco on naked mole rats. I watched this with morbid fascination. These creatures look just like ugly penises with tiny legs and little ratty teeth (shades of vagina dentata wot!) that zoom around little tunnels. Because there's so little room in the tunnels, subordinate moles have to crouch down and crawl through the legs of the dominant ones. This made them look just like the rather soiled and baggy penis that kept flopping around in the dust as one notable character around town crawled under a caravan last summer to repair a wheel. I remember standing there aghast at his lack of concern, and a bit incredulous at how very unattractive his little chap was.

Now I know what our dear Gay Blade, that other NMR's been alluding to.

What next? The bird stripped bare...(via Jill)

Today was vet day for YY the cat. Everything's okay of course except that she needs dental work. Now our exhortations for her to eat her bones are vindicated but that doesn't change the fact that pretty soon she's going in for a scrape and probably a few extractions. The canines (weirdly, they're called that even on a feline) that have given her a "littlest vampire" visage will also probably go. A gummy cat - my god - but the worst thing for me will be the huge hole this will leave in my cavernously empty pockets. I should get out the begging bowl à la the outragously shameless Danny B whose prettily coded but desparate "Switch" campaign won't have me holding my breath if the current tally is anything to go by! C'mon Singapuras he has some bargain priced dongxi over there.

My maternal grandmother would have turned 90 yesterday. I had forgotten (how soon...) until mum mentioned it. Oddly, and I don't usually do these things, but Firda who does, linked to a pop actuarial site which predicted that I'd be kicking around until I'm ninety. My mother's comment was along the lines of what an ornery old bastard I'd be...a Victor Meldew in the making. Nana was anything but. Her mother arrived in Australia from the English midlands around 1910 and was very much an Edwardian. I think this was modelled pretty much in Nana's outlook. She never complained - not ladylike - but inevitibly made her displeasure known. I remember her mother, my great grandmother - made by grim circumstance a much more assertive woman, who died when I was around 15. It's conceivable that in her early days in this country, she might have rubbed shoulders in a crowd with some old chap who'd been transported on perhaps the last shipment in 1868 of Feinians outlawed by the British to this country. Time's ebb and flow.

I don't think it could be quite as bad as they make out. Heard yesterday on an ABC-tv mid-evening news voiceover:

Only three Bagdad hospitals remain open. Others are turning away patients after looters have dissected them.

Could Rumsfeld be right about distorted reporting? Nah. I haven't seen as loathsome a creature since Hubert H. Humphrey smeared his way across small b&w screens way back in the late sixties. Kind of cross between a vulture and hyena. [Local equivalent? Perhaps Wilson Tuckey?] With a reptilian smile Rumsfeld trumpets the happiness of the locals now democracy's come to town. It seems we're seeing a brutal, thuggish regime (where did those 400, 000 soldiers go?)apparently morphing into gangs of brutal, thuggish men. The occasional cute kid or shoe-wielding buffoon doesn't moderate it for me. And I don't recall seeing more that half a dozen Iraqi women over all the weeks of the turmoil. I think now's the time to blitz the streets with scads of digital minicams with a direct line through to whatever tv network the occupying force enacts. Could they stomach a really participatory democracy?

For various not so unrelated reasons, I've been looking for the death count from WWII and serendipitously, found it in an old clipping from Tom C's Plasticbag.org - list even breaks these sorry stats down by country. For the record, the total was just over 56 milion. UN figures have deaths of non-combatants in the Twentieth Century going from around 5% in WW I, through 48% in WW II, to around 90% in some 30 theatres of war at the turn of the century. Calling it "collateral damage" just worsens this appalling failure of humanity. We can only hope that the relatively low numbers we're starting to hear coming out of Iraq herald a downward trend to the curve.