BUTTS BREASTS AND WOOLLY MAMMOTHS

VENUS OF WILLENDORF 28,000 B.C.E.

MATA HARI

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3219395/Will-Siberia-home-cloned-woolly-mammoth-Russian-scientists-set-new-laboratory-resurrect-extinct-giants.html

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-dawn/201004/why-do-breasts-mesmerize

The Breast (1972) is a novella by Philip Roth, in which the main character, David Kepesh, becomes a 155-pound breast. 

*

Americans are obsessed with big breasts and big butts.

But this infatuation with bottoms and bosoms SEEMS TO BE a perennial and universal preoccupation.

Scientists have hypothesized that non-paraphilic sexual attraction to breasts is the result of their function as a secondary sex characteristic. For instance, zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morristheorizes that cleavage is a sexual signal that imitates the image of the cleft between the buttocks, which according to Morris in The Naked Ape is also unique to humans, other primates as a rule having much flatter buttocks. Evolutionary psychologists theorize that humans' permanently enlarged breasts, in contrast to other primates' breasts, which only enlarge during ovulation, allows human females to "solicit [human] male attention and investment even when they are not really fertile.

Most mammals (EXCEPT FOR OUR SIMIAN COUSINS) don't seem to have this obsession, but I need to do more research to know for sure.

The history of striptease offers a glimpse into this obsession, and though there is not much on butts and breasts, we can use our imagination:

In ancient Greece, the lawgiver Solon established several classes of prostitutes in the late 6th century BC. Among these classes of prostitutes were the auletrides: female dancers, acrobats, and musicians, noted for dancing naked in an alluring fashion in front of audiences of men. In ancient Rome, dance featuring stripping was part of the entertainments (ludi) at the Floralia, an April festival in honor of the goddess Flora. Empress Theodora, wife of 6th-century Byzantine emperor Justinian is reported by several ancient sources to have started in life as a courtesan and actress who performed in acts inspired from mythological themes and in which she disrobed "as far as the laws of the day allowed". She was famous for her striptease performance of "Leda and the Swan". From these accounts, it appears that the practice was hardly exceptional nor new. It was, however, actively opposed by the Christian Church, which succeeded in obtaining statutes banning it in the following century. The degree to which these statutes were subsequently enforced is, of course, opened to question. What is certain is that no practice of the sort is reported in texts of the European Middle Ages.

Breasts and butts generate a lot of bucks...

and divorces.

Muslim women do not produce such an obsession BECAUSE THEY ARE VEILED, BUT they are mocked for their excessively protective apparel.

No butts or breasts show.

Only mystery.

IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES!

HELLO DR. STRANGELOVE

http://realnewsrightnow.com/2015/08/10/trump-i-will-absolutely-use-a-nuclear-weapon-against-isis/

http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/10/politics/donald-trump-fact-check-bomb-oil-fields-iraq/

Will Donald Trump trump the 2016 election?

The electorate has grown tired of big talkers who produce inadequate actions.

Americans are pumped up by Trump's macho (sometimes loony) rhetoric.

It has been entertaining...until most recently when Mr. Trump said that he would drop nuclear bombs on ISIS.

Yes, Donald Trump, Mr. Rich man; 

Yes, Mr. “whatever you call your weird pate” dude;

 Yes, Donald Trump, who promises to make America GREAT again (no more the Great satan, just GREAT).

Yes, Mr. Trump, we hear your swaggering and cocksure braggadocio.

You are a man of big walls, big buildings, and big bombs, but your mammoth and smug gonads might be too dangerous for America and the world.

We don't want you to make America GREAT again by dropping atomic weapons again...

ANYWHERE!

IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES!

I LOVE INERTIA BUT GRAVITY BRINGS ME DOWN

I love to sit in the sun,

I love to float in the sea,

I enjoy doing nothing,

I am lazy as a flea.

(I know, I'm thinking what you're thinking,
“Are fleas lazy?”)

*

I am like a dog or cat,

I can snooze at noon,

I can sleep until there's another full moon.

*

I don't like to fall down, but I've had many bad falls.

I mean the falling flat on my face kind.

Before getting old I was able to get up from such falls without too much pain or injury.

Now I take every footstep like it will be my last.

I do not want to fall down again.

My last two produced a fractured spine and a fractured humerus.

The injuries came five years apart.

*

I shiver and cringe when I see people on those gravity-defying, head-decapitating amusement park rides.

I prefer solid earth, pristine air, and silence.

Rivers and oceans.

IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND NOT FALLING DOWN

LETTERS

One more blast from the past!

Erato Muse of Poetry by Sir Edward John Poynter


TO AN UNFORGETTABLE TEACHER

I WANT TO BE AN ILLUSTRIOUS POET AND WRITER LIKE YOU TO BE ABLE TO WRITE
EXPRESSIVE AND MAGIC WORDS
ABOUT WHAT YOU MEAN IN MY LIFE
BUT I KNOW THAT THE
WAY TO BE LIKE YOU IS LONG.
SO, NOW I JUST CAN WRITE THE MOST SIMPLE
AND SHORT WORDS
THANK YOU FOR BEING MY TEACHER AND
THE WONDERFUL PERSON THAT INTERPRETS YOUR
VIVID SOUL.

THANK YOU MR. SQUIER

NOTE: I WILL REMEMBER
YOU MY WHOLE LIFE

FROM ANNA RAMOS
6-3-08

TO Lorelei: 

To feel talent-less is a feeling that all good writers have, since they recognize and appreciate the talent of other writers, and aspire for the same.
It is a sign that you seek perfection.
And that is a most worthy goal.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Go forward...with your army of words to unveil your mind, muse and imagination.
I, too, want to capture fleeting moments and turn them into golden words and thoughts.
Sometimes I succeed; most of the time I miss my mark.
We must aim at this mark even though we miss.
Don't feel downtrodden, and if you do, turn these deeply felt thoughts into poetry.

M.L. Squier
6-6-08


IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND POETRY!

WHAT TIME IS IT?

It's time to post an earlier post.  Sunday, December 28, 2008

ON TIME

A ROCK IS 
A TIMELESS
SILENT CLOCK.

My grandfather lived in a tent with his collie dog next to a river.

Except for some raccoons, there were few intruders into his pine-treed paradise.

It was quiet and solitary until summers arrived.

Although my grandfather was able to take apart any clock or watch---and then able to put the clock or watch back together---I don’t remember ever seeing him wearing a watch, or watching a clock.

But he did have a sundial.

He didn’t pay much attention to this sundial or what time it might “say”.

He had become much like those wise “savages” who knew time by the location of the sun.

What time is it?

Look for the sun.

Is the sun Low or High in the sky?

Then you knew what time it was.

My favorite poetic lines about time are T.S. Eliot’s:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

[From Burnt Norton

No. 1 of Four Quartets]

And these lines from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair---

I’ve never liked the words “kill time”.

When I’m about ready to say them, I refrain, and say “wound time”.

(Thank you Maurice Maeterlinck)

It’s that time of year again to say goodbye to the old year and hello to the new one.

As anyone who is past forty knows, the pages of time…

The hours…

The days…

And the years!

Go by much faster as we get older.

I find myself saying quite often, “It seems like yesterday” that this or that happened.

But it isn’t the clocks which have gotten faster.

It’s only our minds and bodies which are moving along on the winged feet of time.

Time seems to pass through us more than we do through it.

P.S.

I don’t use chalk anymore in my classroom, but I did many years ago.

I was always blowing chalk dust off of my wristwatch.

Finally, one of my students asked me (and she always prefaced every question that she asked with “Can I ask you a question?”):

“Why do you blow on your watch so much?”

What a wonderful question, I thought, and then after an abbreviated chuckle, I said to her:

“I’m just getting the chalk dust off of my watch.”

And she said, “Oh, I thought maybe you needed to blow on it to make it run…you know…with air.”

Another favorite anecdote is when I was tramping about and slept one night in a house with other strangers and stragglers.

I wrote about this timely experience in one of my poems.

Here it is:

TIME

I didn't sleep

I didn't snore

Inside

A house replete

With many feet

Spread out across

The living room floor.

I stayed inside the

Bathroom that was as

Yellow as the sun

And wrote poems ‘til

I thought I was done.

When the sleepy supine sleepers all awoke

Here is what to Jim the Space Cowboy I spoke:

"Jim", I said, "What time is it?"

He waved his hand

And asked me to follow him.

Jim the Space Cowboy took me to

The fridge and opened its white door;

Then he opened the freezer door

And took out an alarm clock that

He held in his hand.

Jim said:

“There is no time.

Time is frozen.”

P.S.

I went to the New Yorker magazine and read this poem. It strikes a similar chord on the theme of time:

Anterooms

by Richard Wilbur

January 5, 2009

Out of the snowdrift
Which covered it, this pillared
Sundial starts to lift,
Able now at last
To let its frozen hours
Melt into the past

In bright, ticking drops.
Time so often hastens by,
Time so often stops—

Still, it strains belief
How an instant can dilate,
Or long years be brief.

Dreams, which interweave
All our times and tenses, are
What we can believe:

Dark they are, yet plain,
Coming to us now as if
Through a cobwebbed pane

Where, before our eyes,
All the living and the dead
Meet without surprise.

IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND TIME!

THE UNIVERSE IS KICKING THE BUCKET

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3192913/The-universe-DYING-Astronomers-unveil-stark-new-evidence-shows-galaxies-energy-half-two-billion-years-ago.html

Ebola.

Global Warming.

Iranian nuclear bombs.

Kim Kardashian.

(Well, maybe not Kim Kardashian.)

And now there's even more bad news:

The Universe has lost half of its energy.

“The universe has basically plonked itself down on the sofa, pulled up a blanket and is about to nod off for an eternal doze.”

[Professor Simon Driver from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Western Australia.]

The next president of the United States won't be able to do anything about this, not even Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush.

(Donald Trump will build a homongous fence around the Earth to protect us from illegal E.T.'s).

There are many things we just can't control.

The Universe is one of these things.

So plonk down on the sofa, pull up a blanket, read, or watch a movie.

IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND THE UNIVERSE!

THE STONED BARD

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3191234/Was-Shakespeare-high-Analysis-pipes-garden-suggests-taste-cannabis.html

To be or not to be...stoned.

Was Shakespeare a pothead?

Of course he was!

How else could he have composed his great plays?

The Bard needed weed to do this.

Below is a typical day in the life of the Stoned Bard:

William:

Dear, have you seen my pot pipe?

Anne:

No, dear. Is it time again for you to do some smoking so THAT you can write?

William:

Yes, dear. Well, if I can't find my pot pipe, I'll just use rolling papers.

Anne:

O.K..

I'll look around for your pipe.

go ahead and get high so you can start writing.

William:

Ahhh, that's the ticket.

Now I can concentrate better on my iambic pentameter.

Anne:

Dear, good news, I found your pipe.

William:

Good.

Fill it up.

I'm ready for some more inspiration.

IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND SHAKESPEARE!

KITE FLYING AND THE REPUBLICAN DEBATE

AFGHANISTAN JOURNEY

THESE ARE EXPERIENCES I HAD WHILE I WAS IN THE U.S. PEACE CORPS, TEACHING ENGLISH TO FUTURE TEACHERS AND ENGINEERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KABUL. THIS WAS FROM 1977 TO 1978.

Kite-flying was on my mind right now, and I remembered this experience. 

NOTE: Last night republican candidates were flying some kites of their own.  A few were more like lead balloons.

MONDAY, AUGUST 14, 2006

EDUCATIONAL DISCIPLINE

We volunteers were required to make a visit to a provincial Afghan school. My visit was to a school in Jalalabad. Jalalabad was where fruit trees grew. It was an oasis only 3 hours from Kabul. The bus ride on the high, tortuous and narrow mountain road was frightening. I was happy when the bus stopped for prayers.

At the school in Jalalabad I walked into a crowded classroom. There were a few long benches and one blackboard. I was waiting for some instruction to begin. It was very quiet. Suddenly, the classroom emptied. I followed the crowd of students to the center of the schoolyard. A crowd of students surrounded one boy. Another student began hitting this boy on the back with a branch. It lasted for less than a minute, then the crowd returned to the classroom. I asked what had just transpired, and was told that the student had spoken in class. I had not heard anyone, but apparently the teacher had. Discipline!

While walking in Jalalabad I met a great-grandson of a famous Afghan governor.This great-grandson invited me to his house for tea. On our way to his house a child was crossing the road. The great-grandson tried to avoid hitting the child, but didn't. He accelerated when I protested that he had just hit a child. I looked back, and saw that the child had gotten up from the ground, apparently only grazed by the contact. The great-grandson pointed out that the child was not badly injured, and that if he had stopped he would have been in serious trouble. When we arrived at his house, he opened two large metal doors, and drove the Volkswagen beetle inside.

It was a very large estate, the largest I had ever seen while in Kabul. It had lush foliage and many fruit trees.

Tea was brought. After tea, the great-grandson brought out a huge kite in the shape of an American eagle, and he got it aloft in no time. He pointed out the "glass" string. He said proudly that his kite had never lost. I watched as the eagle flew higher and higher into the sky. Another kite was flying nearby. The great-grandson said, "Watch this". He quickly moved the string on his American eagle, and then he deftly sliced the string on the other kite. He still had never lost.

IT'S ABOUT RENEWABLE RESOURCES AND FLYING KITES!