Month: April 2024

Secret Crush

Gratuitous Chick Pics

Okay, it won’t be a secret after this, but nevertheless:  I have an old-man crush on Brit TV personality Kirstie Allsopp, the plump, matronly host of Location Location Location (or “Location x 3” as it’s sometimes called).

Apart from the obvious two, there are other reasons to love her and her  outspokenness:

‘Plug-in air fresheners are poison. If you use them you are a moron who is poisoning yourself, your family & your pets. No reason for them whatsoever.’

On having to deal with British Airways:

And:

If ever there’s someone with a large megaphone that you don’t want to irritate, it’s her.

And by the way, she has an exquisite accent and lovely speaking voice.  Hubba hubba.

Wokist Of The Year

Modernism, Wokism

Speaking of memes:  I don’t know or care exactly what year this happened, but FFS.

The subject was this pic, which must have become one of the most famous (and funniest) ever:

Funny, that is, except to some Swedish asshole:

The image created controversy in 2018 when it was ruled sexist by a Swedish ad watchdog.

Swedish internet service provider Bahnhof used it for a recruitment ad where the girlfriend in the image was “your current workplace” while the other woman was “Bahnhof”.

But the ombudsman concluded: “The advertisement objectifies women. It presents women as interchangeable items and suggests only their appearance is interesting… It also shows degrading stereotypical gender roles of both men and women and gives the impression men can change female partners as they change jobs.”

My take?

No doubt, he’d take exception to that one too, as it turns a wondrous object of desire (a woman’s vagina) into a humorless fuckwit.

Classic Beauty: Caroline Munro

Classic Beauty

As promised, another of Reader Pierre’s (and my) favorites, another horror movie queen (and Bond girl) Caroline Munro.

Today?

Somebody once said of her that she had the perfect body.  I dunno;  that’s always a personal thing.  (I, as any fule kno, prefer them a little more zaftig.)

But she’s pretty near the top, regardless of taste.

Merci encore, Pierre.

Twisted Bodies

Fine Art

I don’t know when I developed my fascination for the human form when it’s been contorted or twisted, for whatever reason or by whatever force.

Maybe it was at the Rodin Museum on an icy late-December day in Paris, where I saw this:


It depicts the fate of Ugolino the Count of Gherardesca, who while immured in Pisa’s Muda Tower, was driven mad by hunger and ended up eating his own children to survive.  I remember standing there, frozen to the bone, but unable to escape the tragedy.  (Nice story, but pure fiction.  When Ugolino’s bones were exhumed and examined for DNA traces of cannibalism, none were found.)  Of the Burghers Of Calais, we will not speak:

In warmer climes (Vienna, also in December but indoors), I saw a couple of paintings by Austrian Egon Schiele, who after WWI was unable to see any kind of future for mankind, and his artistic vision was distorted thereby in his depictions of people:


That’s The Lovers’ Embrace, and one has to have pity on them — which was his intention.  Even his own wife Edith wasn’t spared:

…nor his mistress, Wally [sic] :

And so to the modern day, where others — perhaps sharing Schiele’s attitude, or maybe just having their own mordant view of the human form, have produced works such as this:


I don’t know who the artists are, but their work fascinates me still.