Important Update | Please share with anyone interested in the Global Congress on Gender & Sexuality Studies. It’s in Amsterdam this year, one of my favourite cities full of bikes & SE Asian food as well as groovy design, great art & a hopping nightlife. Definitely a conference to remember!
A picture of a rather dilapidated copy of "The picture of Dorian Gray" There is visible water damage to the cover and the plastic cover is yellowing. Obviously, not evident from the picture but there is a truly foul musty smell emanating from it!
Last week, a gentleman returned this rather dilapidated copy of this famous book to us after 50 years. He had found it in his attic!
Presumably this means there is a pristine copy somewhere in our libraries....
I like it like that! Nice work! Also I used to ‘tidy up’ my art more before starting to sell it online. It’s the non-planned moments that prove it’s authentic to people. And as AI copies everything we do, ours will be authentic art!
Monte Lauro, Sicily ... what a place! Soooo many orchids. Picks from 8hrs 20min in the field 🤣. Ophrys laurensis, Ophrys tenthredinifera, Anacamptis papilionacea and a Bertolonii hybrid headache. 💜🇮🇹 20/4/2026
It’s just ignorance & US popular culture. Every week they have a different hero who is going to save them. The idea of taking to the streets, in constant revolt, until the govt falls doesn’t seem to occur to them.
👀
Who calls us papists? And why filthy?
… island, has always worked together. And in the North it was unique in being non-sectarian. Both the N & the S seek to support each other against persecution.
Where this gets interesting is that SF is one of the largest parties in the Republic & sells itself as gay friendly, yet banned trans healthcare for kids in Northern Ireland. I can see an all Ireland discussion on their party inclusion. Unlike every other feature the LGBTQ community on this …
*Politicians, who like to use but not support the LGBTQ community, will still get their photo ops, but won’t be allowed to march under their party banners or wear party branding en masse. So they can still come but they can’t pretend they’re not homophobic.
Interesting to see this bubble up on which groups can’t have official floats/sections* at Pride. SF, Alliance, DUP & UUP will clear not be part of marches in NI. The exclusion of Stonewall is because they appeased No 10, & gave Sir Stormfront his own Pride Party against the wishes of the community.
For everyone talking about the Pope, as if he were a superhero. With one Papal Bull [official announcement] he could force Catholic preschools to be Christian. He won’t though, because the Church is good at talking but not acting. And then they wonder why more leave.
Maybe one of them had a sex addiction. There’s something sort of incestuous about it!
You can’t blame Disney, it was v much standard in Central European folk tales. What’s interesting tho is the influence of refugees fleeing the war to the US & how US cartoons & popular perception of commercial art is v much derived from the art of that area too. Think Kandinsky or Münter.
But were they good looking? The affairs I was aware of happened in the US offices & the people involved were so unattractive I found them hard to believe.
Even in kids books & movies. [two gay penguins however, the world collapses]
… sex is purely for the purpose of making babies & should be avoided for any other purpose.
The irony here is that many heterosexuals think of gay people only in terms of sex. Meanwhile popular culture is just one enormous straight cis orgy.
Get a room!
Gay people have to see straight sex, from the age of 3, on TV, in advertisements, school playgrounds, school books, movies & university societies & on TV, more TV & even more TV. Are we know to have it forced down our throats in the workplace. I can only offer the Catholic view - heterosexual…
*of course corporations make it a firing offence to shag on top of the photocopier, or have a private moment in the server room. One wonders now that racism, homophobia & misogyny [DEI] are no longer banned, what does it mean for office furniture. Already working from home is forbidden.
Maybe I’m just too old school, but the idea of having an affair with a work colleague is exhausting. Also have you seen the people in large corporations? Post coitus would there be a KPI ranking? What’s the situation with outsourcing? Straight ppl are v strange*
Why doesn’t anyone in the media ask the very simple question. If being antisemitic I’d wrong, why is being homophobic OK? After all both groups shared the concentration & death camps of the Third Reich?
Dark times.
One of the most important debates should be ‘is it OK to punch Nazis?’
Or whether the only good Nazi, is a dead Nazi?
Or why does the far right feel so threatened by self expression that it clamps down on it, in its Orwellian idea of what is ‘free speech’?
*they also want to persecute LGBTQ people, but when it comes to White politicians & academics it’s always about racism first.
No doubt they’ll also protect antisemitic, racist & Islamophobic speech, too?
The only reason these laws are coming in is so far right lecturers can say the N word in public*.
Farewell, Desmond Morris - wonderful human, zoologist, ethnologist, Surrealist artist, author, in Kildare today.
In memory & celebration of a life lived well & to its fullest - a story he sent us for a publication last yr:
museumofchildhood.ie/when-we-were...
Photos: Museum of Childhood Ireland
Herb-Paris (Paris quadrifolia) in a rather manky chalk scarp wood nr Alvediston, Wiltshire today. Unhelpfully likes hiding amongst dense Dog's Mercury Mercurialis perennis, which can make things difficult. @bsbibotany.bsky.social
Calling all Scots. Now’s your chance to cross-examine Polanski on his policies. It looks like they might get some 20% in the next UK general election, based on current polling & movement of left wing Labour supporters to the Greens.
We are looking at a painting of St Liphardus - a 6th-century lawyer, hermit and abbot in Meung-sur-Loire near Orléans, France. He is wearing bishops clothing including a surplus and mitre and is holding a crook. On a lead is a small knee high green and blue dragon.
We’re very sorry sir but you cannot bring your emotional support dragon in here.
There was a religious element then with the establishment being WASP [White Anglo Saxon Protestant] & discrimination against the ‘uneducated’ & Roman Catholic Irish. Even JFK had to prove to the WASPs that the Pope wouldn’t tell him what to do. Now we have a far right Catholic Supreme Ct majority!
This area fascinates me in terms of how countries influence each other. The second most influential lobby, in terms of foreign countries, is the Irish one. There’s a massive contrast between how each state influences US politicians. The history of the Irish lobby is fascinating from the 1880s on.