Monday, May 8, 2017
Sunday, May 7, 2017
Love or lust on Burnaby Lake
This is some footage of pigeons I took at Piper Spit, Burnaby Lake, our favorite place to bird-watch. The pigeons are at it full-force, and it's quite funny to watch. The video has a little gap in the middle where I forgot to turn the recorder off.
Pigeon Love (Wikipedia)
Courtship rituals can be observed in urban parks at any time of the year. The male on the ground or rooftops puffs up the feathers on his neck to appear larger and thereby impress or attract attention. He approaches the hen at a rapid walking pace while emitting repetitive quiet notes, often bowing and turning as he comes closer.
At first, the female invariably walks or flies a short distance away and the male follows her until she stops. At this point, he continues the bowing motion and very often makes full- or half-pirouettes in front of the female. The male then proceeds to feed the female by regurgitating food, as they do when feeding the young.
The male then mounts the female, rearing backwards to be able to join their cloacae. The mating is very brief with the male flapping his wings to maintain balance on top of the female.
One wonders, given the fact that actual mating takes only a few seconds, why there has to be such a prolonged, elaborate mating ritual. I suppose there's a parallel in human beings, where "love makes the world go 'round", songs are all about "love" (banging, usually), and - aside from industry - sex seems to be not just the main thing, but the only thing. (Come to that, it is also an industry in itself.)
What I have long wondered is this: since birds were directly descended from dinosaurs, did dinosaurs have similar elaborate rituals to attract a mate? Did T-Rex perform pirouettes and coo softtly so he could get it on with a girl T-Rex? How about Tricerotops? Did it throw up in another Tricerotops' mouth to charm and beguile? And how noisy would all this be? I have always thought of the dinosaur-scape as deafeningly loud, as each creature bellows with gigantic vocal cords to communicate. But this. The thuds on the ground! It would be like an earthquake.
Ten things I hate!
Attributed to Johnny Cash, though in this day and age of internet skepticism, I wonder if it's genuine. I tried to find a few other examples of amusing to-dos and only found this:
Yikes. I am supposed to fill in all those little lines in a DAY? Plus I hate being told what to do, so I'd likely never fill in any of them at all. Or if I did, they'd never get checked off.
I find that I either do things, or I don't. The things I do, I either wanted to do, or needed to do. The things I don't do are not very important, things that are on somebody else's agenda, or else just boring and a waste of time.
I KNOW! Let's not.
These aren't to-do lists (or "ta-dah!" lists, as I prefer to call them), but somehow they're in the ballpark. Or at least they're a little bit entertaining.
This last one isn't a list at all, but I love how the cat's paw is so firmly planted on the mouse. From what I've heard of internet lonely hearts, Polly will be over there in a wing-flap.
Saturday, May 6, 2017
The Love Parade disaster
Love Parade disaster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Date 24 July 2010
Location Duisburg, Germany
Deaths 21
Non-fatal injuries 500
On 24 July 2010, a crowd disaster at the 2010 Love Parade electronic dance music festival in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, caused the death of 21 people from suffocation. At least 500 more were injured.
With the slogan "The Art of Love", the event was one of the program elements of RUHR.2010, an effort to highlight cultural events in the Ruhr area, one of 2010's European Capitals of Culture.
The atmosphere was explosive. Many in the crowd seemed to be intoxicated. When people started falling off the stairs and pulling others with them, it became just chaotic. They just couldn't be stopped. It was a living hell.
— Eyewitness police officer
I will never forget the sight. There were all these twisted-up bodies of those who had been crushed. They were lying at the tunnel exit. Their faces had all turned blue.
— Eyewitness woman trapped in tunnel
Bruce Cullen of Parker, Colorado and founder of Trance Elements, a LoveParade artist/performer on float number 7 - "The Ship of Fools", mentioned that he and other performers were concerned before the event that there would be problems, stating "we all said it seems like this is not going to work". Although Cullen did not witness the actual event, he stated: "These guys didn't have this planned out right", "They didn't have enough police at the entrances in that tunnel. I am just really upset because people died. Everybody was there to have fun".
As a consequence of the disaster, the organizer of the festival announced that no further Love Parades would be held and that the festival was permanently cancelled. Criminal charges were brought against ten employees of the city of Duisburg and of the company that organized the event, but eventually rejected by the court due to the prosecutors' failure to establish evidence for the alleged acts of negligence and their causal connection to the deaths.
Assigning the blame
None of the involved organizations or officials took the blame for the disaster by 29 July. Instead, the involved parties issued several statements accusing each other in a circular manner:
On 26 July, Rainer Schaller, organiser of the festival, accused the police of mistakes in crowd control, which he claims led to the disaster.
On 28 July, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia rejected this and assigned all the blame to Schaller, his company Lopavent, their security concept and the festival personnel.
Related Disasters/Phenomena
Hillsborough Disaster
Heysel Stadium disaster
1971 Ibrox disaster
Luzhniki disaster
Burnden Park disaster
Lan Kwai Fong disaster
Roskilde Festival accident
1979 The Who concert disaster
Big Day Out mosh pit death
Herd behaviour
Crowd control
Asphyxia
BLOGGER'S LAMENT: I decided to make this into a sort of gif -based essay, with a little help from Wikipedia. It stuns me how many times people have been trampled to death and even asphyxiated in a standing position from the horrific result of gross overcrowding: a phenomenon known as "crowd crush". This term has largely replaced "stampede" as a more accurate way of describing the horrors that ensue when a densely-packed crowd of human beings implodes.
For decades, this sort of fatal collapse of order was blamed on "hooliganism", particularly at British soccer matches where the outcome of games matters more than life - but also at huge rock concert events where all the spectators are assumed to be drunk, stoned and rowdy. But mere rowdyness is rarely the central, fatal issue. Again and again as I researched this, I read about tremendous numbers of people, even more than a million, being crammed into a venue designed for only 200,000. I heard of exits blocked for police convenience, fences erected in the wrong place for crowd control, tens of thousands being directed into small pedestrian tunnels, and gates carelessly opened to relieve crowd pressure which then allow thousands and thousands more people to flood in. With this sort of atrocious non-planning going on, disaster is nearly inevitable.
A crowd crush is like cement blocks pressing in full-force on every side. Personal space is non-existent, and violent jostling uncontrollable. If the crowd pushes forward, so do you. You have no choice. The mass of humanity becomes a single living organism, an alive thing with a hive mind.
But what makes me quail - what makes my guts creep with squeamishness - are the shock waves that surge through hundreds of thousands of crammed-together human beings. These do not look anything like the innocuous, cheerful "crowd wave" which we used to see across rows of bleachers. It's more like a climate-change-driven monster relentlessly gathering force, a human tsunami which the individual is powerless to resist.
The five gifs above, which I made from a video of an Australian rock concert (though I cannot find any information about it) are an especially hair-raising example. We see huge, stomach-dropping crowd surges, seething motion in every direction, wild arm- flails, and the entire crowd jumping up and down in unison. There is even a chilling "sieg heil" salute that shoots up as if by some secret signal.
This utter uniformity (which reminds me of some other culture/regime, for some reason) makes a kind of sense. Everyone HAS to do what everyone else is doing, or die as a result. It's some sort of definition of fascism.
So what would happen if one - only one person tripped and fell in this scenario? Almost certain death, as the people behind him or her would not be able to stop themselves from falling into the hole. This would lead to ever more tripping and falling until crushed and asphyxiated bodies are stacked up in a deadly pile.
When I look at these gifs and the seasick feeling they give me, and the ineffectual row of security guards standing still at the edge of the stage, I think: what on earth would they do if something went wrong? What if there were a mass panic and a true stampede, with people unable to see or find their way out? You don't need a fire breaking out for the worst to happen.
Some attempts have been made to redesign stadiums and concert halls to prevent these horrors, but many sports officials and impresarios seem to think they're just a necessary risk, collateral damage for important events. The underlying feeling is that the possibility of disaster just adds to the excitement.
The most horrific crowd crush incidents have been in the Third World, usually in massive religious processions involving millions of people, where rickety bridges have collapsed and inadequately small tunnels caved in. Over 800 people died in one of these. I can't even let my mind go there.
Humans are clever enough - aren't they? - to prevent this shit, or at least make it less and less likely. Yet it keeps on happening, being dismissed as the result of "drunken hooligans out of control". I cannot think of anything worse than being crushed to death, because death often comes very slowly. It's worse even than drowning, which many describe as "the worst way to die". Some even end up brain-damaged and vegetative for the rest of their lives. It is too much even to contemplate.
Friday, May 5, 2017
Thursday, May 4, 2017
A twat by any other name
One woman in London is dedicated to starting the world’s first physical space wholly dedicated to vaginas.
BY SARAH LASKOW
APRIL 28, 2017
Florence Schechter is the sort of person who gets a good idea, starts a project, and sees if it its sticks. “I like just going for things and seeing if they work,” she says. “I get upset if I’ve got a good idea and I can’t actually put it into action.” This outlook is what led her, after realizing that the world lacks a museum dedicated to vaginas, to start planning to rectify that omission.
BLOGGER'S COMMENTS. OK, OK - I get her idea. Too many penises; not enough vaginas. But this "museum" of hers displays all kinds of floral images, which are meant - I would guess - to give a sense of a woman's external genitalia.
In other words - her vulva.
Vulva, people!
I've written about this before: how the word vagina, once never uttered by anyone, is now proclaimed at every opportunity to refer to anything below a woman's waist.
The synonym for "vagina" is "birth canal". It's a tube. It's nothing that sticks out or is visible. At all. The vagina is invisible! No one can see it but your gynecologist (and only when the speculum is in there and cranked wide open). Why then is it being used to describe the most erotic part of a woman's anatomy?
For just that reason: it's too erotic. Vagina has a nice clean, clinical sound to it. (Ugly, if you ask me, reminding me of Regina and Spadina and Carolina). Vulva is just too - I don't know! It's sort of - ugh! It's - it's just too -
Too sexual.
It's a voluptuous sort of word (ewwwwww!) that folds into itself, actually a kind of visual onomatopoeia (and I can't believe I actually used that word). Say it over and over again.
Oh all right then, don't.
The point I'm trying to make is that society has become pretty casual about displaying a man's "junk" and making lots of jokes about it. But when it comes to the humble vulva, we pretend it doesn't even exist.
We just don't display what's "down there". Who has a vulva, anyway? And for God's sake, let's not get into the clitoris, a word which is mispronounced 95% of the time. I once heard a university professor go on and on about the "cli-Taurus". Nobody corrected him because they all thought he was right.
As far as I am concerned, women's sexuality has been shoved back into the closet. I remember all sorts of stuff coming out in the '70s about consciousness-raising, women comparing genitals to learn the lesson that "everything is natural and normal and beautiful" in a woman's body.
Now none of it is, and everyone is abnormal.
Meantime, in 2017, a record number of women are undergoing a mutilating, utterly barbaric procedure called labiaplasty (labia being another word we never hear, because all that "stuff" down there is called vagina, folks. VAGINA!). This means the labia are cut off and sewn up so, basically, the woman ends up with a cute little pre-pubescent slit with nothing protruding at all. This sexless mound is usually kept neatly shaven because, well, it just looks better that way. Looks better for him, I would assume.
Why is this happening? Why is it acceptable, increasingly popular and even desirable, to undergo this modern-day version of female circumcision? I don't watch porn, but I have been informed that this is the way a lot of female porn stars look. God knows what they have done to themselves to achieve that look (probably labiaplasty!), but it is fast becoming the "norm", making sexually-intact women feel dirty, smelly and messy "down there" (the vagina, I mean).
I suppose boy friends, husbands and lovers will eventually come around to that standard naked slit, rejecting any woman who does not resemble an eight-year-old girl. Men watch a lot of porn now, and have come to assume those images reflect reality. If that's all a guy has ever seen, well - . Victorian men used to run to throw up on their wedding night, realizing to their horror that their wives had pubic hair.
What creeps me out - well, the whole thing does. I'd rather cut my ears off so my head will look neater. But the fact that it renders the vulva pre-pubescent in appearance is simply alarming. It's eroticizing childish-looking genitals. I don't know how else to see it.
But it gets worse.
I Couldn't Poop For 5 Days While On Vacation With My New Boyfriend
It seems when you’re in the midst of that “Everything is perfect, I’m perfect, you’re perfect” stage of a relationship, nobody poops.
When I returned home from a two-week European vacation with my (fairly) new beau, after the tales of our journey from London to Paris, the revelation that pigeon tastes actually not that bad, and the admittance that, oui, Paris women really are the most stylish femmes on the planet, my girlfriend, Lauren, asked me:
“OK, but you have to tell me: How did you… poo?”
Just so you know Lauren’s not into poo, or anything. I mean, I think she composts, but she’s not into scatology or those DIY fecal transplants. The reason for her inquiry into my bowel movements was in regard to a common problem that plagues many women in new relationships.
“A lot of women actually get sick during the first six weeks of the relationship because they don’t poo around their partner,” Lauren told me matter-of-factly, as if she had actually researched that sh**.
Now, for the life of Google, I could not verify her claim for the sake of this article, but I did find various blog posts and forums where various women commented that pooping is forbidden when it comes to dating. It seems when you’re in the midst of that “Everything is perfect, I’m perfect, you’re perfect” stage of a relationship, nobody poops. Or, at least, you don’t want to imagine that the area you want to do dirty things to is, well, dirrrrtttty.
OK, here it is again, the imperative to NOT be a normal, natural, functioning human being. I had never heard of this pressure on females (no one ever mentions this problem in connection with males) to suppress their bowel movements when they're in a new relationship.
But now I have become enlightened. Girls don't poop, they just don't, and if they DO they are dirrrrrttttty and animalistic, if not a downright freak.
Or, at least, unattractive. Or, at very least, downright inconsiderate to their normally-pooping boyfriends. How can they even think of doing such a disgusting thing in the same hotel room?
I groaned when I came across this piece, but was flabbergasted to see dozens and dozens of articles and message boards and social media posts about "whether we should poop when we're with our boy friends". This is an actual question that you see. A lot. Incredibly, an example was cited of a seven-year marriage where the wife had always found a way to poop outside the home, in a public bathroom somewhere, or at least in a bathroom in a remote, faraway part of the house (with the fan on, and the water running). Or maybe she had a port-a-potty out in the back yard. Thus, her husband had actually come to believe that she never pooped.
It's hard enough not to have genitals, or to have genitals that can only be called by one (inaccurate) name, or genitals that can only be portrayed by pictures of flowers and fruit (or sliced off and sewn up into a neat little slit). It's much worse to be forbidden a bodily function which is about as crucial to health as eating (and by the way, women face pretty tough strictures on that too). The story I quoted above concludes with the woman's shame-faced admission that she had become hellishly constipated after two weeks of not pooping. But isn't dealing with rock-hard shit a lot better than having him leave you because you. . . poop?
This is what I worry about. These things become standardized, after a while. Holding it in will become a requirement, something all decent women are expected to do so their boyfriends won't be totally disgusted and grossed out.
I remember reading someone's query to a sort of internet Dear Abby dating expert, and it was on this question: when my boyfriend of three years sleeps over at my apartment for the weekend, should I - you know? Can I - I mean, is it OK if I - sort of - I mean, uh - can I use my bathroom? The Dear Abby person was sort of taken aback. This woman was asking a dating expert if she could use HER OWN BATHROOM for a universal bodily function. The underlying feeling is that if he finds out she actually shits, he'll just (pardon the expression) dump her.
Who knows how true this is? Maybe a lot of guys DO insist a woman never poop when they're in the same building (if ever). Maybe a lot of guys DO want a neat little slit in which to deposit their goopy, disgusting, fish-smelling slime.
And women always fall into lockstep. If they don't, they might not get ANYBODY. The fact that this may even be true makes my head truly spin, if not fall right off.
Wednesday, May 3, 2017
LAST WORDS: Challenger Astronauts last words caught on tape
This is the real thing, a home movie found years after the Challenger disaster. It documents the reactions of some ordinary people standing around trying to figure out what is going on. In short, they're like everybody else. Even NASA didn't know what to say, except for that "malfunction" remark about five minutes in. People think this video is humorous, and in a way it is, but nothing else about that day was. Nor is the fact that the astronauts all survived the explosion and were alive for the 2 1/2 minutes it took for the capsule to hit the water. That's a very long time to be doomed.
So what is the "last words" in the title all about? Just got mixed up, I guess. I get that way sometimes. Mixed up.
Tuesday, May 2, 2017
Car smashes through wall, almost killing man
Man, unhappy with rental car, returns it in an unusual fashion.
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