Praise the Gods... but not enough ass

Do not worry, avid readers, I have not been attending an ex-Gay brainwashing center in New Jersey. The reason I posted these images is because I laughed out loud when I came across them on Fleshbot.com. First there is Beyonce (above) and then come the comments from delighted heterosexual men, below.

Moonshine Mike says, aptly, I guess: "Praise the Gods!"

Emppu follows with: "And then God descended from the heavens, and he handed me this!"

But, looking deeper into the image, and with far more sophisticated critical acumen than either Moonshine Mike or Emppu, Michael Jeffrey Jones carefully concludes: "Needs more ass shots."

I was thinking, "Oooh, I bet there were some hot stylist guys with her. And is she on a real beach?"

Bravo to all three gentlemen!

Manhattan

I watched Woody Allen's Manhattan last night. Ten marks out of ten for anyone who can tell what this is above...

W H Auden

W H Auden's birth centenary is on Feb 21st.

Law Like Love

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I've told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,

No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyvay:
Like love I say.

Like love we don't know where or why,
Like love we can't compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.

[Auden Centennial Celebration

With John Ashbery, Michael Cunningham, Saskia Hamilton, Nicholas Jenkins, Wayne Koestenbaum, Glyn Maxwell, Carl Phillips, Katha Pollitt, Francine Prose, Maria Tucci, and Rosanna Warren. Introduced by Alice Quinn.
Reading
Wednesday, February 21, 7 pm
The Great Hall
7 East 7th Street at Third Avenue
Free

W.H. Auden, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, was born on February 21, 1907. To commemorate Auden, the Poetry Society of America and The Cooper Union present a reading by Nicholas Jenkins, James Fenton and Adam Gopnik.]

Well...

Thought for the Day!

¹Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?

²Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn?

³Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?

⁴Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever?

⁵Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?

⁶Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants?

⁷Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?

⁸Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more.

[Job 41, vv 1 — 8].

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity

[Photo by Jason Mickle].

Overheard in New York

How cold is it in New York right now? Pretty darn cold. But overheard speech continues to warm and charm...

Tall white woman to short Asian woman at the Hungarian Pastry Shop: "So, no extra chromosome, huh?"

Radio blaring on West 125th Street: "OVARY TRANSPLANTS!"

[Photo from Pro-Zak].

Dresden, 1945

In your thoughts today, do not forget the fate of Dresden. Dresden was one of the most beautiful cities of pre-Second World War Germany (see below).

From Feb 13th to 15th, 1945, the British and American air forces bombed Dresden relentlessly, creating with merely conventional explosives a fire storm...

Eye witness account: "We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub. We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from."

The means of creating a fire storm are crude but effective: high explosives are dropped by bombers to shatter the roofs of buildings, exposing the wooden timbers. Then incendiaries are dropped by a second wave of bombers a few minutes later. Afterwards, more bombers drop a final wave of high explosives to kill and destroy fire and rescue crews.

This is Dresden today. A serene city at sunset once more...

Today, Queens, tomorrow...!

Today I went to Queens, carefully co-ordinating my sneak attack by cell phone from the elevated 7 train platform at 74th Street/Broadway/Roosevelt Avenues with agents Mason and Mickle. In spite of shape-shifting weirdo-flage, the glister of sunlight captured my image (above). Still, we made it to the Queens Museum of Art.

In order to break into the museum, I had to endure hours in the coffee area eating fried noodles ($1.25 a plate!!!) while pretending to be a gnome (see below, AP shot).