Photographed by John Bulmer, whose book The North was published in November. 

“Tennis star buys world’s supply of donkey cheese.” // Ducks
cross motorway. // Arthur Scargill menswear. // Bill Whittle on unserious people. // Self-dramatizing narcissism. // Offensively hot peanut butter. // The International Banana Museum. // Inside Amazon. // Festive decorations. // The full-body sweater you’ve always wanted. // “For a fee and a stool sample, the curious can find out what’s living in their intestine.” // Solar-powered plant thirst detector. // Page turning contraption using (among other things) a hairdryer and a hamster. (h/t, Ace) // At last, a Nüdifier app. // “We have a very good system to detect penis drawings.”

Actor Sir Terence Stamp remembers the Seventies and playing a supervillain from the planet Krypton: 

For me, it was my comeback movie. I’d been out of work for eight years and living in India…. When I walked onto that set I’d been in an ashram for a year, learning to separate orgasm from ejaculation. I was rechanneling the life-force and I hadn’t been working, and when I walked on the set, it seemed like everyone was asleep, but I was so, so ready. The only guy who was really up for it was Brando – he totally understood where I was coming from. 

Via here, via Anna.

A librarian replies to a comment piece in the Daily Californian:

Please don’t fuck in the library. I work here. My staff works here.

The piece in question is by UC Berkeley student Nadia Cho, who seems to believe she’s very edgy and progressive. In fact, it’s difficult to overstate just how edgy and progressive our columnist believes she is:

We decided that, out of the millions of books in the library, the shelves full of books on religion seemed like the best place to fuck.

How incredibly, desperately transgressive. Ms Cho gleefully explains that she and her companions are “desecrating” buildings with their “perverse ways.” You see, the sex she’s having is much more radical than yours, and therefore more important.

The risk of getting caught is what makes having sex in public so exciting. Without that, there wouldn’t be any novelty in doing it.

Indeed. And what’s the point of exhibitionist psychodrama without an audience? We’ve been here before, I think.

Thankfully, the author also obliges with some practical tips:

It’s best to have some empty shelves toward the bottom so that you can climb them and feel like Spider-Man while your partner penetrates you standing up.

And,

It’s probably not a good idea to ejaculate in public places — just saying.

Of course it’s not just a matter of sexual abandon and incriminating evidence. It’s political too. Very political:

Berkeley is the best place to explore your sexuality. Our school is a predominantly safe and accepting space with many places, people and resources to help you discover your sexual self. It is the place where I learned what it means to be queer, to recognise the presence of patriarchy, to attempt polyamory and to become more confident in my sexuality so I could go ahead with new experiences — attending naked parties and orgies and writing a sex column, just to name a few.

Tuition fees well spent, then.

For newcomers, four more items from the archives.

The Arts, They Ennoble. 

Leotard, heels and coloured puke. It’s a vision of loveliness. 

In this 34-minute milestone of cultural enrichment, Ms Brown “explores the relationship between music and performance art via self-induced vomiting.” The word explores is of course obligatory and, given the context, entirely devoid of meaning. Unless we’re to believe that the fruits of this alleged mental activity will redefine human knowledge and shake the world when finally, dramatically revealed to the public. 

Insufficiently Prole.  

The Observer’s Barbara Ellen oozes socialist benevolence. 

While any use of the term chav is denounced by Ms Ellen as bullying, “posh-bashing” is considered protest and an artform. This is the logic of identity politics, according to which, you must always treat people as social categories, as examples of some put-upon victim group, or conversely, some notional oppressor group. To which, various contradictory and patronising assumptions must be applied regardless of the particulars in any given instance. By this reckoning, when opportunist oiks at my old comprehensive school picked on a new arrival who was well-spoken, polite and somewhat studious, the people doing the bullying were righteous, entitled and “responding to oppression.” Their shoving and sneering was apparently “an instinctive protest against inequality.” But my calling them oiks for doing so is practically a hate-crime. You see how it works?

The Cost of Purity.  

“Shut up,” they explained. 

Actually, some of our budding intellectuals do declare their censorious urges out loud and in public, as if such urges confirmed their own unassailable righteousness: “We no longer need to listen,” say these mighty radical thinkers. Nor will they permit others to listen to ideas and arguments they, our betters, deem improper – on our behalf, of course. Let’s not forget the equally progressive efforts to shape young minds at Queen’s University, which decided that students’ private lunchtime discussions were in need of monitoring by hired eavesdroppers called “dialogue facilitators.” Eavesdroppers whose uninvited “interventions” would “encourage discussion of social justice issues” and “issues of social identity, power and privilege,” as defined by them and whether welcome or not. “Positive spaces and mindsets” would of course be created. 

Playing in the Dirt with Occupy. 

Bongos, bombs and ersatz farming. 

Here we have a movement whose “non-hierarchical” founder says Occupy is “about antagonising people and slapping them around a little bit.” A movement whose favoured “non-violent” tactics rely on mobs and coercion – and the moral anonymity that mobs make possible. A movement that’s explicitly premised on the seizure and violation of other people’s property, and which measures its impact by the disruption and distress it inflicts on others. And oh yes. A movement whose cheerleaders tell us that mobbing random retailers and intimidating their customers is “a perfectly justifiable form of protest.” And whose apologists and hagiographers have told us, repeatedly, that they “have no problem with principled, thought-through political violence,” that property damage is “not the same thing as violence,” and that setting fire to occupied buildings isn’t “real” violence. For members of this movement to then affect “shock” when that same thinking is taken one notch further requires colossal dishonesty. But hey, that’s who these people are.

There’s more to be had in the greatest hits.