We have three boys and no girls. Lucia is the only x-chromosome in the house. It’s hard to describe how intense the experience can be. Jennifer Allen has written a stream-of-consciousness about what it’s like to be the mother of three boys. Boys! Give me boys!:

Because when you are the mom of three small boys, who has time for me, myself, or I?

Certainly not you, not now. Right now, you have a six-year-old in a Tae Kwon Do uniform wiggling his top tooth loose with his tongue. You have a three-year-old in an inflatable Hulk costume making farting sounds. You have a six-month-old in a swollen diaper standing in the stroller and chewing on the straps of what was once your favorite and finest Italian silk bra. You have all of them all around you: the sole, freak female in the house, sitting on the potty, pleading, “Can I please, please, have some privacy, please?”

Your boys, these sons, think they have a right to your body morning, noon, and night.

Continue reading Boys! Give me boys! at uncoy.

Ozymandias is one of the great poems of the English language, even if Shelley was a confused, womanising wife-swapper who drove his first wife to suicide.

...on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Craig Murray, indefatigable Scots nationalist,1 invoked Ozymandias to characterise the BLM iconoclasm: Ultimately, All Monuments are Ozymandias – Craig Murray. No great man and no great woman lives without feet of clay. We are all hypocrites and heroes of our time, more than most.

When Horatio Nelson helped to “free” the Kingdom of the Sicilies from Napoleon and restore its appalling autocratic monarchy, Neapolitan writers and intellectuals were shot and hung on Nelson’s flagship, anchored off Naples so the mob could not intervene to save them.

Continue reading Monuments, Heroes of Our Time and Ozymandias at uncoy.

dr ben goldacre bad pharma

Bad Pharma, a new book by Ben Goldacre, looks into the research practices of big pharmacy. Apparently any negative information about new drugs is systematically suppressed even in the academic environment:

In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug…: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found more than 500 trials in total: 85% of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50% of the government-funded trials were. In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefits of a statin….This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. They found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favouring the test drug.

Continue reading (Published) cell phone research indicates no radiation at uncoy.

Steve Jobs was given a strange family life. Given up for adoption himself, his biological parents had another go at it and a sister was born Jobs had a sister he met only as an adult, Mona Simpson.

In his own life, Jobs had a daughter born out of wedlock with artist Chrisann Brennan. For some reason Jobs rejected Lisa Brennan for a few years before finally naming a computer after her.

Writer Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Curiously both sister and daughter are writers. A high level of verbal communication appears to be in Jobs genes. As Jobs is biologically half-Syrian, the entire Jobs family are a poster child against the absurd jingois against the intellectual abilities of the Middle Eastern peoples. It really makes wonder if Nobel peace prize counts are not more a question of the restriction of opportunity to those from Western countries.

Continue reading Date Rape and Vegetarianism: Writings of Lisa Brennan-Jobs at uncoy.

Just digging into Ioan Holender’s Closeup: 118 Premieren Wiener Staatsoper, the men’s gift (Herrenspend) from the 2010 Opernball, this year. I wanted to have a look at the premiers of Gyoala Harangozo as Ballet Director.

Ioan Holender Opernball with Desirée Treichl-Stürgkh

To my astonishment, there was not a single image of ballet in the book. Ballet premiers are relegated to a two page list in the back.

I had heard of Holender’s contempt for ballet but to just cut ballet out entirely from his commemorative goodbye album is a step too far.

While opera can be a magnificent art, most often it is tedious, filled with bombastic emotions of oversized egos.

Ballet on the other hand is the springtime, it is mortality in flight, it is delicate flutters of the soul made flesh.

Continue reading Review: Ioan Holender’s Closeup: 118 Premieren Wiener Staatsoper at uncoy.

Much of the story seemed to be adaptations of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenenant novels. In just one example, the Mord’Sith seem a near clone of the Bloodguard but with breasts.

Which set me to asking myself whatever happened to a film version of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenenant Trilogies (there’s three of them)? The Thomas Convenant novels are fantasy for grown-ups dealing with issues such as acceptance and exclusion via physical metaphors like lepresy.

Continue reading Epic Fantasy still not on the big screen: Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant Trilogies at uncoy.

There’s something marvelous about well written descriptive prose.

I’ve just finished Luke Jenning’s Breach Candy in a single sitting by noon. I woke up early and had the urge to furnish my mind with travel instead of poisoning it with the usual news and internet marketing gunk which clogs my inbox.

As the Israelis give it to the Palestinians again for no particularly good reason apart from intrinsic viciousness and selfishness – and we the Western world stand by and watch (kudos to Sarkozy for actually standing up and seeking to do the right thing just once, tomatoes to Blair for blame and bullying the victim yet again for his American masters), it’s difficult to read the news.

Anyway back to Breach Candy, it’s the story of a film producer in search of a story and love and a ballet dancer in search of herself and love, both lost in Bombay.

Continue reading Salutary effect of well written descriptive prose: Breach Candy by Luke Jennings at uncoy.

John Leake’s book is one of those page turner pulp fiction works about the evil doings of a perverse and sadistic serial killer where the killer is always one step away from the police and doesn’t pay for his crimes.

Except it’s all true. The hero of the Vienna Woods Killer is one of the most loathsome souls to ever tread this planet. Hitler and Stalin and Beria’s soul tied up in the flesh of one nasty small chap from Styria by the name of Jack Unterweger.

Jack Unterweger using his favorite cover: crime writer

One of the difficulties of the story is where to begin… Should one start at the beginning with childhood and growing up? A bit drab. Or should one start near the end to raise interest and then flashback to the end.

Continue reading The Vienna Woods Killer: A Serial Killer’s Handbook at uncoy.

Ohne Anna und ohne Wein
Manchmal muss Mann leben.

Continue reading A Christmas Poem for Anna at uncoy.

Continue reading No Jane Austen Heroines… at uncoy.