Happy Birthday Billie Holiday

"If I'm going to sing like someone else,
then I don't need to sing at all."

Billie Holiday, born April 7th, 1915

Could Female Orgasms Kill Men?

Apparently, there's a good chance they would.. Thanks to Science and Supermodels for this advice, which is another good reason to put your partner's pleasure first, chaps.


"If theta waves are taken as a criterion, the entire brain emits theta waves when women reach an orgasm that are close to 10 times stronger than when men climax. So, if theta waves are an indication of an orgasm's strength, then women experience an orgasm that is physically impossible for men to go through.

Putting it a little crudely, if the intensity of a woman's orgasm was played through a man's brain, there's a danger that the shock to his system would kill him. That risk makes it impossible to experiment on a man at the moment. And men can never become women."

Dr. Kunio Kitamura
Head of the Japan Family Planning Association

Weary Willie and Tired Tim

Weary Willie and Tired Tim were cartoon characters in a comic that had ceased to exist long before I was born (the picture above shows them recruiting unemployed soldiers to go and fight in the Boer War) but my Nana always used to mention them whenever children looked tired.

I was working in The Great Wen last week, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience (which included a couple of new business opportunities, and drinks by the river with one of the women I love) but once I came home I felt seriously tired.

That's how it usually is when I go to London. I enjoy the buzz, and then I crash and burn. I'm wise enough now, to know its coming, and to accept it. I've been going to bed early, and setting the alarm clock a half-an-hour later. Three days seems to have got me right.

And now I find myself thinking about sleep, and tiredness, and taking good care of myself (which I do, some of the time, because if I don't, nobody else will.) I always wanted to stay up late when I was a child, and I never felt good about being tired. But it's a message from my body... and my body is my soul, and I need to learn to listen to it.

The unwanted side-effects of a good education

My Queer Studies

I hope you'll excuse me for deviating from my normal standards of trivia and frippery to discuss something that matters to me.


Some of you know, and some of you don't, that I've been working on a PhD thesis, and a fine old mad-making piece of merriment it has proved to be.


I've been researching Lloyd's of London: how the insurance industry negotiates contracts, and the difficulties of designing an electronic environment to negotiate in, instead of doing everything face to face in this fine, shiny building on the corner of Lime Street.

Over the weekend I discovered an important concept that explains something what I've been trying to explain. To my surprise, the insight comes from Queer Studies; specifically, it comes from the insights we get once we stop thinking about nature and culture as fundamentally separate, and look at meeting the universe halfway: how we perform the world into existence by the ways we study it, interpret it, and try to change it.

So there you have it: the application of Queer Theory to the insurance industry. For example, performing New Orleans into existence, again, after Hurricane Katrina. (That seems to be a very slow project.)

I shouldn't allow myself to get distracted, but there's another chapter in the same anthology called 'An Unfinished Conversation About Glowing Green Bunnies'. I mean, that's got to be worth a read, hasn't it?

Everyone Loves A Tortured Genius

I bought my original copy of The Beach Boys' 'Pet Sounds' in Reddington's Rare Records in Birmingham (the shop has now moved to teh interwebs, and the owner Danny Reddington has a show on a local radio station). I played it an awful lot in the awful empty space between finishing university and getting a job.

They say I got brains
But they ain't doing me no good
How I wish they could.

I was twenty-two; I'd been to school. I'd passed lots of exams. My parents were very proud of me. I had run out of instructions to follow. I had run out of childhood.I was finally free. Oh, fuck.

Brian Wilson, the ever-popular tortured genius.

I keep looking for a place to fit in
where I can speak my mind
and I've been trying hard to find the people
that I won't leave behind

they say I got brains
but they ain't doing me no good
I wish they could

each time things start to happen again
I think I got something good goin' for myself
but what goes wrong

sometimes I feel very sad
(I wish I had something I could
put my heart and soul into)
sometimes I feel very sad

I guess I just wasn't made for these times

every time I get the inspiration
to go change things around
no one wants to help me look for places
where new things might be found

where can I turn
when my fair weather friends cop out
what's it all about

each time things start to happen again
I think I got something good goin' for myself
but what goes wrong

sometimes I feel very sad
(I wish I had something I could
put my heart and soul into)
sometimes I feel very sad

I guess I just wasn't made for these times.

BRIAN WILSON

A Close Watch On The Trains

My parents' generation remembered The War. They still call it "The War" even though there have been a few more wars since. My Nana, when she was alive, said there was another war, before "The War", that she thought was even worse.

Anyway. I grew up in peacetime. I was very relieved that I wasn't going to have to join the army, unless I wanted to. I was, however, worried, that compared to my father, I was growing up soft. My father worried about this, too. (Let's be honest. I learned to worry from him. But because I was a child, I thought it was all my own idea, and, of course, all my fault. )


When I was a boy, I liked trains. Then later on, I liked girls. In my teens, I liked both together, and - things being the way they were - I especially liked the older, better looking ones that I couldn't catch. (The trains, that is. And the girls.)

Eventually, I went to university, where I fell in love with a woman who was older and madder and interesting and Eastern European and politically active. (And a self-harmer. Pity about that. ) So, I got to see lots of interesting films from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (and plenty of dull ones, too. Pity about that.)


Jiri Menzel's Ostre sledované vlaky was one of my favourites. It was made in Czechoslovakia during the mid-sixties period they called the Prague Spring, when people were confident and artistic, and reflective and critical about society and the possibilities for the world, in a positive way, until the Russian tanks arrived, and they all had to wait another twenty years before Václav Havel became President and met Lou Reed and Frank Zappa.

It's a film about trains and The War - I don't know what my father would have made of it - and a young man trying to lose his virginity.


Milos, the teenage protagonist, is an apprentice at a small railway station in provincial Bohemia, and the trains he is supposed to watch often contain Nazi troops and equipment being sent to the Eastern Front. The Nazis are, of course, the enemy, an occupying army, and in the film we follow young Milos as he learns, in different ways, what he has to do to be a man: how to survive under Nazi occupation, how he can resist it, how to be courageous and heroic, how men behave around women, and how to get the girl he wants.


Milos watches an older colleague as he flirts with and seduces a girl, and thinks he knows what sex is all about. But his dirty weekend with a beautiful train conductor doesn't go to plan, and in despair, Milos tries to kill himself. I can never forget the scene in the hospital, where Milos shows his bandaged slashed wrist to a visitor and says, with a straight face :

"The doctors say it's called premature ejaculation."

A Close Watch On The Trains is a comedy about being a man, being a hero, and being good enough. Milos' sexual awakening goes hand in hand with his political development.

Appropriately enough for a film set in Bohemia, orgasms are an act of freedom and defiance. Orgasms will defeat fascism, if we have enough of them.

We can imagine that Menzel's tale of resistance to the Nazis was also meant to encourage 1960's Czechs and Slovaks not to stand for any crap from Moscow. Certainly, the Russians banned the film after they invaded provided fraternal assistance in 1968.



My father was right about me being soft, compared to him. But his mother died when he was five, and he was raised by an alcoholic father for a few years, before he died, and left his sons to be raised by someone even more brutal. So my dad didn't have a lot of opportunities for softness in his life.

He made the most of the opportunities he had with me when I was little, but the older I grew, the more talkative and curious and energetic I became, the less he knew what to do. I guess my dad's life forced him to toughen up a lot sooner than he would have liked, and we both lost something on account of that.

A Song From Under The Floorboards

The newcomer arrives
Possession and guilt in his face
Apologises to the customs man
For the gaping hole in his suitcase

I'd like to write about my vulnerability.
I'd like to write about my fear of being seen.
I'd like to write about my fear of writing.

I'd like to write about my great big head
Filled with ideas and dreams.
I'd like to be able to write
Instead of just making the paper dirty.

That old big head that protected me
That old big intellectual, exam-passing head
That old big rude-dreaming, song-writing head
That old big head that protected me so well
I used to wish I could live without it.

That old big broadband website head
Where I uploaded everything I was afraid of losing
Afraid of loving
Afraid of using.

feeling messy complicated flesh world

It's time to get the CDs out
It's time to go to the record store
It's time to borrow somebody else's voice

I am angry I am ill and I'm as ugly as sin
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it.

This is a song from under the floorboards
This is a song from where the wall is cracked
By force of habit, I am an insect
I have to confess I'm proud as hell of that fact

I'd like to write about my vulnerability.
I'd like to write about my fear of being seen.
I'd like to write about my fear of writing.
I'd like to write about my fear of being me.

I just want to be touched again.
not poked or messaged or emailed.

I used to make phantoms I could later chase
images of all that could be desired
then I got tired of counting all of these blessings
and then I just got tired

I just want to be touched again

I've known the eeriest wounds
the soul's long quarantine

and I still turn to love
I want to burn again

I just want to be touched again.
I have to confess I'm proud as hell of that fact.

(with thanks and respect to HD & TH, the original authors)