Sublime the blind parade

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11,0002? Yep.

This is way beyond my remote concern of being condescending

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On Monday I went to the One in Four conference on mental health and the media. This was my take-home message: a rose is a rose is a rose is a service user.

Can't you see I'm a fool in so many ways?

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I have yet to actually watch an episode of X Factor from start to finish. That said, even I can spot two off-key twonks a mile off. And this time, even Hitler agrees with me.

[Birthday card for Juliet. Happy birthday Jules.]

I love you more

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Thanks to everyone who voted for my Michael Jackson FUN? monument over at Bustler/Archinect. If you'd never heard of the competition, that's because you didn't see the international coverage of it in...um, Turkey.

Things got a little bit sticky on the Comment's Board at one point, when it looked like I might actually carry away the much coveted glow-in-the-dark T-shirt, but in the end it was won by this young lady.

Overstanding is the key

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For those of you who can't be arsed (or don't have the flexibility of spine) to crane your neck 180º to read the upside-downness of this, you can check things out from Prozac's perspective by clicking here.

And you must confess that at times like these hopefulness is tantamount to hopelessness

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I used to be a terror but now I am a tired man

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Frute tells me that America doesn't have Jelly Tots.

And you call yourself a 'First World' nation?!

Wilco will love you, baby

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Self-pity won't save you

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The shadow of the object

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"Thus the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, so that the latter could henceforth be criticized by a special mental faculty like an object, like the foresaken object. In this way the loss of the object became transformed into a loss in the ego, and the conflict between the ego and the loved person transformed into a cleavage between the criticizing faculty of the ego and the ego as altered by the identification."

Freud, Mourning and Melancholia

A vampire or a victim, it depends on who's around

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Lean on me

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The nature of love

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In 1957 Harry Harlow devised an experiment designed to take a pop at psychoanalytic drive theories of bonding ("Mummy gratifies my hunger. I love Mummy"). He wrote up his findings in a paper bearing the tongue-in-cheek title The Nature of Love.

The experiment proceeded thus: infant rhesus monkeys were separated at birth from their mothers and reared with the help of surrogate wire 'mothers' to which feeding bottles had been attached. 

The monkeys were also presented with another ‘mother’, this one without the feeding bottle, but covered with soft terry nappy material.

The infant monkeys showed a clear preference for the cuddly mothers, clinging to these surrogates for 18 hours a day (as they would to a real mother) even though they were fed exclusively from the wire mother and even ‘punished’ with sudden blasts of compressed air as they clung to the cloth stand-ins.

Lucky me, I guessed the kind of man that you would turn out to be

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Spot the difference

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"When a gentleman and his girlfriend of two or three weeks are facing one another, phases of lively social interaction occur, alternating with phases of disengagement. Each phase of interaction begins with initiation and mutual greeting, builds up to an animated interchange comprising facial expressions and vocalizations, during which the girlfriend orients towards her beau with excited movements of arms and legs; then her activities gradually subside and end with the woman looking away for a spell before the next phase of interaction begins. 

Throughout these cycles the girlfriend is likely to be as spontaneously active as her boyfriend. Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses. Whereas a girlfriend’s initiation and withdrawal from interaction tend to follow her own autonomous rhythm, a sensitive boyfriend regulates his behaviour so that it meshes with hers. In addition he modifies the form his behaviour takes to suit her: his voice is gentle but lower pitched than usual, his movements slowed, and each next action adjusted in form and timing according to how his girlfriend is performing. Thus he lets her call the tune and by a skilful interweaving of his own responses with her creates a dialogue.

The speed and efficiency with which these dialogues develop and the mutual enjoyment they give point clearly to each participant being preadapted to engage in them. On the one hand is the boyfriend’s intuitive readiness to allow his interventions to be paced by his girlfriend. On the other is the readiness with which the girlfriend’s rhythms shift gradually to take account of the timing of her boyfriend’s interventions. In a happily developing partnership each is adapting to the other."

[To read the original of this text, click here]

 

Oh where would I be without my friends to help me? I just can't imagine where I'd be, can you?

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Sometimes even a global recession has its upside

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You're so beautiful, you could've been an air hostess in the 60s

[Soundtrack & a bit of extra boom for your 2008/2009 boom]

New Year's MILF

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Somebody kill me please

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"We both know that love will die at last, turn tepid and perfunctory, decline into mere companionship and affection, if there is not cruelty in it. Not physical harm or violence, but cruelty. The cruelty of loss. Of dread. Of jealousy. Whatever the counselling professions tell us about trust, where we are not jealous, we are not in love at all. Othello was within his rights, though it is not fashionable to say so, to claim he loved too well. His mistake was not to see that suffocating his wife was not the best way to express it. Inviting Cassio to his bed would have been the infinitely preferable option for all parties."

(Howard Jacobson, The Act Of Love, p285)