Phantom penis?

From Mind Hacks:

After amputation, many people feel ‘phantom limb‘ sensations that seem to come from the missing body part. Although typically associated with missing arms or legs, these phantom sensations can arise from almost anywhere and a new study in the Journal of the History of the Neurosciences looks at how the ‘phantom penis’ has enjoyed a surprisingly long history in the medical literature.
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This new historical study shows that there were actually many reports of phantom penises in the 18th Century medical literature that have previously been overlooked.

These include reports from some of the most important doctors of the time, and indeed, some of the most important in history. This included the Scottish surgeon and anatomist John Hunter who reported on what can only be described as phantom wanking:

A serjeant of marines who had lost the glans, and the greater body of the penis, upon being asked, if he ever felt those sensations which are peculiar to the glans, declared, that upon rubbing the end of the stump, it gave him exactly the sensation which friction upon the glans produced, and was followed by an emission of the semen.

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Phantom limbs are thought to arise when activity in the brain maps that represent the limbs no longer have a constant flow of sensory feedback that keep them tied to their task.

The boundaries of the maps become blurry and information from other body areas starts to cause activity in the map for the missing limb, leading to the phantom sensations.

Sunday sermon from P. J. O'Rourke

The Republican Party Reptile speaks.

From They Hate Our Guts - and they’re drunk on power:

Democrats aren’t just dateless dweebs clambering upon the Statue of Liberty carrying a wilted bouquet and trying to cop a feel. Theirs is a different kind of love story. Power, not politics, is what the Democrats love. Politics is merely a way to power’s heart. When politics is the technique of seduction, good looks are unnecessary, good morals are unneeded, and good sense is a positive liability. Thus Democrats are the perfect Lotharios. And politics comes with that reliable boost for pathetic egos, a weapon: legal monopoly on force. If persuasion fails to win the day, coercion is always an option.

Give yourself a treat and read the whole thing.

Jane Austen couldn't write

One of the best English novelists ever was bad at spelling and grammar:

Jane Austen couldn't spell, had no grasp of punctuation and her writing betrayed an accent straight out of The Archers, according to an Oxford University academic.

Prof Kathryn Sutherland said analysis of Austen's handwritten letters and manuscripts reveal that her finished novels owed as much to the intervention of her editor as to the genius of the author.

Page after page was written without paragraphs, including the sparkling dialogue for which Austen is known. The manuscript for Persuasion, the only one of her novels to survive in its unedited form, looks very different from the finished product.

"The reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on the issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation. But in reading the manuscripts it quickly becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing.

"This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book," Prof Sutherland said.

The editor in question is believed to have been William Gifford, a poet and critic who worked for Austen's second publisher, John Murray.

"Gifford was a classical scholar known for being quite a pedant. He took Austen's English and turned it into something different - an almost Johnsonian, formal style," Prof Sutherland said.

"Austen broke many of the rules for writing 'good' English. Her words were jumbled together and there was a level of eccentricity in her spelling - what we would call wrong.

"She has this reputation for clear and elegant English but her writing was actually more interesting than that. She was a more experimental writer than we give her credit for. Her exchanges between characters don't separate out one speaker from another, but that can heighten the drama of a scene.

"It was closer to the style of Virginia Woolf. She was very much ahead of her time."

Amongst Austen's grammatical misdemeanours was an inability to master the 'i before e' rule. Her manuscripts are littered with distant 'veiws' and characters who 'recieve' guests.

Elsewhere, she wrote "tomatoes" as "tomatas" and "arraroot" for "arrowroot" - peculiarities of spelling that reflect Austen's regional accent, Prof Sutherland explained. "In some of her writing, her Hampshire accent is very strong. She had an Archers-like voice with a definite Hampshire burr."

Over 1,000 of these handwritten pages will be placed online from Monday as the culmination of a three-year project led by Prof Sutherland in collaboration with the Bodleian Libraries, King's College London and the British Library. The collection reunites the letters and manuscripts for the first time since 1845, when they were scattered by the terms of her sister Cassandra's will.

They range from fiction written in early childhood to the manuscript for Sanditon, the novel that Austen was writing when she died in 1817. Sadly, the manuscripts for Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Emma, her most famous novels, were destroyed after being set in print.

Shakespeare couldn't spell either.

Why I gave up surfing

Surfer killed by shark:

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — The victim of a fatal shark attack at a beach northwest of Los Angeles cried out to his friend for help as the shark flashed out of the water with no warning, bit into his leg and pulled him under in a tide of red blood, the friend said Friday.

Matthew Garcia was two feet away from his friend, 19-year-old Lucas Ransom, when the shark attacked with no warning, he said. The whole attack lasted seconds while the pair were bodyboarding about 100 yards from the shore.

"When the shark hit him, he just said, 'Help me, dude!' He knew what was going on," Garcia told the AP. "It was really fast. You just saw a red wave and this water is blue — as blue as it could ever be — and it was just red, the whole wave. Even the barrel was red."

As huge waves broke over his head, Garcia tried to find his friend in the surf but couldn't. He decided to get help, but turned around once more as he was swimming to shore and saw Ransom's red body board pop up. Garcia swam to his friend and did chest compressions as he brought him to shore.

When I was growing up in South Africa, we all surfed. One friend lost an arm to a shark, another lost a leg and one was killed. A few years later shark-nets were installed. When I moved to San Francisco, I still surfed for a few years until there was a shark attack north of San Francisco.

Avatar

I don't know if this is Hindu, Tibetan or California New Age pothead art but I liked the startled look on the snail's face as he gazes at the avatar's penis.

The difference between English and American cucumbers

You can eat the skin of an English cucumber.

Cowboys

Computer "art"

I'm not a big fan of computer "art." It's a bit too lifeless and robotic for my tastes but I liked these pics even though they're a bit arty-farty.

Turn on, Drop Out, Start Up

Hyper-libertarian Facebook billionaire Peter Thiel's appalling plan to pay students to quit college:

If you've seen The Social Network, you may have caught a passing glimpse of Peter Thiel. Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook, putting up $500,000 to finance the site's original expansion in 2004.
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Thiel's philosophy demands attention not because it is original or interesting in any way—it's puerile libertarianism, infused with futurist fantasy—but because it epitomizes an ugly side of Silicon Valley's politics.
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To describe Peter Thiel as simply a libertarian wildly understates the case. His belief system is based on unapologetic selfishness and economic Darwinism. His most famous quote—borrowed from Vince Lombardi—is, "Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser." In a personal statement produced last year for the Cato Institute*, Thiel announced: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." The public, he says, doesn't support unregulated, winner-take-all capitalism and so he doesn't support the public making decisions. This anti-democratic proclamation comes with some curious historical analysis. Thiel says that the Roaring 20s were the last period when it was possible for supporters of freedom like him to be optimistic about politics. "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron," he writes.

If you want to go around saying that giving women the vote wrecked the country and still be taken seriously , it helps to be handing out $100 bills. What differentiates Thiel's Silicon Valley style of philanthropic libertarianism from Glenn Beck's screaming-raving-weeping variety is a laissez-faire attitude toward personal behavior and the lack of any demagogic instinct. Thiel, who is openly gay, wants to flee the mob, not rally it through gold-hoarding or flag-waving. Having given up hope for American democracy, he writes that he has decided to focus "my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom." Both his entrepreneurship and his philanthropy have been animated by techno-utopianism. In founding PayPal, which made his first fortune when he sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, Thiel sought to create a global currency beyond the reach of taxation or central bank policy. He likewise sees Facebook as a way to form voluntary supra-national communities.

Of course Jacob Weisberg, who wrote this hit-piece, is a blithering leftist idiot. I may not be an extreme libertarian like Thiel but he's onto something. Most students get liberal arts degrees which aren't worth the paper they're printed on but cost them tens of thousands of dollars.

PS Thiel recently held a gathering in New York for conservative homos at which Ann Coulter spoke.

PPS It was Herbert Spenser who gave Darwin the phrase "the survival of the fittest." "Economic Darwinism" is more correctly called "Spenserianism."

Hump Day pic dump

Over at homodecor (X-rated).

Li'l Abner and Steve Reeves

I had never seen Reeves as Li'l Abner. Of course I knew Abner from the comics in the Sunday paper. I always liked him because he reminded me of my sweet and simple farm-boy cousins but I stopped reading comics when I went to boarding school at the age of 11 and never got back into them so I'm finding out stuff on Wiki that either I never knew or had forgotten. For instance:

Li'l Abner Yokum: The star of Al Capp's classic comic strip was hardly "little"; Abner was 6' 3" in his stockinged feet (if he wore stockings) and perpetually 19-years old. A naïve, simple-minded and sweet-natured hillbilly boy, he lived in a ramshackle log cabin with his pint-sized parents. He inherited his strength from his irascible Mammy, and his brains from his less-than-brainy Pappy.
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He was a paragon of innocence in a sardonically dark and cynical world.
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Abner's main goal in life was evading the marital designs of Daisy Mae Scragg, the virtuous, voluptuous, barefoot Dogpatch damsel.
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Pappy Yokum: Born Lucifer Ornamental Yokum, pint-sized Pappy had the misfortune of being the patriarch in a family that didn't have one. Pappy was so lazy and ineffectual, he didn't even bathe himself. Mammy was regularly seen scrubbing Pappy in an outdoor oak tub ("Once a month, rain or shine.")
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Salomey: The Yokums' beloved pet. Cute, lovable and intelligent, (arguably smarter than Abner, Tiny or Pappy) she was accepted as part of the family, ("The youngest," as Mammy invariably introduces her.) She's 100% "Hammus Alabammus"—an adorable species of pig, and the last female known in existence. A plump, juicy Hammus Alabammus is the rarest and most vital ingredient of "ecstasy sauce", an indescribably delicious gourmet delicacy. Consequently, Salomey is frequently targeted by unscrupulous sportsmen, hogbreeders and gourmands (like J.R. Fangsley and Bounder J. Roundheels), as well as unsavory boars with improper intentions (like Boar Scarloff and Porknoy). Her moniker was a pun on both salami and Salome.

My Andy recently found these pics of Reeves as Li'l Abner.



I used to love Reeves' movies when I was a boy so I took a trip down Memory Lane. Stephen L. Reeves (January 21, 1926 – May 1, 2000):

He was an American bodybuilder and actor. At the peak of his career, he was the highest-paid actor in Europe.

Born in Glasgow, Montana, Steve Reeves moved to California at age 10 with his mother Goldie Reeves, after his father Lester Dell Reeves died in a farming accident.[1] Reeves developed an interest in bodybuilding in high school and trained at Ed Yarick's gym in Oakland. By the time he was 17, he had developed a Herculean physique, long before the general interest in bodybuilding. After graduating from high school, he enlisted in the Army during World War II, and served in the Pacific.

After his military service, Reeves began an acting career and, between 1954 and 1968 played many different roles but is mostly remembered as Hercules. And that's the way I remember him - as Hercules not Li'l Abner.

The first pic is of Reeves in the Army and the last one is Li'l Abner with the Yokum's pet pig, Salomey.

Short arm inspection?

This pic is for the Heterodox Homosexual who says he likes CMNM pics. I'm wondering if it depicts what is known in the military as a "short arm inspection."

Chubby David

I like my men on the chunky side. In fact, if a man's waist is smaller than his shoulders, I regard him as a boy - or overly vain. Males over 30 should at least have a bit of a belly.

But this is a bit too chubby even for me.

Pushing the nudity envelope

Well, I've read all my "Daily reads" and found nothing worth commenting on. So, it's more pics for the day - this time pushing the nudity envelope. I've got thousands of pics of nude men (which I'll eventually upload to my Pigsty) but I want to keep this joint fairly non-X-rated. It's not easy to find decent pics of gay men who are not waving their willies in the wind. Perhaps the third pic is a bit iffy and maybe the first pic could be considered bareback porn.

Daily beefcake

Adam and Steve

More watersports

I needed a little comic relief after looking at that hideous face of fanaticism.

The face of fanaticism

Sullivan posted this as his "Face of the Day":

People demonstrate on October 19, 2010 in Paris against pension reform. France faces a sixth day of national protests against President Nicolas Sarkozy's reforms, with the stakes rising after youths battled riot police and filling stations ran dry. A placard reads, "When order is injustice, disorder is a beginning of Justice'.

That mask can't hide the insanity in the man's eyes. He has the eyes of a fanatical Marxist or a Muslim terrorist. But he's not a Muslim so I guess he's a fanatical Marxist - you know one of the true-believers in communism who are stirring up the "useful idiot" students.

Politics schmolitics - I prefer watersports

Daily dog post - man's best friend

Tuesday tummy

All hands on deck

Fifties nostalgia

Chart of the day - fetishes

Gun porn

I like guns as much as the next redneck fag but I wouldn't go within a 100 yards of any of these guys if they were carrying.

Daily beefcake

The "It gets better" campaign

Lately many "gay bloggers" have been posting videos of older queers telling younger fags not to kill themselves because "it gets better."

Mike Barthel:

The Google Trends spike over the last year for "bullying" is impressive, and it's all around us: the car ad that was recut to change a kid fleeing bullies into merely a friendly race between youngsters; the members of the Westboro Baptist Church being described as bullies (rather than, say, insane bigoted cultists, which would apparently be less damning!); and, of course, the Times Styles section on bullying in kindergarten.
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The most visible recent examples, of course, involve gay teens killing themselves after being bullied. That increases the perception that bullying is not just something vaguely unpleasant that you have to deal with, but a threat to the survival of our loved ones.

The equation, then, is this: bullying is bad not because it's unpleasant to endure or because it can screw you up psychologically, but because it can result in teenagers killing themselves. But there's a sense that something's changed, that there's something new here—even though of course teenagers have always killed themselves, and probably sometimes because of bullies. We have statistics! One particularly well-established statistic is that the suicide rate for gay teenagers is several times the rate of that for straight teens.

It's a long article and includes Barthel's story about how he was bullied at school and gave the bully a bloody nose and what became of the bully:

[T]he one web hit I turned up is… a picture of my former tormentor in SWAT gear, participating in a simulated takedown of a school shooter.

He concludes:

Meanwhile, we're telling kids that it gets better. Which means we're pretending that adults are far less terrifying creatures.

Precisely. As my dad said to me when he made me learn boxing because I was a sissy: "It's time to man up!"

Local boys on ATVs on the Dunes

Remember these pics? I found another one. Let's just say that he's giving more than a finger - it's X-rated. I put it here.