Censorship on the net. Some websites being policed, particularly the ones which contain information which certain individual governments may regard as dangerous. (Usually to themselves alone.)

But hang on... isn't the net meant to be a place where there is no censorship other than that which is imposed on sites by site owners, boards by board-owners, etc? What does anyone think of this? I think any censorship of the net outside of those terms is unnatural, because - in electronic terms! - the net is a naturally-growing, organic thing, and lies mercifilly outside any nation or state.

Yum. Gratuitous disgusting food for the day.

You know, the little links saying 'comment?' under each post are usable. So, if you feel moved to, use them. If not... don't. See if I care.

I've just come across a link to this website; WARNING!: it's not for the faint-hearted. Put bluntly, it has lots of pictures and videos of things like shootings, suicides, gruesome accidents and not-quite-accidents of all kinds. I initially thought that it was just pointlessly sick stuff, and was sort of comforted and confirmed in my view when I saw lots of bad spelling and swearwords in the comments pages. Obviously, I thought, the people who visit this site are just dumb sickos.

But then I looked at a clip. It was the suicide of a guy called Bud Dwyer. He was a state dignitary of Pennslvania who put a pistol in his mouth during a press conference which aired on live TV. He was going to be sentenced the following day for a host of white-collar crimes, and it was likely he would be imprisoned for over 50 years. Apparently. Anyway. I was both repelled, and fascinated. There was no reason in the world that I'd have sought out something like this to watch: last night I spent nearly all my online time taking a look at nice things on this site. I certainly don't think that this clip was put onto the site as any kind of catalyst for law reform, or as education into the tragedies of suicide.

All the same, I was fascinated. The image of a person's death is, shockingly, special. Yes; it's disgusting as well, of course. Many of the links in the site describe only, and they were enough to stop me from clicking. But whereas we may see squashed animals on the roads every day and not be disturbed, as soon as we see another dead animal (of the human kind), we recoil. Is this instinctive? I'd say not. Is it aesthetic? I'd say it is. But are aesthetics unchangeable, set in stone, absolute? No. Therefore, although I was so disgusted by what I've just seen that I am gently sipping from a glass of water to quiet my stomach, I have to recognise that maybe the people who keep the site online might (unintentionally) be providing something of a service to those of us brave enough to look and think. That site reminds me, at any rate, that when you get down to it, all I am is a living organism. I'm not sacred. I can be pulled apart, even killed. But hell, there's so much more to me as well - and when you think about it, that's kinda special.

Two things have happened today which have made big news in the UK. One: England lost in the latest world cup football match. I couldn't give a fuck. And then a bloke called Spencer got thrown out of the Big Brother house: basically a place in which ordinary people are imprisoned and assigned various tasks and have to live together, and they're watched *really avidly* by the nation, which decides on which one of them is to be evicted from the house at the end of each week. Well, those of us who can actually be bothered to watch the thing, and call in to vote. Personally, I'm more taken with the wonderful thunderstorm we had tonight over Belfast. Really big rumbles, and hailstones as big as pebbles. FAN-tastic. :o)

And apparently, as a result, people on the outskirts of Belfast have had to fight floodwater coming through their homes, sometimes 4 feet deep in certain areas. I'd say that was a lot more important than Big fucking Brother. But hey. We all have to have priorities, and mine are the quiet little boring ones. I've also been thinking quite a lot lately about a certain person. But I'm not saying who it is. I don't want to jinx things. And I might not even be thinking about anyone: that's the thing with words. You can make them say anything.

*grin*

Tonight was the night that the first person to visit our house with a view to seeing whether they might want to bid for it, well, visited. She was only here for about 15 mins I guess, but I left after the first 5, not really wanting to stick around and hear dad's final "So I hope you'll want to buy this excellent family home" spiel. Because it's our family home, dammit. Ours.

Am I being too possessive over this?

Your online smile for the day.

This little guy is called Quetzalcoatl, and he's in a room at the back of the great court in the British Museum, London. I sort of wanted him when I first saw him. :o)

Now, who can guess what this is?

Twisty bit of wire? It's bronze actually. Still no clue? It's a mummification probe from the British Museum's interesting online database. Basically, they stick this up your nose when you're dead, push hard so it breaks through the bone between your nasal cavity and brain, and then twizzle it around so it breaks up the brain. The pieces are then spiked and pulled back out through your nose. When you're dead, obviously. And why? Because the brain didn't have any significance to the ancient egyptians, but the heart did, and it was where the personality, thoughts etc. were thought to reside.

I love museums. They contain objects of such bizarre, and sometimes grotesque, significance under the polite patina of educated research and endless quiet Sunday afternoons.

Oh my god.

Now, that was me during my final year of uni, with specs and seemingly without eyes, but in a very very nice bar in Aberdeen. Which you can't really see. Dammit. Wow. What you find in dusty folders.

They were there again tonight.

God, that sounds like the opening line of a ghost story. Except ghosts don't reach out and try to feel your bits. Well, usually they don't anyway, and if they do, we can only assume that all those writers have been censoring stuff for centuries. It's weird, I know, but I got drunk with dad tonight. Yeah, drunk with my own, usually non-alcoholic father. It was actually quite good. We both got drunk, and we both didn't argue. I think it was the food. We were both too hungry to fight, and then after we'd got through the first stretch of stuffing our faces and things had got more leisurely, there was no real urge to do anything but have more wine and slur more speech.

I've been looking at gaydar tonight. I know, I know. Slaggy gay website. Well, slaggier than my own haunt. And it's so bizarre. I went on it to look for my friend Lars (who still lives there and emailed me recently) and I can't find him, even though Patrick described his profile to me, because - would you believe it?! - there are actually over 500 entries for Aberdeen alone! I never knew there were that many of us there! Admittedly, a lot of them are people who just aren't us. They stand in the corners of bars and look for SEX all night, and if they don't do that, the environment they're in leads them to describe themselves and their needs in a really clinial, abnormal way. Instead of just saying "I am this person, and I want this sort of experience / person / chocolate / icecream", they say "I'm a male (never a guy) who wants to be taught (why not just leave it for later?) about blah blah". Can anything BE more of a turn-off? I like to know what people are interested in, *outside* the sheets. When you're done talking about the consistency of different types of cum, ewwww, there's precious little else you'd actually want to say. Whereas if you're talking about film, or music, or books, or countryside, or travel, everything's so much more real. And interesting.

I met a guy in London once who must have thought that I wanted sex with everyone I met. Like, I think he must have thought I wanted to shag *friends* all the time. I have *slept with* (as in, yes, actually snored beside) some of my friends in the same bed. By which he understood: "Pete has rampant *sex* with *all* of his friends, and is shockingly unapologetic about that, but rather than actually taking the trouble to find out whether this rather unbelievable thing is true or not, I'm going to run away with my own sense of shock, magnify it out of all proportion, and ignore any other aspects of Pete's personality. And then say limply and unconvincingly that I don't feel we're suitable for each other".

I saw the other day that he's moved within London, and is still looking for friends he really feels completely comfortable with. Now, I'm not knocking that. But. Surprise fucking surprise. Maybe he should move to another, earlier, century? I think so, anyway - for his own sanity at least.

Does anyone outside of Belfast know what millies are? If not, here's a crashcourse. They are female, usually wear tracksuits and very little else, constantly wolf-whistle at any passing male, have no education, probably lost their virginity at age 12, and have had meaningful relationships with lines of coke for as long as they can remember. And there are two of them right outside my window, in my cosy little cul-de-sac street, and when I walked past them they did the whole whistling thing and shouted, really loudly, in the most disgusting accent you can possibly imagine:

"Hey... give us yer COCK!"

I retreated indoors, not wanting to get into the whole "I'm gay" "But we can change that in these bushes right now" exchange.

Okay. So. The whole department of transport / Byers thing was somewhat overblown by me, in that they were marginally less shitty than at first appeared. Still doesn't stop me from holding them in high contempt though. So just in case anyone's in the slightest bit doubtful, I want to say this. Fuck Byers. Right in the ear.

;o)

Paul is being sort of endearingly nasty and calling me a porn slave. It's just not true. Now, porn. There's an interesting subject. It changes so much through the centuries. I was looking for ages to see whether there were any representative photos of nineteenth-century stuff out there on the web but I kept on getting sites like this and this and this instead.

If you clicked any of the above links, shame on you. SHAME, I say. You know who you are. You know very well that you came here for what is basically a cerebral read, and ended up being lured away by nothing more than the promise of seeing naked flesh. You shallow person.

19th-century porn is laughable now, but then, it was hot stuff, kept by men in private collections, and surprise of surprises, they even had porn moves then. Well. Quite funny porn moves by our standards no doubt. Sort of, 'oh, bare that ankle a bit more and you'll make me cream' type of stuff. These movies were called 'smoking concert films', delightful euphemism. Men used to get together and show these in little wank parties when their wives were out in someone else's parlour and saying 'eau, your cakes are delightful'. And the guilt. You could be publicly disgraced then if it was found you liked porn. Can you believe it? Jobs lost, houses lost, lives decimated, and all because of hypocrisy. It's bizarre that the Victorians (in this country) used porn much more extensively than most people would today, but they were also far, far more repressed about it.

Alex should be pleased I've finally written something here, after a 6-day break, even if it is just a brief foray into sexuality and out again.

I don't often feel really seething about political stuff. I don't often really care about it in the least; it's something Really Important which is done by besuited people with very little life other than being Organised and Important. And I tend to have a pretty high level of contempt for it just because of that. Human beings are rarely really important, in my view, ever. I mean, the highest level of importance anyone can attain in my eyes is boyfriendship. So if someone was to hold a gun to the head of any prime minister and another to the head of my boyfriend, and ask me who I wanted spared, I'd go for the boyfriend every time.

Anyhow. Our department of transport in this country, run at present by Tony Blair's Labour government, the department itself presided over by the recently departed Stephen Byers, seems to be full of complete, utter, specially shitty shits. First, one of Byers' key advisers chose the day New York's WTC towers came down in a massive terrorist attack to send an email to colleagues saying that "Today would be a good day to bury bad news". Byers kept her on. Made excuses for her, and then, spinelessly, said that maybe he'd've done it differently if.... if WHAT? If he hadn't been such a worthless inept fckwit in the first place? Fucking hell. So, today, we have the news that after a particularly horrific train-crash a few years ago, after which many survivors raked the transport and government people over the coals, someone else in Byers' department ordered that all survivors' political leanings should be looked into, in case the government might want to rubbish them later.

What utter shits we have running the country. What heartless, corporate, narrow-minded bastards who can't see further than the walls of their tasteless houses, the paper walls of their sad, uneventful lives.

I don't know what it says about Byers himself. Or about the prime minister, come to that. But Byers must either be bloody good at being a shit while appearing to be contrite and mouselike, or else he's actually a bit dim and didn't have much idea how to run his department and had no respect inside of it. Whatever. It takes a lot to get me angry about stuff I don't usually think about for a second. But saying "Those people who survived that crash. Those traumatised, badly injured, vocal people. Let's dig up whatever we can about them". Make up your own mind, and then write to them at rail@dtlr.gov.uk and tell them what you think.

Isn't it brilliant when you wake up in the morning and see sun, and then you wander downstairs in an airy and empty house to find that there's freshly-made mango juice with mint in the fridge? If you don't know whether it is or not, damn you to hell, and try making some. I didn't make mine from Nigel Slater's new book but my god, that's something I'm going to have to get my sticky paws on at some time.

Today is a drink day. A day when you're very likely to be positively dripping over the idea of sitting out in the garden rather than sitting indoors. A day when any type of food, apart from sorbet, is a preposterous irrelevance, and clothes are almost a thing of the past. I say almost. I'd not want to sit out in my back garden with next to nothing on. The neighbours would get self-conscious and the kids in the school wouldn't learn a thing, apart from the basic rudiments of how exactly Michelangelo was able to turn out his human figures.

Muahahahaaa.

Oh, what a lovely day it's been. So far. Sunny, nothing happening in the house except photos being taken of the living rooms and kitchen. I'm wondering what other people who pick up the brochures in the estate agent's will think when they see our place. Will they think "Wow, that's definitely a cool house. You can really tell that a young attractive cerebral guy lives there and sort of tolerates his incipiently geriatric father" or will they think "Hmm. Looks tasteful, in a suburban kind of way"? Probably the second one. Dammit.

I'm very proud of myself today. I decided that today was the day I'd bare my arms for summer. Not usually being one to bare too much, this was as much a revelation for me as anyone else, and I got... *grin* admiring *smile* glances!! Yes! That's right! Of course I'm not really that shallow. I don't look at myself in mirrors, and I don't care about my hair. My clothes are important, but usually less so than whatever book it is that I happen to be reading.

But I got glances! For my arms! My happiness about that might be shallow, yeah, but I don't care, this is a first.

There's something to be said about those nights that you're gathered all in one house, all your friends there, and you're kicking butt over a LAN on lovely-looking graphic-intensive games. Then again, there's something to be said about having a computer which can actually run the most popular of the games at anything but a mind-numbing crawl. I really must get myself a new computer one day. Anyone want to contribute? No, didn't think so. Well, I'm sure that whatever deity's up there will remember that the day you wake up after you die.

;o)