Police S&M!

At the risk of being too topical or political (qualities I try to avoid here as much as possible), I confess to being pretty shocked and disgusted - and hence I suppose fascinated also - with the behaviour of the force policing the G20 in Toronto this past weekend.


Working with an unprecedented budget of nearly a billion dollars, questionable legal powers, and police and soldiers from all over the country (and even the U.S. military) totaling a force some 19,000 strong, this was the cop's show -- they were most definitely in charge and running things.

It was disturbing to see this militant show of strength in such a normally polite and casual place as downtown Toronto - as though we had been invaded by an army of cowardly bullies wearing gas masks and body armour, brandishing weapons and banging on their shields like Zulu warriors. Also very, very angry apparently.


Between the costumes, the disguises, the theatricality, and the overwhelming DOMINATION of it all, this was power play taken to extremes. And it's all so simple, even primitive - the police sacrifice a few junk cop cars, let them burn for the media, putting fear and anger into people who aren't even there. Triggering the loopholes in human brains that let them approve horror, let them applaud violence as a consequence to things that scare them.


And then the cops have the go-ahead to bust up heads: to invade, detain or beat people at random, spray tear gas into crowds of peaceful demonstrators or charge into them with horses. To go crazy basically, shoot people with rubber bullets, make mass arrests, refusing to apologize when even The Sun says they've gone too far.

News of the Perverse!

Most of us could use some good news. But, if the news of the day is not so good, is it too much to ask that it be at least a bit... perverted? A little bit of a slant maybe - on the usual, a little outside the lines?

About.com has some nice pages up, but is more of a one-time, in and out kind of thing. Somewhat along the same lines, The Smoking Gun's Arresting Images section of mugshots.


If you don't like the way these sites cast aspersions on the people featured - well, you'll probably hate The Unknown Highway. I guess the closest thing they have to a Sex category here is Sick. They've also kindly rounded up some Internet Perverts for you to lose your lunch over.

Weird News Files stopped running sex stories in February 2009 it would appear, the last one there being that of a man "arrested after allegedly engaging in sexual acts with two blow up dolls in a shopping center parking lot".


A search of Chuck Sheppard's News of the Weird gets about 137 results for 'sex', the same search at The Smoking Gun nets about 2,650.

World Sex News Daily is updated daily, though the content tends towards celebrity gossip & the like. Covering the same sort of territory are the Sex Gazette series of websites: for Asia, Europe, America, and Latin America. I'm not sure if these sites are still being updated, but they are very interesting to peruse, also dealing with pornography & prostitution.


Pervscan is probably the best of the bunch overall - sister site to Supervert, Pervscan has great write-ups, and shows an obvious love for the subject, but it's just not updated as often as one would like.

A walk in the woods.

It was nice weather today so I went for a walk at Crawford Lake.

Here's some pics I took of the green stuff. Hope you enjoy.

China Vs. The Green Slime!

Perhaps the single most impressive thing about this year's Olympics was the massive effort put forward to fight a particularly beautiful bright green algae bloom on the shores of Qingdao, a city site for event sailing competition. Press reports detail a million tons of the stuff, covering one-third of the surface area, was removed after a month's work by a team of upwards of 2000 boats, and some 30,000 students, volunteers and soldiers.

King Knut himself might have been impressed, I daresay.

Other tactics to wipe out the slime included simultaneous construction of two 20,000 metre 'goo gate' barriers, preventing algae from floating into the sailing venue proper, as well as regular ship patrols to monitor for future algal concerns. The green stuff is reportedly being shipped to farms for pigs and other animals to munch on, although I've also seen photos of it being left to rot in huge piles so I dunno. Don't they know that's cash in the bank?

Special props for this post must go out to the Guardian (who had the best seaweed porn gallery on the interwebs) and the AP photographers who shot all this messy majesty in the first place. Some video reports here and here.

And speaking of props, how cool is this? Not very at all from an ecological point of view I understand, but as knickknacks go, it's pretty nifty I'd say.

Trees Are Excellent!

Trees rock, don't deny it. Starting out as tiny seeds and sprouting into something which frequently dwarfs people in size, and puts their puny 60-100 year lifetimes in the shade. You can learn a lot from trees.


Growing leaves each spring and shedding them each fall, or remaining hardy and piny year round. Swaying in the breeze, snapping in the storm. Tiny or huge.


As far as meditation goes, you could do worse than meditating on, or under, trees. Christ was nailed to one; Buddha found enlightenment under one. There's the Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge. And Yggdrasil, the World Tree.


Trees can stand for justice or injustice, fragility or endurance. Life or death. They give us so much and ask so little.


Trees are truly amazing lifeforms. Time spent relaxing underneath one is never time wasted.


It really doesn't get much better than trees.

Rot Rot Rot

It's finally that time of year when the snow begins to recede.

What it reveals is usually a repellent mess of caked mud, dead brown grass, and decomposing matter of one kind or another. Of course, if you have a dog, there's often a great deal of dog excrement about as well (I had to clean our backyard every spring growing up so this is a strong association for me). It all makes spring a particularly messy season, a squishy season.

Dare I say, a particularly sexy season as well, with its rife explosions of life and rebirth and throbbing flowers sprouting up everywhere. A young man's fancy lightly turns to love. Trees grow leaves. Bees do it.

Of course that's all normal and as per the usual way of things. But up north of 60, it's a different story; ice is melting there that hasn't melted for thousands of years. Ice and frozen soil so permanent they had to call it permafrost.


Aside from revealing cool stuff like woolly mammoths and smallpox, scientists are now warning that the melting permafrost reveals biomass - 500 billion tons of squishy dinosaur dung and other gross rotting matter - which in turn releases methane gases and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which in turn speeds up global warming which in turn speeds up the melting of the permafrost which in turn reveals more biomass, and so on.

Great.

And suddenly the Arctic tundra isn't the frozen funzone you thought it would be. It's likely to dry out, and grow shrubs. It may burn far more easily. Sure, you get to live in weird houses that look really awesome, but what will your life in that weird house be like?


Will the next phase of the ongoing End of the World be a huge release of methane, the fart to end all farts?

As the snow recedes and the ooze is let loose, I am put in mind of Edge Of Darkness, a mid-80s British nuclear-weapon-type-thriller of above average intelligence. The mini-series ends ominously (if memory serves) with a pan across an Arctic tundra-like landscape; amid the snow, we see black flowers are beginning to bloom.

As referenced earlier in the episode, this is an allusion to James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis - the Earth itself had had its share of people, and was helping to melt the icecaps with a little fleur noir so that mankind would die and life could otherwise carry on. But I guess there's really no need for all that effort on the Earth's behalf, eh?

It's Time For Slime

It's devolution in action as the world's oceans gradually return to something like the start of life on the planet. The Los Angeles Times has an excellent long feature on the phenomenon. From this piece:

"In many places — the atolls of the Pacific, the shrimp beds of the Eastern Seaboard, the fiords of Norway — some of the most advanced forms of ocean life are struggling to survive while the most primitive are thriving and spreading. Fish, corals and marine mammals are dying while algae, bacteria and jellyfish are growing unchecked. Where this pattern is most pronounced, scientists evoke a scenario of evolution running in reverse, returning to the primeval seas of hundreds of millions of years ago."

Thought the ocean were relatively free of the sort of garbage we've filled the earth with? Think again. All this unchecked refuse is sure to have consequences we can scarcely conceive of. Jellyfish, algae blooms, fireweed, and - perhaps most notably - giant squid, all these fill the gaps left by now vanishing species, "transforming the oceans into a microbial soup."

Could things possibly get any worse?