Product placement

I’ve seen a few people commenting on this:

…a tweet from the US Department of Homeland Security marking the occasion of Easter with a picture of whatisname on the cross and the text from Luke 23:46 with a crucifix above it. And there is indeed much that could be said about this, particularly the inappropriateness of a US government department ignoring the whole church & state separation thing to the fact that the current regime likely wouldn’t even let their putative saviour into the US to begin with, but it was cartoonist Tom Tomorrow who pointed out on Bluesky the most… interesting thing about it; namely, the way the crucifix above the text was placed right over the Lord’s crotch. And… yeah, there it be. I don’t really know what else to say about it.

Be strong for you surely gonna die

I’ve stuck the odd dub tune in a mix before, but I’ve meant to do a whole mix of the stuff for a while now. So here it is.

    1. Sly & The Revolutionaries, Marijuana
    2. Joe Gibbs, Satta Amassa Gana Version
    3. Keith Hudson, Black Heart
    4. Scientist, Dub Bible
    5. Yabby You, Anti-Christ Dub
    6. King Tubby & Soul Syndicate, Great Stone
    7. Lee Perry & The Upsetters, Drum Rock
    8. Abyssinians, Jah Loves Dub
    9. Tommy McCook, The Gorgon of Dubs & Horns
    10. Keith Hudson, Be Good Dub
    11. Black Ark Players, Guidance
    12. The Upsetters, Rejoicing Skank
    13. Prince Jammy, Jammin’ for Survival
    14. Gregory Isaacs, Leggo Beast
    15. Johnnie Clarke, Drums of Africa
    16. Treasure Isle All-Stars, Arabian Dub
    17. Lee Perry, Such is Dub

But which faith?

J. Divans has a new book:

This is the story of the First Bitch’s journey from atheism to Catholicism. Apparently there’s one slight problem, though, which is that the lovely cover art actually depicts a Methodist church. Apparently it is from somewhere in JD’s native Appalachia, but it is… not of his religion. I wouldn’t have known had someone else not mentioned it online, admittedly; I did do a quick Google search which suggests Catholics are less than one percent  of the Appalachian populachian, so it may just have been awfully difficult to find an actually Catholic structure… but surely there’s at least one? Something else for Pope Leo to snipe at him about, I suppose…

Yes

I suspect we’re all feeling at least a bit like this at the moment. How the fuck is it only the end of March? What the Christ else can still go wrong in the remaining three-quarters of this year? Or should I not ask in case I jinx things? Probably the latter. Sigh.

I’ll bet they are

You may be shocked (or not) to learn that porn doesn’t actually interest me that much. I’m kind of interested in the history of it, but less so the actual products of the industry (a nice display of nudity is fine, but actually watching peope fuck doesn’t grab me. It’s a longish story). That history, of course, includes the artwork promoting the stuff, and I think I’ve posted a few examples in the Important Images series… but I just found this one tonight, via a Tumblr called Vintage Adult Movie Posters, and I decided to post it here cos I’m a bit puzzled by the author’s comment about it: “Not sure what the ‘ultimate sin’ is all about…” I mean, like I said, I may not be interested in actually watching the stuff, but even *I* know why this title is a kind of infamous one. This is the film’s IMDB entry, and the plot summary therefrom:

A female friend of a sexually frustrated mother tries broadening her horizons with a sex orgy. Though avoiding it, the new feelings inside her cause her to force herself on her sleeping son. To her amazement, the seduction is mutual.

So… yeah. That’s what the “ultimate sin” is about. The film’s Wiki entry features a rather more up-front poster that makes it even clearer. Notably, the film was written by a woman, that being director Kirdy Stevens’ wife Terrie, and I don’t know what that may or may not say about their relationship at the time. Per IMDB, Stevens didn’t allow swearing in his films; apparently showing fuck was fine but saying fuck wasn’t…

Tumblr: still partying like it’s 2018

I’ve been maintaining a blog on Tumblr in some form or other since 2010 as a bit of a side thing. The current version is almost as old as this thing, cos Tumblr in their usual infinite wisdom decided the previous one must be destroyed for some reason or other. Accordingly, I haven’t posted anything to it myself, only reposts of other people’s stuff. Let other people take the risk.

And I thought Tumblr had started being a bit more reasonable about adult content; after the infamous (and not altogether effective) porn ban of late 2018, I thought it was making at least some progress by introducing “mature content” tags that users could apply themselves. Not the best solution, but better than outlawing the stuff entirely, which was what they tried in 2018…

Unfortunately, as I’ve seen tonight, Tumblr seems to have decided to go back to 2018 and start applying those tags themselves according to their own judgement… meaning that I’ve now got a bunch of stuff tagged as “potentially mature” and, as in 2018, at least a certain amount of that is actually bugger all of the sort… but I’m more bothered by the things they’ve flagged as definitely “mature”, cos they’ve apparently gone beyond what they did in 2018; back then they replaced the dirty dirty smut with a note that the post had contained dirty dirty smut but had now been hidden to protect everyone (including the blog owner), but now it looks like they’re not even doing that… not only do you have no option to request a review, the content is completely hidden now. Not even a sign that it was there at all. The odd thing is, those things are still visible in the mass post editor, but when I click on them from there, Tumblr just gives me the “not found” page.

So, not for the first time, I’m querying the whole point of me being on Tumblr; feels like a slightly pointless enterprise not just because I’ve got this thing now, but because the whole point of me making it a reblog-only thing was so I wouldn’t be affected again by Tumblr’s decisions about this stuff and, well, here I am affected anyway. I just liked the idea of having a corner of the Internet that people who actually know me in real life don’t know about (apart from one, I think). Mind you, no one who actually knows me in real life ever remarks to me about anything I post here, either, so I’ve kind of got that obscure corner anyway…

Par for the course

Yeah, of course he did. To be honest, I thought this was too ridiculous to be true, so did a quick Google, and oh for fuck’s sake. I don’t like linking to News Corp sites if I can avoid it, but the New York Post is where the story seems to originate; one of their writers was, for reasons not given, granted access to a bunch of Junior’s old diaries back in 2013 and she has now turned what she learned from that into a book, because why on earth wouldn’t you sit on this story for years instead of releasing it when it was timely and might’ve at least got in the way of his rise to political prominence… The story is actually about three men who influenced him after Bobby Sr’s murder into becoming the piece of shit he now is (one of whom had Epstein connections, because why not), and the raccoon revelation is somewhat casually tossed off—and I’ve just realised what a really bad choice of words that is considering the subject matter, but oh well—as if it’s “just one of those things”, but I suppose it kind of is “just one of those things” for this dickhead, and I’m increasingly sure there’s a lot more of this sort of thing in his background that he’s hasn’t admitted to even in private… starting to think that brainworm was the animal world trying to get its revenge on him.

Ambrosio ’75

And another book spotted online recently, being The Monk by Matthew G. Lewis… specifically the 1975 printing by Avon Books. I mention this because nothing on that cover indicates the book was 180 years old by that point, unless the back cover mentions it or something or there’s publication info inside the thing. If you didn’t know any better (and I’m sure some people who picked up this edition didn’t), you might not know it wasn’t a new title until you started reading it and found the style a bit old-fashioned… The Monk was, of course, the pre-eminent hell-raiser of 1796 and it’s actually still kind of bracing at points, and this is pretty good cover art for it (wish I knew who did it); if you were going to disguise The Monk as a common 1970s horror paperback, this is the sort of thing you’d want…