Month: April 2025

I should hope so

Nothing if not an extraordinary title. However, trying to find out exactly what the fuck this thing is/was has been another matter… the Internet has been unusually unhelpful, and has primarily pointed me towards second-hand bookshops offering it for sale through Abebooks. Still, with a bit more research, I’m going to assume “this book of Earth” was in fact a booklet (only 32pp. long, apparently) of poetry, cos that’s what Dave Cunliffe did… the latter was part of the ’60s British poetry revival, and this obituary of him is where I get most of what I now about him from; that obit includes a photo from which the cover picture has evidently been cropped, and it depicts Cunliffe and Tina Morris, his wife and partner in crime… I don’t recognise many of the other names invoked in the articles I’ve seen about cos frankly I know bugger all about this particular scene (though obviously I recognised Nelson Mandela, who apparently contributed to one of Tina’s works), but I did know the name Jeff Nuttall; he was another publisher of small press books and journals at that time, including My Own Mag, which I knew of cos William S. Burroughs wrote for it, and Nuttall wrote a book called Bomb Culture in 1968 about the rise of the underground movement of the era. And I’ve actually got that, or rather a bodgy ebook of same, cos I read about it in Mark Fisher’s K-Punk… though being me, of course, I still haven’t read the damn thing three years later. Perhaps I should actually do that and learn something…

Penis

Historians dispute Bayeux tapestry penis tally after lengthy debate

In a historical spat that could be subtitled “1066 with knobs on”, two medieval experts are engaged in a battle over how many male genitalia are embroidered into the Bayeux tapestry.
The Oxford professor George Garnett drew worldwide interest six years ago when he announced he had totted up 93 penises stitched into the embroidered account of the Norman conquest of England.
According to Garnett, 88 of the male appendages are attached to horses and the remainder to human figures.
Now, the historian and Bayeux tapestry scholar Dr Christopher Monk – known as the Medieval Monk – believes he has found a 94th.
A running man, depicted in the tapestry border, has something dangling beneath his tunic. Garnett says it is the scabbard of a sword or dagger. Monk insists it is a male member.
“I am in no doubt that the appendage is a depiction of male genitalia – the missed penis, shall we say. The detail is surprisingly anatomically fulsome,” Monk said.

The real question this article unfortunately fails to answer is why exactly anyone felt the need to count how many penises were in the Bayeux Tapestry in the first place, never mind why five (or six) of them were human ones…

…and frankly I don’t know that I’m convinced either way. But if that IS his John Thomas, well, that fellow was certainly… endowed.

And which of these are we looking at here?

Oh Guardian, this was poorly chosen. What we’re actually looking at here is “American artist, community activist, and perennial candidate” Paperboy Prince at the New York City Mayoral Candidates Forum at Medgar Evers College, being hauled off the stage for protesting that he was a mayoral candidate but wasn’t allowed to speak at the forum. I don’t know the merits or otherwise of the case, but… well, when you use the headline “Holocuast Remembrance Day and mourners at the Vatican” for your photo section and then illustrate it with this picture of some dude in clown makeup, you’ve made a choice. And you should probably regret it. And lose your job for it.

Oh THAT’LL work

Yeah, I can REALLY SEE Putin ending this infernal war just because Mushroom Cock told him to. Not, of course, that I believe the latter’s sudden concern for the Ukrainian people is at all genuine; in almost all these cases what the aggressor wants is victory, not actual peace, and the spoils that accompany it, and Drumpf wants his share of those more than anything. And if he keeps wagging his finger at Putin, he might be lucky to get any of those, cos I don’t think Vlad will take kindly to his puppet telling him off like this somehow…

Here come the crotch-stepper

Last year I posted some old paintings of Jesus after his resurrection. A bit late for this Easter, I think I’ve found a new favourite via Bluesky:

“This initial from the 15th-century Chichele Breviary shows Christ rising from his tomb with the guards asleep around him. He appears triumphant, yet he still bears the wounds from his crucifixion. [MS 69 f. 118v]”

Also sprach the Lambeth Public Library Bluesky account. Christ not only appears triumphant, he also looks like he’s about to stand on the crotch of the dozy bastard on the ground. THAT would’ve been a rude awakening…

We can but hope

A week after a major hack brought down 4chan and doxxed all its users, it seems like it may be dead for good

Nearly a week after a major hack forced it offline, the notorious imageboard 4chan remains inaccessible, and there’s a growing feeling that it’s going to stay that way—and that maybe it’s not so bad.
Founded in 2003, 4chan is—or was—something of a waypoint for a particular part of online subculture: Basic, unrefined, unmoderated, and almost entirely anonymous, which is what made it so notorious. Vice called it “the internet’s favorite hotspot of moral bankruptcy” in its report on the hack, and that seems about right: There are certainly worse places to go in the digital world, but none that are so singularly famous for it. […]
What ultimately brought 4chan down wasn’t controversy or opprobrium from the right-thinking denizens of the online realm, though, but rather a beef with another imageboard, Soyjack.party. A message on that board celebrating the attack said the alleged hacker had been in 4chan’s systems for over a year before launching the hack.
Specifics are unclear, as you’d expect from this particular type of old-time internet gong show, but the attack itself was devastating. While 4chan was built around anonymity, users could register accounts to take advantage of certain features; many did, and they were reportedly all doxxed: A TechCrunch report posted shortly after the attack said the hacker posted screenshots purportedly showing 4chan’s “back end, source code, and templates to ban users,” along with a list of 4chan moderators and “janitors,” users who can delete posts and threads but don’t have full moderator access. One janitor told TechCrunch they believed the posted information was all real, and that the hack was “obviously an issue of greater magnitude” than previous leaks.
Despite that, the janitor seemed unexpectedly sanguine about the whole thing, adding that “doxxing is a longstanding pastime on 4chan, and the possibility that we could be exposed has always been there.” Others may not share that sentiment, though, given the potential to tie users—including some who’d registered with .gov and .edu domains—to alt-right, sometimes violent, political content and movements.
The extent of the hack has led some to believe that 4chan may never be restored. A BoingBoing report said that “with every single user of note doxxed, the site’s servers decimated, and the admin team in disarray, it’s unlikely 4chan will be back up soon. Or ever.” With each passing day, that looks more and more likely. It’s been six days since the hack, and 4chan remains offline.

We shouldn’t be mourning the loss of 4chan, of course, assuming that is indeed the case, much in the same way we probably shouldn’t be celebrating Soyjak.party; an admittedly cursory examination of the latter suggests to me that they’re basically cunts of a similar order. And as long as 8chan/8kun is still out there the problem hasn’t really gone away, has it… still, if this the end of 4chan, I suppose we should take what we get…