Letter S
In the blaze of flashbulbs and howl of headlines, the men in the Profumo scandal crumpled and the women seized pop-star status. It was Rice-Davies who, upon hearing that Lord Astor had denied doing the dirty with her, bequeathed to posterity the snappy rejoinder "Well, he would, wouldn't he?," and it was Keeler who furnished one of the most iconic and imitated poses of the 60s when she was photographed by Lewis Morley straddling the back of a chair in the imperturbable nude. The original print is enshrined at the Victoria and Albert Museum, its inclusion certifying its historical-pictorial value. It's difficult to imagine Monica's blue dress ever ending up at the Smithsonian.
From an article in Vanity Fair, February 2007 called "Why Are British Sex Scandals So Much Better than Ours?"
That history has ignored the woman [the Marquise de Pompadour] who seduced Louis XV is disappointing but not altogether surprising, for to have as your life's principal achievement the seduction of an utter mediocrity, to be, as it were, the Edwina Currie of the ancien régime, inspires more contempt than admiration.
In New English Review, January 2007, in an article called "The cruelty of Eros". He goes on to add:
During high school, college, and the early years of one's working life, few men and women are actually seeking out a partner for life. Where
Pompadour's advice is helpful is in the pursuit of one-night stands or good-for-now relationships. In these trysts, does it really matter that a
certain level of emotional manipulation is involved? I should hope not, for to expect every romantically-inclined young adult to pursue their lust
within Kantian constraints is certain to result in an unspeakably sub-optimal number of such relationships..
I suspect there would be more poems about sex,
If it rhymed with more words than "pecks",
"necks", "erects", and "ejects".
This begins to sound Promising...
I may write one.
In my initial version of this page, I set the above poem in the same crazy font, based on data70 (last seen in Kubrick's "2001: a space odyssey") that my source had used for the printed original. Don't spend (waste?) the amount of time I once did trying to re-implement this font on my Acorn RiscPC.
For 12 years after its inauguration in 1944, the government's plutonium-production facility in Washington State released radioactive wastes to the environment "on a scale that today would be considered a major nuclear accident", as the New York Times put it more than 40 years later when the news became public. In 1945 alone, Hanford officials secretly released 340,000 curies of radioactive iodine to the surrounding countryside. By comparison, official estimates give the total release from the Three Mile Island accident as 15 curies.
In "Multiple Exposures" (1989).
Amazing what eventually leaks out, don't you think?
Q: What constitutes a freshly-dipped sheep?
A: A sheep is regarded as being freshly-dipped for the short period which
follows immediately after dipping, when
the sheep is still wet from the dip bath.
In "Hansard", or so I assume!
A telling Q&A exchange by the Countess of Marr, in our House of Lords in May 1994.
All but seven of the ships were later salvaged for scrap and their metals recycled into the fleets of both sides in World War II. The remaining ships are now one of the few sources of uncontaminated steel needed to shield delicate instruments that measure radiation, so bits of the Kaiser's navy are now (courtesy of NASA) on the moon, or even further afield.
Recall that, on the 21st June 1919 the German fleet was sunk (scuttled) at Scapa Flow.
This quote concerns the vast amount of oxygen used in the Bessemer conversion of iron to steel and the
inevitability [since nuclear bomb "tests"] of radioactive contamination of some of that oxygen.
Thus all steel manufactured since Trinity, Hiroshima, Nagasaki (et endless al) is contaminated...
We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
To suppose, as we all suppose, that we could be rich and not behave as the rich behave, is like supposing that we could drink all day and stay sober.
Too sobering? Cheers!
Granted, it sleazily intimates that Hillary Clinton is a lying, scheming, smelly, left-leaning lesbian and a non-maternal parent who consorts with lawyers who defend mobbed-up unions and bears a striking character resemblance to both Richard Nixon and Madonna, and who tacitly approved of her husband's rape of a young woman at a time when Mrs. Clinton may or may not have been bathing, washing her hair or shaving her underarms, while hanging out with short-haired women from the sapphic charnel house Wellesley College.
But to suggest, as the talented John Podhoretz did in The New York Post, that this is "one of the most sordid volumes I have ever waded through" is to raise serious questions about Podhoretz's sordid wading experiences.
In "The New York Times" in a book review called "Whacking Hillary", 31 July 2005.
Comment seems superfluous, somehow.