Letter X
Not for Antoni van Leeuwenhoek the post-coital cigarette that day in 1677. No sooner had he finished making love to his wife Cornelia than he was up at his home-made microscope, discovering in his semen a "vast number of living animalcules", little wriggling creatures with rounded bodies and long, vigorous tails. The Dutch draper and microscopist had confirmed, for the first time, the existence of spermatozoa.
In his review of "THE EGG AND SPERM RACE: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unravelled the Secrets of Sex and Growth" writing on the Financial Times web site on 14 April 2006.
"The only way she's coming back to you is if a burst of semen catapults her over here!"
Spoken by the Meg Ryan character in the film "Addicted to Love".
Jeremy Hardy (a BBC radio News Quiz regular) is extremely
quick-witted, in both senses of the word and, during an exchange regarding insemination and sperm donation he coined the phrase
"Keeping your passion porridge in your love grenades!" Which aligns nicely with the equally sparkly dialogue above...
Until the jizz bizz has access to the digital vaseline used by the studios to make Kiera Knightly, Sandra Bullock and Cameron Diaz look flawless the best way of preserving porn's "perfect" illusion in HD is going to be younger performers, midshots and squinting. Meanwhile prepare for a lot of hasty, desperate and pointless surgery followed by a couple of unexpected early retirements.
From a piece called The High Definition Porn Problem on the SugarBank blog.
Better teeth: Seminal plasma contains zinc, calcium and other minerals shown to retard tooth decay. Since this is a family Web site, we will omit discussion of the mineral delivery system. Suffice it to say that it could be a far richer, more complex and more satisfying experience than squeezing a tube of Crest -- even Tartar Control Crest.
In "Is sex necessary?" on Forbes.com
Grasping this slippery theme (if possible) between the teeth.
Civilisation is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.
Remaining on a bodily fluid theme, it's also been said that civilisation is only about two square meals away from collapse. (Usually by people like John Brunner.)
When you consider how indifferent Americans are to the quality and cooking of the food they put into their insides, it cannot but strike you as peculiar that they should take such pride in the mechanical appliances they use for its excretion.
As for plumbing!
The frontal cortex is an incredibly interesting part of the brain, since it's the nearest thing we've got to a super-ego ... It's the part of the brain that controls impulsivity, that accepts the postponement of gratification, that does constraint and anticipation, and that makes you work hard because you will get into an amazing nursing home one day if you just keep pushing hard enough.
In "A Bozo of a Baboon".
This chap first caught my eye with his essay The trouble with testosterone...
Mine would be a fairly simple, straightforward case of an unjustifiable belief, namely that there is no god(s) or
such a thing as a soul (whatever the religiously inclined of the right persuasion mean by that word). ...
I'm taken with religious folks who argue that you not only can, but should believe without requiring proof. Mine is to
not believe without requiring proof. Mind you, it would be perfectly fine with me if there were a proof that there is
no god. Some might view this as a potential public health problem, given the number of people who would then run damagingly
amok. But it's obvious that there's no shortage of folks running amok thanks to their belief. So that wouldn't be a problem
and, all things considered, such a proof would be a relief - many physicists, especially astrophysicists, seem weirdly
willing to go on about their communing with god about the Big Bang, but in my world of biologists, the god concept gets
mighty infuriating when you spend your time thinking about, say, untreatably aggressive childhood leukemia.
Writing in "The Guardian".
More recently [January 4, 2005], answering the question "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" he came up with
the above. (The original question was posed and answered on Edge.com I believe.)