Fidelity - Female Fruit Flies Only Fuck on the First Date

I'm not a lot interested in fruit flies, as such, but they (Drosophila) have been a great deal helpful to science in general and especially in the genetics corner.

It seems that female fruit flies are fussy. After the first time they have intercourse, they don't want to do it again.

Someone has discovered (or thinks he has) how.

Now this is how you find out the the details of the complicated and devious mind of the female fruit fly.

You feed them. With yeast that contains lots of heavy nitrogen. That isotope labels all of the female proteins.

Then you look at them after they've fucked. Anything that didn't have the heavy nitrogen was given by males. The researchers discovered some sixty-three proteins from fruit fly semen, which may suggest that the male fruit fly lacks confidence in his wife's fidelity, and is over-doing it a bit.

(Sorry to anyone who's offended by the fffour-letter word - the alliteration was just too good to resist).

Venus in Blue Jeans

I've been having a lot of idle fun in the past few days, playing with the Paint.Net program. It's fun, it's free, and (I think) it does most of what you might want.

This is John Everett Millais' 'Venus Verticordia' (Venus will turn your heart vertical). It's a winsome, bee-stung lipped nonsense, with slight symptoms of thyroid trouble in her neck.

Here, on the other hand, by Hans Memling, is an old lady who's seen it all.

She ain't going to take shit from nobody.


But this is the best, the Rokeby Venus, by Diego Velázquez.

Truly, Venus in Blue Jeans, and one of the best bums ever painted.

Pool Swimmer

People keep on writing to me about why I've lived in the Philippines for all of 12 years and still like it.

Look at the photo above - 'nuff said.

The Grinning Bitch

You'll probably recognise this lady, in spite of what I've tried to do to disguise her. In fact, where she's currently exhibited, behind bulletproof glass, she doesn't look a lot different than this. That is, if you can see over the crowd of that day's share of the 6 million gawkers who look at the original every year.

This picture makes her look like a BIG masterpiece. She ain't one of those.
She looks as if she's living in a smallish living-room aquarium, 30" in high by 20 7/8" wide (77cm by 53 cm). That's why I've given her a couple of goldfish swimming past, and a plastic rock to the right.


I've thought about her sometimes over the forty years since I first saw her at her current French residence. I was, at the time, trying to do a 'Five Minute Louvre', in emulation of the late and very lamented Art Buchwald, who never tried it himself , but apparently met a very serious Swede who had actually accomplished: Entry to the Louvre, sight of the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Victory of Samothrace, in turn, and was out of the back door in five minutes flat.

Anyway, what I'm on about today are the anomalies of that famous icon of womanhood. Look at this picture, and ask yourself just why:

• the landscapes at left and right are completely different; climates, horizon, colours and all. It's just as if Leonardo cut-and-pasted a couple of his apprentices' efforts into his final production. We can all do this now, thanks to Photoshop, but Leonardo had to use very much more basic means.
• the famous smile; it's ambiguous, because Leonardo used an old painter's trick; perhaps he invented it himself. Smudge the ends of the lips, and you really can't tell what she's thinking.
  But look again at the image on this post. Just because I've put a plastic rock right next to her smile, her smile's got a reference point that shows she's definitely smirking.
• the lazy come-to-bed eyes. Well they're part of the whole, but look again.
  The right eye (from your perspective) is a bit higher than the left one. A few millimetres down and she'd look like any dumb peasant woman. And the eyes are looking in different directions. They're slightly away from looking directly at you. They are but they aren't. Another old painter's trick.
• the veil - she's wearing a very, very light veil. It's just visible over her head, and, by inference, over her body. This is is a guarnello, typically used by Italian women of that time, while pregnant or just after giving birth.
  (That's a symptom of the long tradition in many cultures about the uncleanness or untouchable sacredness of women at menstruation or birth - I'll deal with this story another time).
• her bosom is quite ridiculous. No woman has a perfectly straight neck, and no woman's chest flows smoothly, and roundly, down to a pair of hidden milk-and-honey breasts. This part of the picture is pure fiction.
• below the tits, and before her arms, there's a big area of ambiguous shadow. But this shows up Leonardo's deliberate manipulation of normal human anatomy.
  Look at the right hand side. Her veil covers her arms, but is light enough not to stick to them. Her real arms, shown below the veil, are much to short to fit the grand portrait L de V planned for the conventional head-n-shoulders portrait applicable at the time. He should have chopped it off 2/3 of the way down.
• and the arm of the chair she's sitting in; from what little you can see, it's probably something like what we call a captain's chair (without all the swivels and stuff), with horizontal curved arms.
  But that little obscure detail contributes a huge amount to the distance she preserves from you, the observer.

Leonardo was a wonderful painter-trickster. When I've learned a bit more about how to de-re-construct his paintings, I'll show you a bit more of why.

Jungle Terror Orchid

This is part of an orchid that grows on the second coconut tree down in my garden. It's the sexy bit, the bit that makes insects (mostly bees) come in to pick up pollen.

I've not seen such a greedy image in nature before. It has little beady eyes, and a gaping mouth, and even little hands at each side. And it's got a big wide-open bag to hold all the victims it finds, for future consumption.

It even appears to have arms and hands, to drag its victims into its ever-open pouch.

But don't those insects ever watch movies?

The creature at the heart of this flower is a copy (or perhaps the inspiration?) for the creature that burst into the world in Alien.

H.R.Giger's wonderful inspirations for the original film were great, but the first Alien was aggressive.:

The second film, though, showed a more seductive Alien, and Sigourney Weaver fell for it.

Francoise On The Beach - Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was often in love but perhaps his greatest love was Francoise Gilot (companion between 1944 and 1953). Or, at least from his pictures it would seem so. She was not, in fact the most beautiful girl in the world (very Greek, with a long nose, and certain things going around the corners of her mouth that would produce hard wrinkles later).

But, in this tender series of drawings, Picasso created her essence in a very, very few simple lines. He did these sketches (or etched them, which is about the same thing), in the first few years that he knew her, and I once had one of the prints from a limited edition.

That is, he didn't capture her essence, but his idea of it. She was, undoubtedly, a lovely lady.


Here is a sketched etching of her (I've been vandal enough to put a Technicolor background to it.)


Picasso's artistic shorthand was amazing; here are a very few simple short lines, giving the very essence of the woman he loved.

"The sketch is like a tree; a trunk growing up from the narrow neck to fruit in abundance".

(No it isn't; he drew the face first, and the neck afterward; but why not give a bit of desconstructionable bullshit).

And just look at those simple, simple lines; total and absolute confidence in exactly where they will go, and exactly what they will shape.

Picasso really was a faux naïf genius, and I'll go on to say a bit more about him in later posts.

Francoise went on, from Picasso, to marry Dr. Jonas Salk, the co-inventor of the polio vaccine. For one woman to marry two geniuses (genii?) in a lifetime is a more than considerable achievement.

Pornography - Some Observations

I don't like pornography - at least, I don't like the stuff that's peddled for inadequates on the internet and in those top-shelf magazines in plastic bags.

If I want to see a c**t in all its great wonder, I really don't have to go to a Broadway movie house, as I once did, to be confronted by a magnified vagina in full, glorious, slippery Technicolor, forty feet high.

I can buy a girl in Cebu for less than the price of a 'Playboy' magazine, and see for myself.

But I do like subtle, arousing (in all the best senses, physical as well as sensual, spiritual, etc, etc) stories and pictures that lead me on to think and feel more ... and more.

One of the very first genuinely porno film scenes I ever saw (in the sense that it aroused real physical feelings in me, not just prurient ones) was the scene in Tom Jones (1963) where Albert Finney and Joyce Redman dine together. Their lip-smacking, smirking attention to each other, while they were only eating something, gave more than a few hints, and stimuli for the imagination, than could any pictures of 40ft high c**ts.

That wonderful scene can be seen here

Shedney Being a Dam' Nuisance

Part of my reasoning for my extravagant investment in Shedney's new sari-sari store was to stop her sitting around like this beside my work desk, doing her devilish and seductive best to distract me.

New Supermarket in General Luna

It's not often that I get invited to open many supermarkets these days, so it was with great pleasure that I officially presided over the opening of Shedney's new sari-sari shop in a nearby street in General Luna.It's not often that I finance a supermarket, either, but I reckoned this was worthwhile project for Shedney, and would keep her occupied, with enough profit for her to buy some of the little absolute essentials that all women seem to need, like hair conditioner regular manicures, etc.




Hopefully, she will become quite self-financing, and my investment ($200) can be repaid, and might even return a profit.It's got all the usual wide range of goods that any sari-sari store has: canned beans, sardines, corned beef, tuna, shampoo and toothpaste sachets, snack packs, soft drinks, sweets, eggs, rum (junior lapad - 375ml at US75c), in other words exactly the same as any other local small shop has.

And she's working hard. She also makes bananacue, fried small bananas coated in sugar, yerma, a sort of toffee ball made with condensed milk and sugar.

Expensive Birds

I always knew there was one small tiny problem involved with keeping a pretty woman; decoration, maintenance and upkeep costs.
The town Fiesta is due on Friday, so there is a travelling fair of ukay-ukay stalls set up on the foreshore next to my neighbouring village of squatting fishermen, Mabua, between me and the creek. Ukay-ukay is basically second-hand clothes (yes - you know the ones you dutifully collect for the poor of the world? Well, they get bought up on arrival by Chinese traders, and farmed out to the local equivalent of Gypsies, who travel from town to town at fiesta time. They sell sheeting by the kilo, T shirts for 50p ($1),shorts for 100p, and so on.
On Monday night, I took Shedney out for our usual pub-crawl from Lalay's at the end of the Boulevard, to Nine Bar just up the road from me.
Only then did I notice that the short-short-shorts she was wearing had a broken zip, so when the tails of her shirt opened, everyone could see her her sweet little cotton-clad pussy.
So I blew up; just quietly exploded, thrust a 500p ($5) note into her hand and growled that she'd better get to the bulanon (ukay-ukay market) first thing in the morning, and get herself some new (and longer) shorts.

So what did the little minx do? She went straight up to Larry's Reef Break Shop (good website), where he has an enticing show of beachwear, and bought herself a grand new ensemble, plus a T-shirt and pair of short-short-shorts. The short-short-shorts have a hand-embroidered motto: "I AM A SIARGAO ISLAND SURF BITCH", and she blew the whole goddam' $5!

But she does look good in it, I must say.

And so thought Harry the Canadian Real Estate Millionaire, as he gazed, tongue lolling out, at that little area just below her collar bone.