An Elephant of One's Own

A few years ago, I got to know an Online Poet (who has since, alas, died, along with the newsgroup that contained him) who used to murmur, in the manner of a profound philosophical utterance cum poetic manifesto, "It's all about Tits". It always struck me that this was at least as good an answer to the Eternal Question as "you put your left foot in, &c", but it would have been nice if he'd given the idea some extra support. Anyway, it still seems as good a topic as any. The other reason I have decided to grapple with Breasts is that a couple of hours ago I learned in bemusement that in Nottinghamshire, UK, the act of looking at breasts has recently been declared an instance of a special category of Hate Crime by the local police constabulary, the Hate Crime in question being, generically, "misogyny". Now, it so happens that this is precisely what I mean by "low hanging fruit". Which in turn calls for a digression. The phrase isn...

In a small, poor and seldom visited South American country, an incomplete git, of discreetly decrepit middle age, has the good fortune to land a job teaching English in a state university with an extensive, attractively wooded campus, inhabited by iguanas, moths and finches. Some years later, he is sitting in the car (a Chevy Aveo) at 7 a.m., half an hour before his first class of the day, in an empty car park under the hazy early morning sunshine, picking his nose, cursing the locked door of the Gents' Toilets, and wondering, for the thousandth time,  what to do with all these Ideas . Having Ideas has always been his dominant vice. If the ideas were any good, he would probably not regard having them as a vice, but instead as something of a gift; if all of them were self-evidently bad, then they would presumably not have become a vice in the first place. The trouble with his Ideas is that they are none of them clearly one or the other. For most of hi...

I hear they're trying to bring back the Great Auk . I was not, it turns out, a child when the Great Auk became extinct, but I might as well have been. I mean, even if I had been a child in 1844, I wouldn't have actually seen one, probably. But as it is, I spent many, many hours in my childhood thinking about them. I liked, more than words could say, the fact that they were called "garefowl", and lived in a place called Funk Island. Auks were truly part of my goldenest infancy. So bringing them back seemed, to me, the other day when I read about it, like a good idea, for a kick-off: that's until I thought it through a bit more. Imagine a world where Great Auks were a bit bigger, and a bit niftier, and humans were a bit smaller, and less skilled at shooting and strangling things. In such a world, one might expect Great Auks to be the dominant species, and humans to have been hunted to extinction by these remorseless, harpoon-happy, penguin-like seabirds. Finally...