All bathtubs should be banned. Just imagine it! – King Carl XVI Gustaf
On Thanksgiving night I was relaxing (yes, I’m starting to figure out how to do that) and listening to music on my Tubular Bells-based Pandora station, when I suddenly heard a piece of music whose identity has eluded me for 34 years. It was the soundtrack for a sequence about gravitational wormholes in an episode of Cosmos, and I adored it; however, it wasn’t included on the soundtrack album and the internet didn’t exist in 1981. Furthermore, when the series was released on video at the end of the decade, that sequence had a different score; clearly there had been a problem with the rights, so it had been replaced. But I never forgot the tune, so when I heard it on Thursday night I practically leaped to my phone to discover its identity. So here it is: Equinoxe, Part 4, by Jean-Michel Jarre. The links above it were provided by Jesse Walker, Matt Welch, Wendy Lyon, Grace, Popehat, Jillian Keenan, and Glenn Greenwald (in that order).
- Feral cows.
- Exactly as old.
- Because Sweden.
- To protect and serve.
- I’m sure you feel safer now.
- Which poet should you fight?
- Man accidentally comes up with perfect metaphor for the “War On Terror”.
From the Archives
- The “commodification of sex and desire” is not a bad thing, but a good one.
- Prohibitionists are terrified of people realizing that sex work really is work.
- Funny how relatives who hate BDSM relationships focus on mental illness.
- Any study which equates sex work with “crime” is flawed from the forge.
- Dr. Marty Klein trying to make up for long silence on sex worker rights.
- While sex work is criminal, whores are vulnerable to cops & scammers.
- Cops raid & rob old woman for letting people play cards in her house.
- How the US government promotes censorship on college campuses.
- Cops, love letters, irony, Florida, totalitarianism and The Avengers.
- A moral panic is nearing its zenith when mobs with torches appear.
- “They did not feel like trafficking victims, but victims of the police“.
- Holidays, clown panic, cops, recalls, songs and racist sandwiches.
- Florida whores are forced into a religious brainwashing program.
- Fanatics want to destroy the internet to eliminate dirty pictures.
- Spam doesn’t become sinister just because sex workers use it.
- Remember the “London slaves” who turned out to be Maoists?
- This would be hilarious if real women weren’t being hurt by it.
- The McCain, Inc “sex trafficking” cuckoo clock is striking 13.
- Why I hate “Black Friday” and too-early Christmas displays.
- 5% of Japanese women have done some kind of sex work.
- Cops admit there’s no “sex trafficking” in massage parlors.
- Another example of “sex trafficking” as default bogeyman.
- Why are there so many flaky, unprofessional escorts now?
- The Swedish model reaches Vietnam, and it’s still a scam.
- New Jersey considers defining prostitution stings as rape.
- Naive idiots volunteer to conduct SWAT raids on brothels.
- Celebrity tries to excuse violence as consensual BDSM.
- More ludicrous Victorian “sex trafficking” phraseology.
- “Don’t believe our data; believe our dogma instead!”
- Wouldn’t you love to see articles like this in the US?
- My recipes for cornbread stuffing and dog biscuits.
- Another example of the need for eternal vigilance.
- More virginity bullshit from Catarina Migliorini.
- Some rapist cops don’t stop with mere rape.
- Why drinking on the job is a really bad idea.
- If he asks for change, say you don’t have it.
- Swaziland is far more sensible than the US.
- November 2010 and 2011 in retrospect.
- How to succeed as a “rescue” profiteer.
- An ugly exercise in arse-backwardness.
- My last two columns for Thanksgiving.
- My return from Seattle.
King Carl XVI Gustaf was quite present in the news four years ago for having allegedly been a patron of strip clubs, and even of honest-to-goodness brothels…
Nothing much seems to have come of it, there was either really nothing to it, or the affair was successfully smothered.
At least he didn’t give his hypocritical royal assent to the country’s anti-prostitution laws — but this constitutional role was taken from the King of Sweden’s hands one hundred years ago anyway. It’s lucky, as that meatball obviously ain’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.
You don’t have to fill the whole bathtub, you silly King. Just because the design gives you the opportunity to waste water doesn’t mean you have to. And for an equal amount of water, you can enjoy it much longer in a bathtub than in a shower. Have you ever tried playing with a yellow rubber duck in a shower? It’s really not fun.
I turned on the Jean Michele Jarre video, opened a couple tabs, then heard, to the tune of Equinoxe, Part IV, “There was a man who tried to put out a fire by driving over it with a van full of ammunition!”
Nice. Thanks.
Your Majesty, I can imagine the smell already, and trust me, it’s a worse emission problem than a little CO2.
No discussion of feral cows in Hawaii is complete without the late Sol K. Bright’s country swing tongue twister Hawaiian Cowboy. [youtube link]
It’s been covered many times since 1936 by great country swing bands and yodelers.
From Nattie Roman:
I went through a period of maybe six months where Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells was my going-to-sleep music. The Equinoxe series as a whole was very fine. Two months ago I found the name of a song I had searched after for about a dozen years. (Lars Danielsson’s Granada). And that led me to two albums of his I had missed.