Those are a few of my favourite things...about London

The cultural and exuberance and the culinary diversity. All the learning opportunities. The ease of travel from here to anywhere. The sheer richness of the urban fabric of communities and architectural variety. The climate even, no extremes, yet with seasons. The choice of living paces: from the fast lane to the vegging out in the sun in the park. The quality of "human material", the daily flurry of all the wonderful people coming my way...

The Ukraine crisis and the end of a "dictatorship"

As long as the old tired trope of "goodies vs. baddies" keeps being rubbed in by the media time and over again, journalism as a profession will remain what it has always been: propaganda-mongering for gullible masses.

The sounds of Brixton

My ideas as per why people would want to turn up music to to eardrum-popping levels on a lovely spring day:

1) they need to drown out the voices in their heads that keep telling them how useless and hopeless is what they are doing with their lives;

2) they need to drown out the shit they say by way of small talk so that they would come across smart and attractive enough to each other and with a bit of luck have sex afterwards;

3) I've run out of ideas. Any suggestions?

Gay London

This could be a nation of wine drinkers

Шизоблок

Шизоблок - профессиональный приём политтехнологов (spin doctors), сведение реальности к двум якобы взаимоисключающим альтернативам (плохиши<->кибальчиши, социализм<->капитализм, Ельцин <-> Зюга, республиканцы<->демократы, гей-Европа <-> гетеро-Россия), чаще всего с сильной эмоциональной наживкой: "За детей!", "За наших!", "Бойтесь террора!", "Понаехали тут чёрные!", "А  вот как пропадёт колбаса из магазинов!" и т.д.. Нюансы, другие варианты, весь спектр между крайними проявлениями и т. д. таким образом исключаются из возможного рассмотрения, и все дебаты и политические решения с их  последствиями направляются в организованное русло с предсказуемым результатом. Профессиональный наёбинг мозгов широчайшим слоям населения.

Boston marathon bombings

No matter who and why staged the Boston events, we need to remain mindful of the emotional journey the media would try to take us on and to what conclusions we will be prompted to.

 

Why Are Trace Chemicals Showing Up in Umbilical Cord Blood?

Why Are Trace Chemicals Showing Up in Umbilical Cord Blood?

For me, that proves once again that natural scientist's complacency about progress and technology is based on self-delusion (or a social construct if you will). Technologies that are meant to improve our lives in fact ruin them. There are no long-term case studies for most synthesized materials we are using. It took half a century to figure out that freon and leaded gas were bad to us, what next?

Clint Eastwood speech at GOP convention: unqualified opnion par excellence

Clint Eastwood really should stick to acting and stop making an ass out of himself. So should all other celebrities, just stick to singing, acting, juggling, etc. We know who you are. We don't expect anything smart from you.

Atonement: review

Atonement: your run-off-the-mill BBC period costume drama until Vanessa Redgrave descends from the Parnassus or wherever actors of her calibre dwell and with but a few minutes of monologue yanks the whole pretty but trite shebang to the Oscar and BAFTA wow-heights.

TV is a Hitler in your living room

Except it's not just "state" sponsored propaganda. That's vulgar Marxism. There are more players in the filed vying for your brain synapses.

The 10 signs that I've become a Londoner (the joie de vivre version)

1. I still admire the city I live in, how handsome and charming it is. It never ceases to amaze me: just turn around the familiar corner for some quirky discovery, be it a pretty Victorian mansion, ethnic restaurant, or a view of the City's skyscrapers from a most unexpected place.
   
2. I still feel overwhelmed with how much goes on daily in this city: exhibitions, premières, musicals, openings, concerts, demonstrations, seminars, public lectures. Sometimes, I just have to stop reading mail-lists with yet more new announcements: I just don't enough hours a day to visit all that takes my fancy!
   
3. I avoid the Tube except for emergencies and "long-haul" travel. Buses are the most civilised means of commuting: you get a seat, a nice view and another free city tour. Most places in Central London are easier to walk to anyway, especially when you are versed in the quintessentially British idiosyncratic shortcuts through buildings, back lanes and car parks.
   
4. I take it for granted that no street is straight here (save for Oxford Street and Edgware Road) and getting from point A to point B can take any amount of turns and changes of direction. That has helped me reconcile mentally and emotionally with the irrationality of existence.
   
5. I have finally discovered where to go shopping for affordable stylish clothes. I can't buy garb on the Stateside any more, in London it would look like peasant's pajamas.
   
6. I spell the British way by default now. My Microsfot Word yet needs to learn that too.
   
7. I got used to the "hard-core, fuzzy-edges" English attitude to appointment-keeping, project management and weekend-planning. I allow a bit of leeway for everything and that, in fact, makes my life much easier and enjoyable.
   
8. The sight of the Shard lit up at night excites me no end. I think the Gherkin is iconic. The Royal Festival Hall is still an abominable monstrosity on the outside but I love hangung out inside.
   
9. The East End accent does not baffle me any more. Now I find some North American accents completely incomprehensible.
   
10. The sight of London from the airplane's window makes my heart melt. It's good to get back home!

Idols and mobs

Every time I see someone engrossed in reading a newspaper with a picture of an orange lady with glued-on eye-lashes and inflated boobs being peddled as a role model for the nation thanks to her uncanny ability to climb from one highly affluent cock onto another, well, I just cackle a bit. Earthlings are peculiar critters.

Work hard, play hard

The 'work hard, play hard' slogan is utter hogwash because it glorifies slaving yourself into the ground in exchange for retail therapy and party drugs.

Online gay dating websites

just mere commodity markets of temporary body part appropriation for purposes of physiological gratification?

Relationships and finding partners

According to my shrink, and I totally concur with her, all people's relationships are games, over the rules of which they have no control, being jerked around, like marionettes, by blocked out memories, shards of past emotions, reactive patterns of behaviour sitting beneath their conscious mind.

So when people look for love and relationships, they simply chase invisible shadows in their minds, projecting them on reality. It is a pure accident if a real person fits the bill, because the criteria are hardly known to the chaser. That is, unless they've been through a successful therapy.

Human race vs. chaos

Human beings are the only force in the Universe (if you don't count God) that is working to counter entropy, the natural way of things to fall into chaos. The formidability of this task only really strikes you, when you think what cosmic forces we, mere thinking mould in a far-flung corner of the Universe, are against in this.

Lifestyle choices: Brahmacharya

The word brahmacharya is understood broadly in yoga as "sexual continence," which can be understood as being applicable as appropriate in different contexts (e.g., faith in marriage, celibacy for spiritual aspirants etc.), in more extreme terms (complete celibacy) or in more specific terms in relation to preserving and sublimating male sexual energy rather than losing it through ejaculation.

In yoga, the term brahmacharya tends to take on a connotation of disciplining the use of and preserving sexual energy. Brahmacharya is discussed in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras as one of the 5 Yamas, the foundational commitments for the practice of yoga. According to the Yoga Sutras, the end-result or fruit of Brahmacharya practised to perfection is unbounded energy or vitality.


Brahmacharya can also be interpreted more generally in a variety of ways, such as:

* generally striving for excellence in all domains of activity and relationship
* pursuing 'virtue' however defined. Brahmacharya understood in this sense is similar to the classical Greek concept of arete (excellence)
* clearing underlying personality conflicts and centering oneself and ones spiritual journey in clear, well conceived and sustainable values (that is, thinking of Brahmacharya as an ongoing practice of 'clearing' analogous to resolving personality complexes and conflicts in psychotherapy)
* refining one's 'energies' (prana/chi/aura etc.) in relation to other people generally, to become aware of more subtle energies and to take one's energies or 'vibration' higher

Pre-logical, Logical and Supra-Logical

There are three types of minds:

• pre-logical, corresponding to our animal interioir section of our brain. That's how animals think "likes are alike", "A=B=C=D", ...
  
• logical, that lives in the frontal lobes, we acquire it from the civilising effort of upbringing and education, that's what science uses to understyand the visible world
  
• supra-logical, of the "God operates in mysterious ways' fame, is accesible through spiritual development, it allows to understand the inner struicture of people, things and events.
  

At this point of the developmet of ourrace, we thinkthat logical, scinetific is the

However there is a higher

Why is God a Him?

Human mind due to its limitations can only think in human categories. We need some kind of pronoun, so we use He, for the sake of convenience and also due to our own tendency to associate the qualities we see in God to maleness. Although I don't think that God would have primary or secondary sexual attributes, do you?