{ 1. Unsourced image | 2. Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 2000 }

{ Google Books | Nietzsche, The Antichrist, 1888 }

Tell about places you have been, strange customs. The other one, jar on her head, was getting the supper: fruit, olives, lovely cool water out of the well stonecold like the hole in the wall at Ashtown. Must carry a paper goblet next time I go to the trottingmatches. She listens with big dark soft eyes.

{ James Joyce, Ulysses, published in 1922 | Continue reading | Ulysses contains approximately 265,000 words from a lexicon of 30,030 words (including proper names, plurals and various verb tenses), divided into eighteen episodes. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }

images { Hilo Chen, Beach, 2005 | Huata, Open The Gates of Shambhala EP }

{ Courtney Love by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, Pop 14, 2006 | Madonna by Stephen Meisel, 1992 }

{ When it comes to secure messaging, nothing beats quantum cryptography, a method that offers perfect security. Messages sent in this way can never be cracked by an eavesdropper, no matter how powerful. At least, that’s the theory. Today, physicists say they have broken a commercial quantum cryptography system made by the Geneva-based quantum technology startup ID Quantique, the first successful attack of its kind on a commercially-available system. | The Physics arXiv Blog | full story }

photos { Guy le Baube | Daemian and Christine }

{ Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin | Phantasm II: The Ball Is Back }

{ Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953 | Maurizio Cattelan, La Nona Hora, 1999 }

related:

{ The Pope of Greenwich Village | video | jump to the 2:00 mark }

{ 1 | 2 | Unrelated: The strange link between spherium and helium }

{ 1 | 2. Robert Whitman | Related: An Israeli man has been imprisoned for 10 years for tricking women into sexual acts by claiming his semen was holy and had healing powers. | Pope ‘condom’ gaffe: Foreign Office apologises. }

{ 1. Grant Willing | 2. David Sherry }

{ Leda and the Swan, copy after a lost painting by Michelangelo, c. 1530 }

{ François Boucher, Leda and the Swan, 1741-1742 | Read more }

{ François Boucher, Leda and the Swan, c. 1740 }

{ Leda and the Swan, Scindia museum, Gwalior }

{ Leda and the Swan by Norman Parkinson, 1980s }

Leda and the Swan is a motif from Greek mythology, in which Zeus came to Leda in the form of a swan.

The subject undoubtedly owed its sixteenth-century popularity to the paradox that it was considered more acceptable to depict a woman in the act of copulation with a swan than with a man.

Leonardo da Vinci began making studies in 1504 for a painting, apparently never executed, of Leda seated on the ground with her children. In 1508 he painted a different composition of the subject, with a nude standing Leda cuddling the Swan, with the two sets of infant twins, and their huge broken egg-shells.

After something of a hiatus in the 18th and early 19th centuries (apart from a very sensuous Boucher), Leda and the Swan became again a popular motif in the later 19th and 20th centuries, with many Symbolist and Expressionist treatments.

Cy Twombly executed an abstract version of Leda and the Swan in 1962.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | Bonus: Doggie style by Fred Inaudi }

{ Dolphin clit stimulator | Vibrator a doppio effetto }

related:

{ 1 | 2. Spam email. | Related: Most men ‘unhappy with penis ops’ }

unrelated:

{ 1 | 2 }

Psychologists have used an inventive combination of techniques to show that the left half of the brain has more self-esteem than the right half. The finding is consistent with earlier research showing that the left hemisphere is associated more with positive, approach-related emotions, whereas the right hemisphere is associated more with negative emotions.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Iain McGilchrist has recently published ‘The Master and his Emissary’ a book which posits that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with quite different priorities and values.

{ Interview | Frontier Psychiatrist | Continue reading }

illustration { Kristian Hammerstad }

What is “familiarly known” is not properly known, just for the reason that it is “familiar.” When engaged in the process of knowing, it is the commonest form of self-deception, and a deception of other people as well, to assume something to be familiar, and give assent to it on that very account.

{ Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, 31, 1807 | Continue reading }