Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Fire Sale

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/many-in-nation-tired-of-explaining-things-to-idiots


Nora Boyle
Just now
Fire Sale!
I don't mean to be rude, but when I moved West, I was alarmed at how many people own guns (and tons of ammo in the next door apartment bathtub!) that I've been researching the subject...
Guns are illegal in Mexico.
All guns.....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/04/16/mexicos-gun-control-laws-a-model-for-the-united-states/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/04/16/mexicos-gun-control-laws-a-model-for-the-united-states/








ARMSLIST - Firearms Classifieds
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Saturday, April 16, 2016

the Much Maligned Banana

Bananas are rich in potassium, that helps to regulate your blood pressure, which is what helps to keep your heart functioning correctly.
Our bones also need this potassium as it helps to reduce calcium excretion, which is how bananas help to reduce the risk of developing osteoporosis and help to keep bones strong the older we get.
They contain good levels of Vitamin C, magnesium and manganese.
Bananas also contain a compound called cytolcin which is believed to increase white blood cells that are crucial for having a strong immune system.
 The fibre in bananas can also help relieve the symptoms of heartburn.
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Thursday, October 10, 2013

State of Memory or Historical Revisionism

Neuroscientists Daniela Schiller says every time you recall a memory, it changes, and that can be a useful thing.
How much can you trust your memory? Not a whole lot, according to Daniela Schiller, a Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist. To a packed audience at MIT Technology Review’s 2013 EmTech conference on Wednesday, Schiller explained how research in her lab and others is uncovering how memories are tweaked each time they are recalled.
“This decade is the time of a revolution in the way we perceive memory,” Schiller told attendees. For the previous century, the accepted view was that once captured and stored in neural circuits in the brain, a memory could be retrieved but could not be rewritten. In that view, every time an experience is relived, it is the same, over and over.
Now, however, researchers understand that that the process of recalling a memory actually changes it. “Each time you retrieve a memory it undergoes this storage process,” Schiller told me over the phone the day before EmTech. That means the memory is in an unstable state, rewritten and remodeled every time it is retrieved.
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Sunday, September 22, 2013

DePressed?

Breaking the Depression Cycle

How to Manage Depression Triggers

(continued)

Depression Triggers continued...

Depression Trigger: Family Strife
While some people enjoy spending time with family, others may find it less than enjoyable. “Family get-togethers can rekindle childhood and child-like ways of interacting with one another,” Saltz says. “Any intense relationship tumult can alter your mood.”
Mood-Boosting Strategy
Just say no! “Make other plans and say, ‘This year, I can’t do it’.” If you are around your family, and feel that relatives are trying to rile you, don’t take the bait, she says. “Walk away.”
Depression Trigger: Holidays
For some, holidays are the loneliest days on the calendar. “Suicides peak during the holidays,” Saltz says.
Mood-Boosting Strategy
Reach out to others so you feel less alone. Volunteer at a soup kitchen or homeless shelter during the holidays. “Don’t have such a high threshold for asking for help,” Saltz says.
Depression Trigger: Winter Blues
If you notice that you begin to feel down each year when winter arrives, and the days grow shorter, it could be seasonal affective disorder (SAD), a type of depression that occurs during the same season each year.
Mood-Boosting Strategy
 “The good news is that SAD is treatable,” Saltz says. “Medication or light therapy, under a doctor’s direction, can help.” There is more you can do too. “You can also increase natural light by making it a point of doing work near a window – particularly in the morning,” she says. Exercise also helps improve symptoms of SAD. “Aim for 30 minutes of aerobic exercise multiple times a week.”
Depression Trigger: Anniversaries of Loss
Many people may feel depressed on or around the anniversary of a loss, almost as if it just happened or is happening all over again. “These are almost always triggers,” Saltz says.
Mood-Boosting Strategy
“When you know that an anniversary of loss is coming and that you are more likely to feel depressed, try to bolster your connectivity to people who are supportive,” she says. “Honor the anniversary, but don’t isolate yourself
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Wednesday, September 18, 2013

From the NYX

re They Here to Save the World?

By JOHN LELAND
Published: January 12, 2006
AT a coffee shop in TriBeCa one morning two weeks ago, David Minh Wong, age 7, was in constant motion. He played with quarters on the table. He dropped them on the floor. He leaned on his mother and walked away.
Rollin Riggs for The New York Times
Annette Piper, right, in her store, Spiritual Freedom, with her daughter Alexandra, 10, said she realized she could tell what's wrong with people by touch.

"Indigo Evolution," a documentary, is to be shown widely on Jan. 27.
"Tell him I'm strong," he said to his mother, Yolanda Badillo, 50. She sat in a booth with a neighbor, who was there with her goddaughter.
"I woke up at 2:16 this morning, and it wasn't raining," he said.
"I'm getting bored," he said.
At David's public school, where he is in a program for gifted and talented second graders, a teacher told Ms. Badillo that he is arrogant for a boy his age, and teachers since preschool have described him as bright but sometimes disruptive. But Ms. Badillo, a homeopath and holistic health counselor, has her own assessment. To her David's traits - his intelligence, empathy and impatience - make him an "indigo" child.
"He told me when he was 6 months old that he was going to have trouble in school because they wouldn't know where to fit him," she said, adding that he told her this through his energy, not in words. "Our consciousness is changing, it's expanding, and the indigos are here to show us the way," Ms. Badillo said. "We were much more connected with the creator before, and we're trying to get back to that connection."
If you have not been in an alternative bookstore lately, it is possible that you have missed the news about indigo children. They represent "perhaps the most exciting, albeit odd, change in basic human nature that has ever been observed and documented," Lee Carroll and Jan Tober write in "The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived" (Hay House). The book has sold 250,000 copies since 1999 and has spawned a cottage industry of books about indigo children.
Hay House said it has sold 500,000 books on indigo children. A documentary, "Indigo Evolution," is scheduled to open on about 200 screens - at churches, yoga centers, college campuses and other places - on Jan. 27 (locations at www.spiritualcinemanetwork.com).
Indigo children were first described in the 1970's by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness.
In "The Indigo Children," Mr. Carroll and Ms. Tober define the phenomenon. Indigos, they write, share traits like high I.Q., acute intuition, self-confidence, resistance to authority and disruptive tendencies, which are often diagnosed as attention-deficit disorder, known as A.D.D., or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, or A.D.H.D.
Offered as a guide for "the parents of unusually bright and active children," the book includes common criticisms of today's child rearing: that children are overmedicated; that schools are not creative environments, especially for bright students; and that children need more time and attention from their parents. But the book seeks answers to mainstream parental concerns in the paranormal.
"To me these children are the answers to the prayers we all have for peace," said Doreen Virtue, a former psychotherapist for adolescents who now writes books and lectures on indigo children. She calls the indigos a leap in human evolution. "They're vigilant about cleaning the earth of social ills and corruption, and increasing integrity," Ms. Virtue said. "Other generations tried, but then they became apathetic. This generation won't, unless we drug them into submission with Ritalin."
To skeptics the concept of indigo children belongs in the realm of wishful thinking and New Age credulity. "All of us would prefer not to have our kids labeled with a psychiatric disorder, but in this case it's a sham diagnosis," said Russell Barkley, a research professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. "There's no science behind it. There are no studies."
Dr. Barkley likened the definition of indigo children to an academic exercise called "Barnum statements," after P. T. Barnum, in which a person is given a list of generic psychological characteristics and becomes convinced that they apply especially to him or her. The traits attributed to indigo children, he said, are so general that they "could describe most of the people most of the time," which means that they don't describe anything.
Parents who attribute their children's inattention or disruptive behavior to vibrational energy, he said, risk delaying proper diagnosis and treatment that might help them.
To indigos and their parents, however, such skepticism is the usual resistance to any new and revolutionary idea. America has always had a soft spot for the supernatural. A November 2005 poll by Harris Interactive found that one American in five believes he or she has been reincarnated; 40 percent believe in ghosts; 68 percent believe in angels. It is not surprising then that indigo literature, which incorporates some of these beliefs along with common anxieties about child psychology, has found a receptive audience.
Annette Piper, a mother of two in Memphis, said that she had planned to go to medical school until she realized she was an indigo, able to tell what was wrong with people by touching them. Like a lot of others who describe themselves as indigos, she was also sensitive to chemicals and fluorescent lights. Instead of going to medical school, she became an intuitive healer, directing the energy fields around people, and opened a New Age store called Spiritual Freedom.
Her daughter Alexandra, 10, is also an indigo, she said. They play games to cultivate their telepathic powers, but at school Alexandra struggles, Ms. Piper said. "She has trouble finishing work in school and wants to argue with the teacher if she thinks she's right," Ms. Piper said. "I don't think she's found out what her gifts are. From the influence in school and friends she lays off these abilities. She's a little afraid of them."
Problems in school are common for indigos, said Alex Perkel, who runs the ReBirth Esoteric Science Center in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, a bilingual (Russian-English) center dedicated to "the knowledge of ancient esoteric schools and Eastern science," according to its Web site (www.esotericinfo.com).
Last year the center organized a class for indigo children but canceled it when families dropped out for economic reasons.
"A lot of people don't understand the children because the children are very smart," Mr. Perkel said. "They have knowledge like our teachers. They don't want to go to school, No. 1, because they don't need the knowledge they can get from school. So parents bring them to psychologists, and psychologists start giving them pills to take out their will and memory. We developed a special program to help them understand that they came to this planet to change the consciousness because they have guides from a higher world."
Stephen Hinshaw, a professor and the chairman of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, acknowledged that "there is a legitimate concern that we are overmedicalizing normal childhood, particularly with A.D.H.D." But, he said, research shows that even gifted children with attention-deficit problems do better with more structure in the classroom, not less.
"If you conduct a very open classroom, kids with A.D.H.D. may fit in better, because everyone's running around, but there's no evidence that it helps children with A.D.H.D. learn. On the other hand if you have a more traditional classroom, with consistent tasks and expectations and rewards, kids with A.D.H.D. may have a harder time fitting in at first, but in the long run there's evidence that it helps their learning."
Julia Tuchman, a partner in Neshama Healing in Manhattan, who works with a lot of indigo children and adults, said it was important for their families not to turn away from traditional psychology and medicine.
"I'm very holistically oriented, but many people who come here I send to doctors," she said. "I'm not against medication at all. I just think it's overused." When parents take children to her for treatment - she practices electromagnetic field balancing, a touch-free massage that purports to tune a person's electromagnetic field - she said that just telling the children that they have special gifts is often a healing gesture.
"Can you imagine a child going up to his parents and saying, 'I'm talking to an angel,' or 'I'm talking to someone who's deceased'?" Ms. Tuchman asked. "A lot of them have no one to talk to." She, like others who see indigos, sees them as a reason for hope.
Even disruptive behavior has a purpose, said Marjorie Jackson, a tai chi and yoga teacher in Altadena, Calif., who said that her son, Andrew, is an indigo. Andrew, now 25, was not disruptive as a child, she said, but in her practice she sees indigos who are.
"The purpose of the disruptive ones is to overload the system so the school will be inspired to change," Ms. Jackson said. "The kids may seem like they have A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. What that is, is that the stimulus given to them, their inner being is not interested in it. But if you give them something that harmonizes with the broad intention that their inner self has for them, they won't be disruptive."
She said that schools should treat children more like adults, rather than placing them in "fear-based, constrictive, no-choice environments, where they explode."
Ms. Jackson compared people who do not recognize indigos to Muggles, the name used by J. K. Rowling in the Harry Potter books to describe ordinary people who have no connection with magic. "I would say 90 percent of the world is like the Muggles," she said. "You don't talk about this stuff with them because it's going to scare them."
In the TriBeCa coffee shop, David Minh Wong continued to play with his coins and talk to his mother. Ms. Badillo and her neighbor Sandra McCoy said they have family members who don't believe in the indigo idea. Ms. McCoy sat with her goddaughter, Jasmine Washington, 14. In contrast to David, Jasmine listened serenely, waiting for questions.
Yet Jasmine too is an indigo child, Ms. McCoy said: "I always knew there was something different about her. Then when I saw something about indigos on television, I knew what it was." Like many other indigos Jasmine is home-schooled.
For Jasmine, who often sensed she was different from other children, especially in the public schools, the designation of indigo is a comfort.
"The kids now are very different, so it's good that there's a name for it, and people pay attention to what's different about them," Jasmine said. Like the women at the table she said that indigos have a special purpose: "To help the world come together again. If something bad happens, I always think I can fix it. Since we have these abilities, we can help the world."
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RTC = Resistance to Change

 http://leobabauta.com/


Zen Habits, a blog by Leo Babauta


The reason for our suffering is our resistance to the changes in life.

 And life is all changes.
 
While I resist change (and suffer) just like anyone else, I have learned to adapt. I’ve learned some flexibility. I’ve realized this:

Everything changes, and this is beautiful.

The Pain of Life’s Changes

What do I mean that our suffering comes from resistance to the changes in life?
Let’s take a look at some things that give us trouble:

  • Someone yells at you at work. The change is rooted in the fact that we expect people to treat us kindly and fairly and with respect, but the reality is that they don’t always. When they don’t, we resist this reality, and want things to be the way we want them to be. And so we get mad, or hurt, or offended.
  • Your 3-year-old (or 13-year-old) won’t listen to you. Again, you expect your child to behave a certain way, but of course reality is different. And when reality doesn’t conform to our expectations, we are stressed out.
  • You lose your job. This is a huge change, that affects not only your financial stability, but your identity. If you are a teacher, and lose your teaching job, you now have to deal with the changes in how you see yourself. This can be very difficult. Resisting these changes (and the financial constraints that come with the job loss) can be very painful.
  • You have too many tasks and feel overwhelmed. What is the change here? We want things to be in control, but of course they aren’t. New tasks and information come in, new requests, new demands. And these are changes that are difficult, because we thought we had our day under control, and now it’s not. And so we feel overwhelmed and stressed.
  • A loved one dies. One of the ultimate changes is death, of course, but what has changed? Well, the person is obviously no longer in our life (at least, not in the same way), but just as painfully, we are not the same person when a loved one dies. We have to change who we are — we’re now a widower instead of a husband, a father without his daughter, or a friend who is left alone (for example). We want life to be the way it was, but it isn’t, so we grief, we rage.
That’s just a start. Things change all the time, and we resist it. Our day changes, our relationships change, other people don’t act the way they should, we ourselves are changing, constantly, and this is hard to deal with.
So this is the pain of change, of not being in control, of things not meeting our expectations.
How do we cope?

The Beauty of Life Changes

We can cope with the pain in numerous ways: get angry and yell, drink or do drugs, eat junk food, watch TV or find other distractions. We can find positive ways to cope with the stress and hurt and anger: exercise, talking about our problems with a friend, or trying to take control of the situation in some way (planning, taking action, having a difficult conversation to work out differences, etc.).
Or, we can embrace the changes.
If changes are a basic fact of life (actually life is nothing but change), then why resist? Why not embrace and enjoy?
See the beauty of change.
It’s hard, because we’re so used to resisting.
Let’s put aside our resistance and judgments for a few minutes, and look for beauty in life’s changes:

  • Someone yells at you at work. This person is hurting, frustrated, angry, and is taking it out on you. They are reaching out, trying to control the chaos of life (uselessly of course), and are not succeeding. Can you empathize with this? Have you ever felt this? There is beauty in our similarities, in our joint pain, in our connection as humans. Mentally embrace this beautiful, hurting human being, feel his pain, give your compassion.
  • Your 3-year-old (or 13-year-old) won’t listen to you. Amazingly, your child is asserting her independence. She is showing that she’s a full human being, not just a robot who follows orders. Have you ever been in that position? Have you ever been frustrated by someone else trying to control you? There is beauty in this independence, this fighting spirit, this rebellion. That’s what life is (OK, life is change, but also rebellion against control). Smile at this beauty, love it, give your child some space to grow.
  • You lose your job. As difficult as this is, it’s an ending, but also a beginning. It’s the start of a new journey, the opportunity to refresh your life, to reinvent who you are. See the beauty in this opportunity, the liberation from the “usual way”.
  • You have too many tasks and feel overwhelmed. This is difficult, without a doubt, but it’s possible to surrender to the chaos of tasks and information and demands. You can’t do them all at once, but you can let go of wanting things to be under your complete control. There is beauty in this chaos. It is random, it is crazy, it is life. See the pain of your resistance, and the beauty in this struggle as well. Then realize you can only do one thing at a time, and do that. Then let that go, and do the next thing. By embracing the chaos and seeing the beauty in it, we can be less overwhelmed and stressed out.
  • A loved one dies. Maybe the hardest one of all — it’s indubitably sad. But death is an ending, which is a necessity. Ending are necessary for beauty: otherwise we don’t appreciate the thing, because it’s unlimited. Limits are beauty. And death is the ultimate limit, a reminder that we need to appreciate this beautiful thing called life while we have it. Death is also a beginning — not in the sense of an afterlife, but a beginning for the survivors. While we have lost an important person, this ending, like the loss of a job, is a moment of reinvention. It might seem sad, but we are forced to reinvent our lives when a loved one dies, and in this reinvention is opportunity. Which I think is beautiful. Finally, of course, death is an opportunity to remember the person’s life, and be grateful for what they gave us.
The possibilities of finding beauty in our struggles with change are endless. And, I believe, that’s beautiful in its own way.
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Saturday, July 6, 2013

More Shake Spirits

7 Filthy Jokes You Didn't Notice in Shakespeare

Let's face it: The percentage of our audience who will just sit down and read a bunch of Shakespeare without being forced to by a professor is pretty damned small. And that's too bad, because what most non-English majors don't realize is that under Shakespeare's flowery language and incomprehensible old-timey wordplay is a whole lot of sly references to boners, anal sex, masturbation, and much worse.

#7. Romeo and Juliet -- Mercutio Tells Romeo to Find a Girl Who Leaves the Back Door Open

At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo's sex life is as barren as Frank Herbert's Dune (though judging by how the play ends, it really doesn't get that much better once he meets Juliet). As he laments this fact, his motor-mouthed friend Mercutio shares this timeless bit of wisdom:
If love be blind, love cannot hit the mark.
Now will he sit under a medlar tree
And wish his mistress were that kind of fruit
As maids call medlars when they laugh alone.
O Romeo, that she were! Oh, that she were
An open arse, and thou a poperin pear
(Emphasis ours)
James Brydges
 "Emphasass mine."
Mercutio is talking about a medlar fruit, which was colloquially referred to as an "open arse," for reasons that can never be adequately explained. However, there is no such thing as a poperin pear -- it's another old-timey play on words. Separate "poperin" into its three syllables and you get an Elizabethan penis euphemism -- "pop 'er in."
Yep. Mercutio is saying, "What you need, my friend, is a chick who does anal."

#6. The Taming of the Shrew -- Playful Banter About Cunnilingus

In The Taming of the Shrew (more commonly known by its Latin name, 10 Things I Hate About You), Petruchio is trying to woo the frigid ice queen Katherine so that her insane father will allow her younger sister to get married. Luckily, Petruchio's preferred method of wooing is to engage Katherine in playfully sexual banter while wagging his eyebrows like Groucho Marx:
PETRUCHIO
Come, come, you wasp, i'faith you are too angry.
KATHERINE
If I be waspish, best beware my sting.
PETRUCHIO
My remedy is then to pluck it out.
KATHERINE
Ay, if the fool could find where it lies.
PETRUCHIO
Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail.
KATHERINE
In his tongue.
PETRUCHIO
Whose tongue?
KATHERINE
Yours, if you talk of tales, and so farewell.
PETRUCHIO
What, with my tongue in your tail?
George Henry Hall/Royal Shakespeare Company Collection
 "STAGE NOTE: PETRUCHIO should immediately turn to the audience and start flicking his tongue whilst pelvic thrusting."
In his defense, she started it. Katherine takes his simple analogy about pulling out a wasp's stinger and twists it into that age-old indictment about men being thoroughly unable to locate key parts of a woman's anatomy. Petruchio smartly counters by offering to lick her asshole, and the game is afoot.
Smatprt
 "Your feet, tail, ears, whatever. I'm down for anything."
Or at least that's what it looks like to us. But back in Shakespeare's day, "tail" was jack-jawing street talk for "vulva." So in actuality, Petruchio is merely building upon Katherine's barbed quip by offering to shove his face into her crotch. This is truly a battle of wits.

#5. The Comedy of Errors -- A Single Fat Joke Gets Stretched Out for an Entire Page

In The Comedy of Errors, two of the characters begin a protracted discussion of the physical characteristics of a woman named Nell. This is another way of saying that they call her a globular fatass for 23 lines of dialogue:
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
What's her name?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Nell, sir; but her name and three quarters, that's
an ell and three quarters, will not measure her from
hip to hip.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
Then she bears some breadth?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip:
she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out
countries in her.
DEA Picture Library/De Agostini Picture Library/Getty
 "Her measurements are in longitude and fatitude."
Realizing they have just struck comedic gold by comparing this woman's corpulent roundness to the planet Earth, the two men proceed to describe where on Nell's undulating ocean of obesity the countries of the world would be located. They start by declaring Ireland to be resting directly on the muddy banks of her asshole, because Shakespeare was English, and as such was required to hate the Irish at least as much as he clearly hated fat women:
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
In what part of her body stands Ireland?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs.
Get it? "Bogs." Meaning "shit." Anyway, they continue playing Carmen Sandiego with Nell's anatomy, doing their best to insult both her and other nations, including lines about Nell's big chin and nose, until this vaudevillian routine finally comes to a close on this blazing punchline:
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE
Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE
Oh, sir, I did not look so low.
Thomas Newland/Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
 After writing this line, he dropped the quill like a mic and pimped out of the room.
Yep. They're talking about her vagina, and how Dromio would rather punch his own face inside out than deign to look upon it. Incidentally, this conversation does nothing to advance the plot in any way, and Nell is never mentioned again.

#4. Hamlet -- Hamlet Tries to Go Alanis Morissette on Ophelia

Shakespeare's Hamlet is about a guy (named Hamlet) who comes home from college to find out his uncle has murdered his father and married his mother. Hamlet responds by literally killing everyone around him. Except for Ophelia, his kind-of girlfriend, whom he merely decides to drive insane by doing his best to confuse, embarrass, and insult her in every conversation they have, for the sole purpose of cracking himself up. Like in this exchange, when he sits down next to her in a theater:
HAMLET
Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA
No, my lord.
HAMLET
I mean, my head upon your lap.
OPHELIA
Ay, my lord.
HAMLET
Do you think I meant country matters?
OPHELIA
I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET
That's a fair thought to lie between maid's legs.
OPHELIA
What is, my lord?
HAMLET
Nothing.
Agnes Pringle/Chiswick Town Hall
 "Now quiet, the curtains are opening and I want to see if they match the drapes."
Ophelia is doing her best to be polite, and Hamlet is taking every single one of her responses and twisting them to be about her vagina. See, when she first declines his offer to put his head in her lap, presumably on the grounds that it is a totally insane thing for a grown man to suggest in a formal public setting, he clarifies, "No no, on your lap, not inside it. Did you think I meant country matters?" Drop the second syllable from "country" and you'll see what Hamlet is talking about.

Again, Ophelia politely tries to deflect his infantile japes by simply saying, "I think nothing," but Hamlet immediately quips, "Nothing, eh? 'No thing' is pretty much what I'd expect to find between a woman's legs." At this point, Hamlet presumably dons a spinning bow tie while someone in the orchestra pit plays a slide whistle.
George Clint/Victoria and Albert Museum
 "Tell me, do you smell something fishy in the state of Denmark?"
 
 
 
 

7 Filthy Jokes You Didn't Notice in Shakespeare


#3. Venus and Adonis -- Venus Commands Adonis to Go "Downstairs"

In addition to scribbling out plays laced with innuendo, Shakespeare would occasionally write poetry, also laced with innuendo. His poem Venus and Adonis, about the goddess of beauty falling in love with the sexiest man on the planet, reads more like one of Shakespeare's Red Shoe Diaries than something you'd find in a literary textbook. Check out this line, when Venus is speaking to Adonis:
Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.
Pieter Borsseler
 "STAGE NOTE: VENUS should immediately turn to the audience and start flicking her tongue whilst pelvic thrusting."
Yep. She's talking about country matters. Venus is essentially saying, "We can make out for a bit, but then it's time to go downtown."
Francois Lemoyne
 "And none of this 'I owe you one' bullshit."
Being a goddess and all, she pretty much has her way with Adonis like this for most of the poem, until he gets killed by a boar. It's something you would write in a feverish state of bitter, premasturbatory frenzy if you had a really extensive vocabulary.

#2. Twelfth Night -- Shakespeare Sneaks the Word "Cunt" into Dialogue

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, recently rediscovered by archaeologists in a discount-bin excavation of an ancient Blockbuster as She's the Man starring Amanda Bynes, is about a shipwrecked woman named Viola pretending to be a man for the purposes of hilarious comedy.
William Hamilton/Theatre Royal, Bath
 Like Tracey Ullman, but funny.
A good deal of the play is devoted to a completely inconsequential subplot wherein several ancillary characters play an elaborate practical joke on a stuffy old butler named Malvolio by presenting him with a forged love note from the young lady of his house:
By my life, this is my lady's hand, these be her
very C's, her U's, and her T's, and thus makes she her
great P's. It is, in contempt of question, her hand.





"Alas, later tonight, the hand in use shall be my own."
Shakespeare was fond of all types of puns -- literal puns ("This ghost has made a grave mistake!"), visual puns, and wordplay that required the dialogue to be spoken aloud for the joke to make sense. Malvolio's line here is an example of that last type -- when the line is performed, it would sound phonetically like this:
"These be her very C's, her U's, 'n' her T's."
The stuffy old butler spells out "cunt" onstage, and immediately follows it by (phonetically) saying "and thus makes she her great pees." Essentially, Malvolio is telling everyone, "This is unquestionably my lady's vagina, with which she makes giant toilet."
Daniel Maclise/Tate
 "And somehow you're still single?"
There are also some vague masturbation jokes hidden in there, as Malvolio makes it a point to emphasize that "my lady's hand" is responsible for making those C's, U's, and T's end with a great gushing P.

#1. Sonnet 151 -- Shakespeare Writes a Poem About His Boner

Sonnets in the 13th and 14th centuries were traditionally short 14-line odes to beautiful women. When Shakespeare came along, he stayed mostly faithful to that tradition, writing numerous sonnets about his love for gorgeous females. However, he would occasionally shift the focus of the narrative over to his bonerific wang, as seen in this excerpt from Sonnet 151:
My soul doth tell my body that he may
Triumph in love: flesh stays no further reason
But rising at thy name doth point out thee
As his triumphant prize.
Gerard Soest/Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
 "It's the thinking man's 'Dick in a Box.'"
He literally says that his body "rises" at the sound of a girl's name and "points" to her. That is, his fully erect man saber is courageously battling against the laces of his breeches to leer at her through a wall of fabric like the ghost from The Frighteners. The undeniable DTF-ness of Sonnet 151 (and many of his sonnets in general) has frequently been used as a counterargument to the theory that Shakespeare was gay, second only to the sobering rejoinders "Who gives a shit?" and "What difference does it make?"
Regardless, Sonnet 151 makes it pretty clear that on this particular day, the bard really wanted to dip his quill in some lady's inkwell.
Richard Westall/Shakespeare Birthplace Trust
 "Come now, ladies. You can't leave Willie Shakes shaking his willie."
Related Reading: For more Shakespearean insanity- including random-ass bear attacks- click here. And did you know that old Willy S invented many of the words we use every day? We owe eyeball, puking, alligator and many more to the author of Hamlet! Finish your bard binge by reading Swaim's argument for why Shakespeare would write for Cracked.com if he lived today.
 
 
 
 
 
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