Rick Santorum is back...

...and so are we. We don't have to explain, we guess, just click on the picture. 

Collateral effects

かなまら祭り

The Shinto Kanamara Matsuri (かなまら祭り, "Festival of the Steel Phallus") is held each spring at the Kanayama Shrine (金山神社 Kanayama-jinja) in Kawasaki, Japan. The phallus, as the central theme of the event, is reflected in illustrations, candy, carved vegetables, decorations, and a mikoshi parade.

The Kanamara Matsuri is centered around a local phallus-venerating shrine once popular among prostitutes who prayed for protection from sexually transmitted diseases. In addition, there are sundry protections regarding prosperity, easy delivery, and marriage harmony. There is also a legend of a sharp-toothed demon (vagina dentata) that hid inside the vagina of a young woman and castrated two young men on their wedding nights. The young woman sought help from a blacksmith, who fashioned an iron phallus to break the demon's teeth, which led to the enshrinement of the item.

The festival has become something of a tourist attraction and is used to raise money for HIV research.  

God moves in mysterious ways (Glenn)

"Fuck these five fish in particular!"

Saturday matiné

Purity pledge (2)

Recall this picture from the first purity pledge post:

They look the part, don't they?

So, we were wondering about a purity pledge for boys. So we asked Bob Bienpensant. That's how it looks like, the purity pledge for boys, he writes, and sends this picture:

...and grammar (Glenn)

Atheists know better

(I knew)

Come to think of it (Glenn)

No, you do this:

Find a caption

"The Taliban has arrived"

(lol)

And while we are at it: Sacha, our landlord here, sends this alternative picture of this poppy in our neighbor's garden  (we've added the arrow)...

...and writes: "On my way to Sweden the other day... I waved, but I guess you didn't look up that very moment..."...
...so we write in reply: "No-no, we waved back."

(Very deep!)

Sunday matinée

"Blessings, my children."

(Artwork by Bob Bienpensant)

Find a caption

"Those damn darn liberals"

Handsheet for the erotic writer (6)

Salvador Dali: The temptation of St.Anthony

(Like the last post on this...)...not exactly a hand sheet either, but we couldn't help developing second thoughts when reading the following short quote from an article about sanctification:

"Saintliness is part of the church's DNA," the Vatican's current chief saint-maker, Cardinal Angelo Amato, wrote in his 2012 tome on canonization. "Through the centuries, saints have been the spiritual doorway through which humanity is directed toward God."

Like Alex says, the power of substitution, folks. Start considering substituting terms for "saints" and "humanity."

(Just saying, okay. When you write sex scenes---yes, it happens, people write sex scenes---you have to rely on the power of similes and analogies. Along those lines. Nothing deep. Peace from Cali.)

(Sorry, Alex didn't say "the power of substitution," he said "the power of subsumption"---never mind)

Happy Easter

It's Obama's fault

(Recent paintings by George W. Bush)

Family material

In a bow to romantic romanticism, Bob Bienpensant has managed to produced a non-pornographic picture; behold:

Shaolin monks training session

The religious war is over

Jesus Christ! (Plus Roman abortion clinics and the conversion of homosexuals)

No, she won't go away, Sarah Palin. And she can't because the left wages War on Christmas. And not only Christmas, but all the other Christian holidays they can lay their hands on as well.

Sarah Palin

So Sarah goes on FOX to promote her book against the "War on Christmas" and says:

"It makes me so gosh darn angry. The liberal left in this country has targeted Christian holidays and is trying to secularize them right out of existence.

"When Jesus celebrated Easter with his disciples there were no Easter bunnies or egg hunts. There were no Easter sales at department stores or parades in the street. Easter was a special time of prayer and Christian activism.

"Jesus would gather all the townspeople around and would listen to their stories about the meaning of Easter in their lives. Then he would teach them how to love one another, how to protest Roman abortion clinics and how to properly convert homosexuals.

"You can't even do things like that these days without getting called out by some wacko left-wing human rights group. Christians had more freedom under Roman rule than we do now in our own country! We need to return Easter back to the way it was when Jesus was alive."

She says this in an interview on FOX news. Now, Easter was celebrated first in the second century AD to commemorate Christ's resurrection. One always wonders whether Palin and her ilk actually do read the Bible --- according to the biblical record, Jesus had disappeared from the cave where he had been laid to rest, and later reappeared as wraith to his disciples and before his ascension to heaven. He did not celebrate anything on that Sunday following the fatal Friday night of his crucification --- but never mind.

Off the cliff

We've been discussing this with Glenn and others since a while: the American Right, we argued, is still fighting the issues of the 1861 secession; the trenches of the culture wars are more or less aligned with the Mason-Dixon line. And here's the latest from Frank Rich, the world's leading we-told-you-so artiste, to say it so much more succinctly than we could.

(Follow the link and read the whole piece, our Rich-quote here is just a pretext to hawk yet another fragment from the Green Eyes. First Rich:)

"Implicit in this bipartisan gallows humor was an assumption shared by most of those listening: The non-legislating legislators responsible for the crisis [the Right Wing of the Republican Party in the American Congress] are a lunatic fringe — pariahs in the country at large and outliers even in their own party. They’re “a small faction of Republicans who represent an even smaller fraction of Americans,” as the former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau put it in the Daily Beast. By this line of reasoning, all that kept them afloat was their possession of just enough votes in their divided chamber to hold the rest of America temporarily hostage to their incendiary demands.

"Let's meet in the middle."

"Looks like someone out of Kenya" --- the Tea Party protesting at the White House during the weekend

And while we are at it, here's a fitting fragment from the Green Eyes, Ch. 27: I'll charge 100 dollars but am willing to negotiate:

"We're dressed, ready to roll, Ben's got hold of an inch of the fliers, how do we get hold of my father? He has a cell-phone, right? Let's hope he’s not behind on the payments. Technology works, so I tell my father my truck is broken, I need to borrow his car, right now, to drive a friend to the Greyhound terminal in Ocean View. I'll be at the parking lot in two minutes. As we exit the main entrance his back is turned to us, he's expecting us coming down the ramp, he isn't even aware we're coming from upstairs. I won't call him out of course, from behind, or touch his shoulder, I never touch him, save sometimes on the third day, when I throw him out. So I just walk around him in a semi-circle, perimeter of 20 feet, Ben-John next to me, Ben proudly holding his stack of fliers, grinning. Let a little mystery prevail. Ben is born in Kenya, right? I just extend my hand, say nothing, until it holds the car keys, hand father the apartment key (the spare one, of whose existence he's unaware) we get into his crappy, reddish, dirty, misparked Chevy, Ben waves with his hands to my father, still holding the fliers. We've not said hello, we've not said goodbye, we're good."