Mark A. Rayner's Blog: Mark A. Rayner's Goodreads Blog, page 120

The tragedy of bad design

It's Bad Design



Originally uploaded by lunchbreath



Alltop doesn't even know what a g-spot is.

Forty-seven Signs of the Apocalypse (#34)

From the Book of Jerry

And yea, it shall be a time of great lamentation and strangeness.

The fish of the seas shall drink of the bones of the past, and the birds of the sky shall be coated in its blackness, and the race of Adam shall be helpless before its wrath.

But in this era of evil a man shall send another man a Parcel. And it shall contain a book of fiction, and filled with lies and tales of great wantonness and evil. And they shall both make use of the Mail. And the Parcel will...

Renoir's The Festival of Slorg

Many art historians believe this to be the famous painting, Luncheon of the Boating Party (Le déjeuner des canotiers) by the French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, painted in 1881.

They are right on two counts: it was Renoir, and it was in 1881, but the actual title was The Festival of Slorg, and is much more sinister than art historians have always assumed.

According to Brian A. Oard in his essay on this painting, The Lure of Lotus Eating:

It is a scene of the triumphant bourgeoisie...

Marvellous Hairy — on Kindle now for $3.99!

A slight deviation from the normal deviancy that goes on here at The Skwib. As you know, I am a writer of novels in addition to this blog, and my second book is now available as a Kindle edition.

As we lead up to the official release of the paper version, I've priced the Kindle version at $3.99. (Actually, I priced it at $1.99, but Amazon adds a $2 fee for downloading.) But even at $3.99 it's a helluva deal. And it's a limited-time offer!

You can buy it here, and find out more about the...

Leonardo Da Vinci's Woman with Telekinetic Powers About to Destroy Sienna

Many people have described this as one of history's most mysterious paintings. They have described the smile on this woman's face as "enigmatic" and "curious" and highly erotic. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

As you know, Florence, where Da Vinci painted this, was in a very long and intense struggle with Sienna, a nearby city that also intended to rule all Italy. The military conflict widened as both independent cities created breeding programs to produce women with mental...

Picasso's Women from Five-Dimensional Space Prepare to Absorb The Artist's Essence

There is something undeniably creepy and alien about the women portrayed in Pablo Picasso's masterpiece, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. He painted this in 1907, though it wasn't shown publicly until nearly a decade later. When it was finally revealed, it was like Picasso threw a plasma bomb into the art world. It was immoral. Outrageous.

According to the BBC series, The Private Life of a Masterpiece :

Les Demoiselles D'Avignon shattered the image of the female form in painting.The...

Professor Quippy: Research shows chatting with babes is good for a man's mental health

More groundbreaking science from the Institute of the Painfully Obvious has revealed what men have instinctively understood since we came down out of the trees and starting knocking about on the plain: having ANY kind of conversation with an attractive woman is good for a man's mental health.

Not to be too facetious though … the mechanics of this truth are kind of interesting. Researchers at the University of California recruited 149 male volunteers between the ages of 18-24. Two thirds...

Forty-seven Signs of the Apocalypse (#35)

From the Book of Cephalopods

Yeah, I speak to you about the evil times to come, and the truth shall be written in the ink of the cephalopods, and many shall wail and weep at its truth.

Lo! In this time there shall be a Contest of the Foot, throughout the lands both Holy and Heathen, and they shall worship of the Ball of the Foot. And in their wickedness, there shall be wagering, and taking of the odds, and many shekels will pass back over the hands of the Usurers, who worship the an unholy...

A Brief History of Unicorns: The Golden Age of Unicorns

In ancient India, Unicorns faced an existential crisis. Not the kind where you doubted your role in life, but rather, the kind where your whole species was in danger of being turned into aphrodisiac soup.

Hence, the species of onus cornu moved west, where human civilization had yet to reach the dizzying heights it had in the east. There were signs of cities in the Levant and Greece, so the unicorns pushed on into Paleolithic Europe, settling in glades, glens and flower-bedecked forests...

Vermeer's Girl With Funky Hat About to Be Sucked Into A Naked Singularity

Few people know the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer had an advanced understanding of modern physics, but only alluded to it in some of his works because he dare not reveal his knowledge. He lived in the mid-17th century, so if he went around talking about gravitational theories not dreamed of yet, he would probably have been locked up at best. (More likely — being burnt at the stake for witchcraft. Or warlockery, whatever they called it when men started raving about event horizons and the...