Bowled over

Smaller images than I would normally post (the first one isn't bad, the other two less good), but worth it, I think, for the sheer wattage of beauty.

No full-frontals either, but I just don't care: I am in love with his lightly haired body and that is the end of the matter.

The fact that he also has eyelashes with which you could easily sweep streets is another huge plus point in his favour.

Have I explained yet how completely smitten I am? Now, if only someone could come up with a full frontal image I could die happy...

What are you looking for?

From time to time I might scan the "personals" looking for my Lifelong Soul-Mate and One True Love... [let's have a brief pause for a random hot image]

... which is when I encountered this statement by a cute man about what he was looking for in a partner:

"I want you to run around after me like a lapdog. I want you to cancel your plans at the last minute to bring me sweets. I want to belittle you in front of your friends and family.

"I will be a complete emotional and financial drain on you, however I will give you sex from time to time, although I will ridicule your performance and laugh at your child-like size.

"I want somebody I can grind down systematically over a period of months or years. I will make you fall in love with me then I will steal your spirit."

Is it wrong that I found that really rather attractive?

Existential triplets

It was this chap's pleasing smile that made me choose him from the vast quantities of naked hotties in the Adventures in Beige Porno Vaults.

Which is strange: normally I would have rejected him for the sheer mutant magnitude of his wanger, but something this evening made me take pity:

Maybe it was because he adopted this pose while his delicious smile tells us that he knows how utterly absurd is human sexuality and, indeed, the human condition:

Or maybe he just likes hoisting his legs up in the air, what do I know?

History Today

Anyone of a certain age who went through the state school system in England is likely to have encountered one or other of the books from this history series -- Carter & Mears:

First written in 1937 by a former Chief Inspector of Schools and a former History Master at Warwick School, these books (4 originally, now a series of 8, and shortly to be expanded to 10 volumes) told a chronological story of... 

... well, actually, not of Britain; or, rather, not of Britain until after the merger of the monarchies of England and Scotland. Until then it is very definitely a history of England, notwithstanding its imperial use of "Britain".

But it approaches history as a chronological narrative, as a series of stories about how we have got to where we are. And with its muscular style, focussed on kings and privateers, swashbucklers and Great men, they were actually a rather engaging read.

And now, Carter & Mears lives again. The entire series has been gently updated and reissued as a series of, incidentally, beautifully tactile hardback books.

The new editions have been sensitively updated (although there are one or two areas where they seriously lag behind the consensus of modern scholarship), and for the most part they are beautifully written. 

They cost a tenner a pop, and the typography is rather fine (sorry, I couldn't find any photos of the insides and nor could I bothered to take any. Just take my word for it).

Today's history "teaching" concentrates on an endless recycling of The Tudors (admittedly one of the racier periods of English (sic) history), and projects on the Romans, slavery, Russia and the Second World War. Not necessarily in that order. And every child studies the Second World War usually three times.

Almost no-one under thirty has anything but the haziest grasp of the history of their own country. I like to think knowing at least some of that stuff is important. Maybe some of those people will be tempted to pick up these Carter & Mears. They could do worse.

Assortment

More random nonsense from me (but you'll need it to fortify yourself for the ranty posts appearing just below this one...).

I thought that image was sweet enough, so you can imagine that, when I saw the next one, I assumed I had died and gone to Heaven...

Writing of which, here's a couple of utterly wonderful saints -- starting, I assume, with a St Francis:

[Image removed -- someone is claiming it was a copyright violation, and who am I to question them?]

He is extraordinary, wonderful, glorious. Almost enough to make me embrace Catholicism.

Who's his partner?:

[Image removed -- someone is claiming it was a copyright violation, and who am I to question them?]

Ok, enough thematic nonsense, we're into hard-core randomness now, starting with this gorgeous bobbing wee pricklet that I so very much just want to suck:

Er... ditto:

A couple of this next hairy studly stud-muffin -- God I love that chest:

But this next one is as revealing as I can find. Which is pretty revealing, actually, just never enough to satiate me:

Back to singletons, and I wonder where you can buy stuffed squid:

On that random note it's probably time to draw things to a close, so let's go out in style with this immensely elegant pose:

I suspect that he is too thin to accommodate any internal organs, but let's not let something like that reduce our enjoyment of his prominent wee winkie. But I have to say, the saints have it.

Central Government is utterly crap

Something unexpected has arisen and I needed to get my passport (which expired last month) urgently renewed. Not to worry, I knew that the Passport Agency offers a "same day" service, albeit one for which you pay the princely premium of £130.

So I filled in my form (a really, really badly designed form), and got my photos, and spent my lunch-hour crossing London in an immensely hot and over-crowded Tube train, to arrive at the agency's hideously ugly, brutal office round the arse-end of Victoria station.

And there I was confronted with the sheer surreal brilliance of the ineptitude of central Government when I was told this by an apologetic junior functionary:

Yes, sir, of course you can have the Same Day premium service. You need to book an appointment to have that, and the earliest appointment we have is, er, the 9th of August.

So, just to be clear, the "same day" service can actually be accessed after you have waited 11 days.

This rather sweaty-looking arsehole is the woman responsible -- Sarah Rapson, the "chief executive" of the Government's passport agency, who has the effrontery to draw a salary from the public purse of in excess of £110,000*:

But she shouldn't take the rap alone. This arsehole is the Home Secretary, Theresa May, who is the political boss of the passport service and who, presumably, thinks Sarah and her cronies are doing a bang-up job (Theresa gobbles-up £145,000 a year from the public trough, plus a pretty foxy pension, entitlement to severance payments, and God knows what Grace and Favour stately homes):

We shouldn't be surprised. Theresa is famous for two things: (1) deciding that, despite viciously attacking us for the entire early part of her career, she now thinks gay men are lovely and not (necessarily) evil deviants. And (2) wearing leopard-skin print, fuck-me shoes:

What else could you expect from someone like her?

But she shouldn't take all the politcal rap since the cretin who appointed her to her current position is, of course, The Boy Wonder himself -- our multi-millionaire Prime Minister and glorious leader, "Dave" Cameron (he gets £198,000 from the trough, plus all manner of extras including more luxury accommodations than you can shake a stick at):

With this shower of morons in charge, is it any wonder that Orwellian creations like a "same day" service that you can't have for nearly a fortnight have infected the public sector?

I am so cross that I would gladly do evil things to all of them right now although, since I am a law-abiding Pacifist/coward, I will confine myself to slagging them off anonymously on my blog. Wankers.

*This data is from the central Government's transparency agenda website run by the Cabinet Office. So it's probably wrong. And that figure does NOT include the final salary pension scheme available to most public servants which is worth something like 20% on top of her salary, and nor does it include any bonuses. I couldn't find out if she had received any bonuses in the last year because central Government's transparency agenda website is one of the most appallingly badly designed ways of communicating that I have ever encountered. Can you tell how cross I am?

Beguiling

That's rather satisfying: a whole swathe of London Underground's stations has been listed, in recognition of their architectural importance, and some that were already listed -- like Sudbury Town -- have been upgraded to 2* status (just one level below the most important buildings of all):

The pair of stations at Sudbury were among the very first of architect Charles Holden's new Modernist brick boxes, inspired by a tour of continental Europe that were to have a major impact on Underground design.

The earlier stations were very formal, almost severe, while the last ones to be built were almost playful -- like my personal favourite, Arnos Grove:

Reminiscent of Gunnar Asplund's wonderful Stockholm Public Library, Holden modestly said of his design that he simply traced on a piece of paper the ways that people would naturally move between the street and the platforms and realised a circular drum would be the most economical way of containing them.

Arnos Grove is one of the great exemplars of his theory that stations should be designed such that in the darkness of the grim London nights they should act as warm, welcoming beacons of light. Most have now been wrecked with overly harsh fluorescent lighting, but Arnos Grove retains the beautiful soft, warm, yellow light that Holden intended:

So, with these upgrades to their Listed status, which should provide the most robust protection to ensure their survival for as long as we have a Capitalist system in place, central Government proves it can do at least a few things properly.

Coming soon

I'm very very conflicted about the imminent arrival of a film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:

That's a great poster, but the next one perhaps better shows the sheer wattage of British acting talent on whose shoulders this adaptation rests:

The trailer actually looks promising in some respects:


But the bottom line is this: will it be good enough to stand up against the utterly brilliant 1979 BBC tv adaptation? That had more than five hours of screen time in which to capture the complexities of Le Carré's original novel, against what will inevitably be the racier pacing of a cinema movie.

Then again, the film has Tom Hardy as Ricki Tarr rather than the slightly too creepy Hywel Bennett, although I'm not sure about Benedict Cumberbatch (much as I love him and his tiny willy) playing the hard man Peter Guillam against the late Michael Jayston's impressive turn.

Alec Guinness was, we all thought, the definitive Smiley, but let's see what Gary Oldman (an actor I don't normally associate with extraordinarily introspective and reflective characters) can do.

Also opening soon is The Moth Diaries. This stars Scott Speedman:

Actually that's all you need to know: Scott Speedman is, of course, the definitive lust object of Adventures in Beige (has been since all those years ago when he first appeared as a hairy-chested fresher in Felicity), so of course this film will be superb.

That is all.

Intimacy

A delightful handful of self-portraits by a photographer who is clearly rather talented.

He clearly likes close-ups of body parts, and we never, ever see his face.

These are very, very good though -- if, perhaps, a little mutant for my taste...

They reminded me of a cyber-encounter I had with someone earlier this week, over several hours of foreplay while we arranged a meeting, in which he persuaded me to map out in clinical detail precisely what sexual acts we would perform together.

He enthusiastically embraced being tied to a chair, blindfolded and stripped, being sucked off and wanked, having his nipples attacked with pegs, and having his arse fingered and then played with using toys. He wanted to explore watersports and corporal punishment, too.

I casually floated the possibility of us kissing but suddenly he was adamant: "oh, no, I couldn't possibly do that! It would be far too intimate". 

Apparently we are not allowed to see this photographer's face -- or, rather, not yet. Ah well: one day, maybe.

Pioneer hero

George Platt Lynes was, of course, a pioneering photographer of the male nude, active from the late 1920s onwards.

His work, consciously or not, is copied every day by arty pornographers trying to get shots which celebrate the male body. Like this one:

But that photographer doesn't have even a fraction of the technical brilliance of Lynes:

Which makes it all the more shocking that the only images of his I could find on the web were such small, pissy little jpegs...

Platt Lynes needs to be seen big, massive even, so you can luxuriate in the gorgeousness of his work (a huge book called, simply, The Male Nudes came out a while back and is well worth investing in).

My scanner has been buried for a few weeks under a pile of books and DVDs (I've run out of shelf space again), so I can't actually make any images for you. But I'll come back to that at some point.

In the meantime, that (above) was an image of the photographer himself, posing on the other side of the camera for Man Ray. The image is so poor I'm almost embarrassed to include it in what is supposed to be an homage to genius.

In the meantime, let's all raise a glass to a heroic pioneer of the imagery we all love so much -- without him our visual world would be much the poorer.

Training rant

A vastly better photographer than me has captured the almost brand-new Class 172 diesel multiple units on the London Overground system.

For a variety of economic and environmental reasons, these may well be the last-ever short-haul DMUs to join Britain's rail network.

Built by Bombardier, they were delivered late -- very late -- and with a major system fault that turned out, er, not to exist. Inside, they are vastly better designed than the slightly older electric multiple units that have taken over the rest of London Overground.

But that's because of the crap economics: this stretch of line is likely to be electrified at some point not too far away, when these units will then need to be re-leased (er... released) to some other train operator. Hence the internal layout needed to be suitable for every possible leasing opportunity. This has nothing to do with matching the interior design to the needs of the passengers on the route, and all about enhancing the residual capital values of the equipment to provide the maximum cash flow...

Elsewhere on the Overground the photographer has captured some of the Bombardier emus. Bombardier, you'll recall, is the Canadian company that lost the bid to build a fleet of new trains for the cross-London Thameslink line to Siemens, a German company. Apparently the loss of the Bombardier assembly line in Derby is some major failing of British industrial policy.

British industrial policy has almost totally failed, actually, and deliberately: for thirty years governments have wanted to move Britain to being a post-industrial economy, and now their wishes are being fulfilled. No-one yet has a plan for ensuring that the vast pool of ill-educated and unskilled or semiskilled labour can be economically active rather than becoming unemployable and benefit-dependent, but I guess for the politicians that is a second-order issue.

All of which has taken us a long way from the successes of London Overground, so dramatically rebuilt that it is almost a completely new railway. The final "missing link" to complete the London circle will open next year. Hugely impressive stuff.