I’m guessing that some may have personal foibles, but the following have universal validity as among the most pleasurable things in life:
1. Massaging my inner ear with a bent paper clip.
2. Wearing a night shirt.
3. Wearing longjohns in winter.
4. A foot massage.
5. A head massage.
6. Tiling.
7. Aiming the moveable shower rose in the direction of the other circular muscle on my body.
8. Washing in a dribble of freezing water on the Trans-Siberian in winter.
9. Using a squat toilet on a rocking, speeding train.
28 February, 2012 at 11:43 pm
That’s not really my photo and it’s not from a train. I can assure you the toilet was more colourful than that!
29 February, 2012 at 1:27 am
Massaging my inner ear with a bent paper clip.
K’pla! ! I knew your Stalinist turn was the result of some kind of brain injury!
29 February, 2012 at 1:44 am
The old effort to dismiss a well-reasoned argument.
29 February, 2012 at 4:01 am
And how many times have you accused me of drunkenness and rightist hooliganism in response to reasonable criticisms such as relying too heavily on Lenin’s writings on the NEP to understand the complexities of East Asian political economy in the 21st century, sir? How many times, sir, how many times?
29 February, 2012 at 4:05 am
“The slide into Stalinism can be explained by the paperclip lodged in the fusiform gyrus,” he said.
29 February, 2012 at 4:28 am
Are you drinking again, Bunga Bunga?
29 February, 2012 at 4:30 am
And please exercise proper scholarly care: I have never accused you of right-wing hooliganism, but made the careful observation that you express cynical and deeply liberal views.
29 February, 2012 at 10:18 am
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8367999
29 February, 2012 at 5:28 pm
The glories of Soviet science, since they had enough presence of mind to remove, preserve and dissect his rather large brain.
29 February, 2012 at 8:30 pm
Indeed, whereas the brains of Einstein, Whitman and other geniuses of non-communist countries had to be archived by stealth.
It’s good that the True story of Lenin’s Brain and other Soviet glories has now been told in this book from Hoover Institution Press:
http://www.hooverpress.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=1287
29 February, 2012 at 9:49 pm
The Cold War is obviously alive and well – ‘the dark inner workings of the Soviet Union’. Can’t help wondering what would be revealed if the classified archives of, say, the USA, were made openly available. For instance, what would be found in Reagan’s brain?. Probably nothing.
29 February, 2012 at 10:25 pm
Unfortunately unless it’s hidden in Area 51, Reagan’s brain went the way of the worms. Lincoln’s is at the NIH. Not that size is all that counts, but its weight was “not above the ordinary”. JFK’s was there too until it mysteriously went missing. Perhaps, like the Soviets with Lenin, the yanks couldn’t let their royalty’s scandalous normality be made known.
1 March, 2012 at 1:27 am
I’m sure that not one government minister in the history of the USA would be acknowledged as the most intelligent and educated minister in the world at the time – as was Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Commissar for Enlightenment is what was then the RSFSR
28 June, 2012 at 7:51 pm
[...] significant reluctance, one of the greatest pleasures for a man or indeed woman comes to an end – my tiling. Over the last few weeks, in those [...]