Monday, June 18, 2007

"My thoughts start out with me like blood-stained mutineers...

debauching themselves on board the ship they have captured, but I bring them home at nightfall, larking and tumbling over each other like happy little boy scouts at play." G.M. Trevelyan, "Walking" (1913)

And Leslie Stephen talks about Byron in his essay "In Praise of Walking": "lameness was to severe to admit of walking, and therefore all the unwholesome humours which would have been walked off in a good cross-country march accumulated in his brain and caused the defects, the morbid affectation and perverse misanthropy, which half ruined the achievement of the most masculine intellect of his time."

R.D. Guthrie's 1974 idea about how/why humans started walking upright: so that men could use their now exposed penises as "threat display organs" to intimidate opponents.

Reagan and Gorbachev walking around Lake Geneva (in Rousseau's hometown), Reagan claiming that they had a heartfelt discussion and agreed to take mutual steps toward disarmament. (A heartfelt discussion with what must have been a huge entourage of security and translators).

1 comment:

Jessica Smith said...

"R.D. Guthrie's 1974 idea about how/why humans started walking upright: so that men could use their now exposed penises as "threat display organs" to intimidate opponents."

seems... accurate.