Ben Quinn on a frightening trend.

Blogging has been slow the past week because of other duties, and now the weekend is here.

Matt Drudge:

ZUCKER UNTUCKED: @rupaul scored 565,000 viewers on LOGO vs @piersmorgan 545,000 on CNN in Monday 9 PM showdown…

You’re born naked, the rest is drag.

George Hendrik Breitner (1857–1923), Gezicht op de Dam te Amsterdam (View over the Dam in Amsterdam), ca 1895.

The Dam is the main square in central Amsterdam, located not far from my former home in the city. I have walked here many times and it’s fascinating how little things have changed since 1895.

Good news from France:

France’s marriage equality bill cleared its first and main hurdle on Saturday when lawmakers overwhelmingly approved the most important article of the new law, redefining marriage as an agreement between two people of opposite or same sex.

Congratulations!

Update: More at The Local.

The language of Jesus is dying:

Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was the common tongue of the entire Middle East when the Middle East was the crossroads of the world. People used it for commerce and government across territory stretching from Egypt and the Holy Land to India and China. Parts of the Bible and the Jewish Talmud were written in it; the original “writing on the wall,” presaging the fall of the Babylonians, was composed in it. As Jesus died on the cross, he cried in Aramaic, “Elahi, Elahi, lema shabaqtani?” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”)

But Aramaic is down now to its last generation or two of speakers, most of them scattered over the past century from homelands where their language once flourished. In their new lands, few children and even fewer grandchildren learn it.

From The Local:

Some areas of Sweden with low levels of immigration have more pronounced social problems than towns with higher numbers of immigrants, according to the conclusions of a new report based on the UN Human Development Index.

This not what the xenophobes want to read. In their opinion, every social problem is down to immigration.

Here’s an example of the old “I have a gay friend and therefore cannot be a homophobe although I hate gay rights”-genre. But hey, the writer, Taki Theodoracopulos, is a 75-year-old fool from Greece who will die soon. I can write this because I have elderly friends who are Greek.

No, seriously, anyone who uses his acquaintance with a member of a minority group to legitimise hatred towards this minority is wicked. (Think of Samuel L. Jackson’s Stephen in “Django Unchained” as an argument for racism.)

August Strindberg’s “Marin” (Seascape), 1894.

Strindberg (1849–1912) is by many considered Sweden’s foremost writer, but I have always appreciated him more for his paintings. That’s why I posted some of my favourite Strindberg artwork in the past few weeks.

Andrew Sullivan puts a good label on the trend to ban foreign words. It’s so stupid.

Andrew Sullivan is with a new URL and blog design. I like it, but can’t help but thinking that the choice of colours is a lot like mine. Maybe grey is the new black?

Yes!!! Send him into orbit and let him stay there. The world would become safer this way.

“Sweden’s Crown Princess Victoria made a surprise show-stealing appearance at Monday’s Gay Gala in Stockholm to hand out the prize for Gay of the Year,” The Local reports. This is good and a sure sign that Sweden’s gay-rights movement is now firmly in the mainstream.

Equal marriage bill approved by 400 votes to 175.

From The Economist:

Readers are invited to affirm, among other things, that they understand the history of pre-Roman Britain and the ideas of the Enlightenment. Some of the selections might seem odd to long-term residents. The five writers who merit special treatment are William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, Dylan Thomas, Rudyard Kipling and Roald Dahl. Skiing is described as an increasingly popular sport. Pleasingly, Sake Dean Mohamet (pictured), who opened Britain’s first curry house in 1810, is singled out for praise, along with a few prime ministers.

This about “Life in the United Kingdom”, the textbook that is the basis for the test taken by all would-be British citizens. OK for Shakespeare, but I think more of Alan Hollinghurst and Ian McEwan.

Andrew Sullivan has collected some voices on the parliamentary vote in favour of marriage equality.

“The ailing mother of Jimmy Sserwadda, who married his childhood sweetheart in a groundbreaking wedding in Sweden last week, was verbally attacked after news of her son’s gay marriage reached Uganda,” The Local reports. Makes me sick.

This is an insult to all Jews. The ever-more extreme Chief Rabbinate must go. Israel can’t afford to lose support from world Jewry.

From the Guardian:

One of the most prominent members of the Westboro Baptist church has left it after spending her life as part of the fervently anti-gay movement.

Megan Phelps-Roper, who looked after social media for the church best known for its slogan “God hates fags”, announced her departure in a post on the blogging platform Medium in which she also revealed her younger sister Grace, 19, was also leaving.

In the post, called Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise, the 27-year-old explained how she had become disillusioned with the teaching of Westboro, which is widely considered one of the most detested church groups in America for its “God hates fags” campaign.

European governments discuss a new budget for the EU in Brussels today. To get an idea about what the EU spends its money on, Open Europe has made a graph.

NASA explains:

The spiral arms of bright galaxy M106 sprawl through this remarkable multiframe portrait,
composed of data from ground- and space-based telescopes.

Also known as NGC 4258, M106 can be found toward the northern constellation Canes Venatici.

The well-measured distance to M106 is 23.5 million light-years, making this cosmic scene about 80,000 light-years across.

Typical in grand spiral galaxies, dark dust lanes, youthful blue star clusters, and pinkish star forming regions trace spiral arms that converge on the bright nucleus of older yellowish stars.

But this detailed composite reveals hints of two anomalous arms that don’t align with the more familiar tracers.

Seen here in red hues, sweeping filaments of glowing hydrogen gas seem to rise from the central region of M106, evidence of energetic jets of material blasting into the galaxy’s disk.

The jets are likely powered by matter falling into a massive central black hole

Read more at New Scientist.

(Photo: Hubble Legacy Archive, Robert Gendler, Jay Gabany, Processing—Robert Gendler)

I think this is unlikely to happen in 2013, but considering the popularity of Samsung’s large Galaxy models, a larger iPhone is very likely.

“Swedish police want to introduce an instrument to test drivers suspected of drug use,” The Local reports.

I think this is a good idea. I don’t think taking drugs should be illegal, but putting other people in danger by driving intoxicated should be.

This is nothing new. In Bruce Bagemihl’s Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity (1999), the author tells a story about how biologists at a seminar all kept silent about homosexuality until one brave scientists gave voice to findings that were taken out of all mainstream essays on animal behaviour. Homosexuality was seen but not acknowledged because the unspoken consensus was that it did not exist.

“After eighteen hours of talks EU leaders early Friday morning (8 February) agreed to a total EU budget of €960 billion for the next seven years, which is smaller than the current €1 trillion budget,” EU Observer reports.

I have a taste for the morbid in mythology, and few artists captures this better than Goya in his so-called Black Paintings, made between 1819 and 1823.

Francisco Goya (1746–1828), Aquelarre (“Witches’ Sabbath”).

Untitled painting by Goya, known as “Saturn Devouring His Son”.

The headline sums up my take on this—and this.

This whole imaginary war with Islam and Muslims is tedious. Sure, there are religious fanatics who make terrible things, but this is nothing unique for followers of Islam. I personally know artists who were tormented by Christian fanatics long before the Islamist terror became a topic. The difference is that no one cares much if an artist or a writer is threatened or attacked by people white and blond enough to blend into the Western mainstream.

In a response to physician Connie Mariano’s idea that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is too fat to be president, Time’s Paul Campos writes:

In January of 2017 Christie will be 54, while the current Democratic frontrunner for her party’s presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, will be 69. It is true that, compared to “normal weight” people such as Clinton, very obese people like Christie have, all other things being equal, an elevated mortality risk. Specifically, the most recent, detailed, and sophisticated study of the question, published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that people as heavy as Christie have a 29% increase in mortality risk, compared to otherwise similar people of normal weight.

(Via Andrew Sullivan and @Nonicoc.)

Titan is the largest satellite of Saturn and has a foggy atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and oily hydrocarbons.

“On February 15th (or, depending where you are, the 16th) a hunk of space rock 45 metres across, called 2012 DA14, will buzz Earth in the closest encounter ever recorded for an asteroid of that size,” The Economist reports. Fascinating stuff.

Read Julia Ioffe’s article about the Russian “homosexual propaganda” ban.

Here’s a picture of Värnhemstorget in Malmö taken in 1940. This is my current neighbourhood. I live in a building at the end of the street at the top, built in 1988. Värnhemstorget was the end stop for the so-called White Buses that transported survivors from Hitler’s concentration camps to safety in Sweden in 1945. Today, the square has a memorial to this event. I wrote about that in May 2008.

Who could have guessed that the former president is a painter.

This is fascinating. How secure is a high security prison, really?

If anyone were in doubt about what kind of people make up the UK Independence Party, here’s a sample.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Plath’s death, the Guardian has asked writers and poets to reflect on what her work means to them.

“Five die and three injured in incident during emergency drill on Thomson Majesty moored at Santa Cruz on island of La Palma,” Guardian reports. Oops.

Shane Hegarty on the walking dead.

A painting by an unknown artist in Pompeii, the Roman town in southern Italy that was buried under six metres of ash and pumice when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE.

Here are some more erotic images of Pompeii.

(Via @Vilsjin.)

When on the subject of ancient erotic art, here’s a link to an entry I wrote in November 2010.

Thayer Watkins, “If a heart is good for just a fixed number of beats, say one billion, then heart longevity is this fixed quota of beats divided by the heart rate.”

Table from San José State University.

Jason Kottke has more.

This will be a truly historic day as Pope Benedict XVI becomes the first pontiff to resign in nearly 600 years.

Balaji Ravichandran won’t miss Pope Benedict XVI.

Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), Portrait of Innocent X (ca 1650).

But I prefer Francis Bacon’s (1909-1992) Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953), which is copyrighted but viewable online here.

Andrew Sullivan prays for Catholic reform:

Those of us who have hung in must now pray for a new direction, a return to the spirit of the Second Council, a Pope of reform after an era of often irrational reaction and concealment of some of the worst evil imaginable. It can happen. Perhaps Benedict XVI finally grasped that. And finally did what he was never ever capable of doing before: let go and let God take over.

“A man has been sentenced to 15 months in prison after he threw his nine-month-old infant at a policeman,” The Local reports. What’s wrong with people?

Details of the Pope’s life after abdication are emerging.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.

A truly historic event took place in Russia yesterday as a 10-ton meteorite hit Earth.

Apparently, it’s the mix of genitalia that makes children feel safe. As always, the homophobe says he is not a homophobe because—yes, you’ve guessed it—he has gay friends.

This makes me angry:

Late last year the man, who has chosen to remain unnamed, moved back to his home village of Freyung-Grafenau in the Bayerwald with his partner. He has been HIV positive since 2007 but the infection is dormant, making him 99.99 percent non-contagious, the Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper reported.

The pair planned to open a restaurant and began the process to do so. Initially all seemed to be going well; the bank began to process their loan application and they signed a rental lease on a property.

But suddenly the bank back-tracked and said the man was not even credit worthy for a loan of €1,000. An employee then told him his request had been rejected “for his own protection” and that one day he would be grateful for the decision.

Three weeks ago he received an anonymous letter. “AIDS kills,” the author wrote, and then said that although “homosexuals are tolerated” in the village, no-one wanted a “creeping infection”

Germany might be the next European country to legalise same-sex marriage.

Gerard van Honthorst (1590–1656), De koppelaarster (“The Matchmaker”), 1625.

I think this is rather sad. I like the idea that people can marry more than one person.

More details emerging about the Pope’s decision to abdicate.

Lennart Sacrédeus is known for comparing same-sex marriage to paedophilia and bestiality, and now he is planning a comeback by running for a seat in the European Parliament.

Ian McEwan on religion as magical realism. Personally, I think this is the only sane way to read religious texts.

It’s name is Europa.

It’s a good thing that some politicians focus on the really important things, like nipples.

Amazing images of our part of the universe.

Censorship is always a bad idea.

This is discrimination at work:

“A straight couple living in the U.S. can apply for a green card based on their spousal relationship,” said Rachel B. Tiven, the executive director of Immigration Equality, a legal advocacy group focusing on gays and lesbians. “Gay couples simply can’t do that.”

Salomon van Ruysdael (ca 1603–1670) View of Deventer Seen from the North-West, 1657.

This painting is a bit different from most Dutch paintings of this age. It’s very bright and the strokes seem so light. A sharp contrast to the dark and heavy we are familiar with in the likes of Rembrandt.

Some weeks are worse than hoers. This is one such week. A long, boring trial in court for three weeks and now a funeral tomorrow to look forward to. Not a nice week. Not a good week for blogging.

A major British homophobe says the Pope is part of a secretly gay network. It’s not easy to know what’s what in this mess, but in a bizarre—almost perverted—way it’s entertaining.

Rembrandt (1606–1669), Moses with the Ten Commandments, 1659.

John Everett Millais (1829–1896) Victory O Lord!, ca 1850.

I don’t blame the French actor for disliking the new taxes introduced by François Hollande, but there are plenty of democratic countries to pick before the xenophobic and authoritarian Russia.

I will not stay up all night to watch the Oscars, but for those of you who want to combine some sleep with the highlight of the show, Nikki Finke has a list with scheduled time for each award.

Good news from Israel.

I’m off to Stockholm and the think tank Nocturum for a debate on drugs policy tomorrow. After that, I will spend a few days migrating my very-old blog entries into this current one. In the meantime, this blog will go silent. I’m back blogging in about a week.