We Cheer Ourselves Up, Again, Using Pictures of Caitlin Moran, and Greek Museums

Thinking about Caitlin Moran makes everything better. We cannot stress this enough. We don't know how much time you have had to spend lately on writing stupid and uninteresting essays, or exterminating fur beetles, or dealing with students who think that 200 words is a reasonable length for a discussion essay. But we've spent a large portion of our days recently doing just that, and it sucks an unreasonable amount.

Add to this a stop at a women's shelter flat to visit some lovely women fleeing domestic violence. Then spend some time reflecting on the fact that said lovely women are having to hide in a flat without being able to go out, while the men who have beaten, raped, and threatened to kill them are free to walk the streets, have coffee with friends, and generally do whatever the hell they like. Soon you start to feel the need for A LARGE DOSE OF CAITLIN MORAN.

So. Here is an emergency picture of Caitlin Moran:

CAITLIN MORAN MAKES EVERYTHING BETTER.

Then, to complete this exercise in staying reasonably sane, let's look at some lovely soothing toilet photos. We favour, today, the photos we took in the Archaeological Museum of Mykonos. We like museums. We especially like Greek museums. They are full of things we love - really old shit, dug up from the ground. Bits of marble, and vases with rude paintings, and ostraka, and hair pins, and bronze mirrors, and domestic appliances. Let's have some Greek museum awesomeness!

This was a beautifully clean and harmonious toilet.

We appear to have mislaid the picture of the sink (damn pheasant), but here is a coat-hook!
N.b. the soap was really good.

A glimpse of rampant culture, through the door of an unrestrainedly civilised toilet - heaven!!!

A beautiful juxtaposition of old and new, elegant and vulgar, stone and carton?
Or a heinous sacrilege?
Tudor Friend got very upset by this picture, considering it a base and brutal use of a cultural artefact.
But the stele was right outside the bog!

Funeral amphora, 7th century, depicting the fall of Troy.

If we had a broken statue of Hercules that we needed to fit
into a random corner of a museum, we would also do this.

Today's festive video is super not-festive. Violence against women and girls is a real thing.
This is why we need Caitlin Moran, and rampant feminism. If you haven't read anything by Caitlin Moran recently, go to the nearest library AT YOUR EARLIEST CONVENIENCE. (We were going to say IMMEDIATELY, but really, aren't we all stressed enough already without adding more demands?)

Video - Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Body Electric

Related Reading

Last time we felt a desperate need to cheer ourselves up by looking at pictures of Caitlin Moran:

We Cheer Ourselves Up Using Pictures of Roman Plumbing, and Caitlin Moran

More Greek museum awesomeness, to fortify and delight us:

Beware of Greeks Bearing Gifts, But Totally Trust the Toilet Attendant

The Ancient Agora Museum in Athens - Unbridled Stoicism

Stark Raving Nudity

Christmas, the Acropolis Museum, and an Academic Debate (And Some Very Festive Calypso Music)

All posts featuring Caitlin Moran

An Unholy Combination

As our regular readers know, we like combining our favourite things. There was the time when we managed to combine syphilis and toilets, and there have been other times when we have combined other favourite things, like say rum and lime, or bourbon and lingonberries. Last night we combined the drinking of alcohol with a fascinating conversation with some medical students with a special interest in sex education, which is like our favourite combination ever, in the entire space-time continuum. (Normally, when you ask someone if they've heard of the latest strain of multi-drug-resistant gonorrhoea, in the north of England, they tend to look at you funny. With medical students with a special interest in sex education, however, you not only get invigorating conversation on your favourite subject, but they tell you interesting new things that you didn't know, and give the room at large an impromptu lecture on prophylactics. Amazing.)

Jonny, that ever-helpful, disgusting young person, sent us a message of extraordinary clarity. It said:

Cycling and toilets. Your two fav things.

Though this is not what we wish to lay our eyes on while drinking rum-based (and also gin-based, vodka-based and other-things-based) drinks, we must applaud Jonny's creativity, chutzpah, and roguery.

In other news, remember the festive toilet from the Lux building at Lund University that Meandering Friend sent us recently? Well, we happened to be passing Lux for intellectual and also drinking-related reasons the other night, and suddenly it struck us that the disability toilet was not only disability-hostile, but drunkard-hostile!

Look how far away the toilet-roll holder is! Unless one has massive gorilla arms, how is one supposed to REACH?
Granted, there are two other bog rolls attached to the arm supports, but what is the other bog-roll holder then FOR? What? Whattt?

To be fair, we love all of this. Love it.

Nota bene we have lots more pictures from the Lux building at Lund University. They're in the archive, with the pheasant. One day we shall grab a candle, open the oaken door, take a deep breath and a swig of whisky, and venture in there. One day.

(Anyone into psychoanalysis may ponder why we imagine our archive to be like a crypt out of The Monk. Ponder on.)

Today's festive video illustrates how we often feel when Jonny sends us pictures.

Festive video - Bruce Springsteen, I Wish I Were Blind

Related Reading

That other time when Jonny sent an actual picture of himself on the toilet:
What Goes Around, Comes Around (This post is surprisingly intellectual for featuring a picture of Jonny on the bog with his bike.)

Meandering Friend's report from the Lux building at Lund University:
A Picture of Jonny Not Holding a Fruit Pie

All posts featuring syphilis

North of England 'super gonorrhoea' outbreak triggers nationwide alert (ITV News)

A Picture of Jonny Not Holding a Fruit Pie

Privy Counsel HQ is abuzz with activity! There are things happening left, right, and centre, and - on top of everything else - the bathroom tap has clapped out, leaving us comfortless and unable to satisfy our OCD tendencies.

Since we're not in the habit of asking invisible beings in the sky for favours, we can't even pray for a speedy solution.

Clearly, the only reasonable strategy for dealing with this situation is our usual practice of hard-headed denial, combined with rampant procrastination. Hence, a blog post!

Jonny sent us these pictures some time ago. He says, simply,

You're welcome.

This is a picture of Jonny in, probably, a pub toilet, making a rude gesture.
His top says "Pie till I die", which we rather suspect refers to the concept of pizza pie, as opposed to fruit pie.
This is very odd, considering Jonny has promised us a picture of himself holding a fruit pie.
WHERE IS THE FRUIT PIE, JONNY?
WE ARE WAITING.

This vulgar poster is possibly funny, but it might depend on how drunk one is at the moment of examination.

We don't know about you, but upon regarding some of Jonny's contributions to this blog, and also other places, we often feel - there is no other word for it - sullied. We think maybe we would all quite like a mental eyewash. Don't worry - the Privy Counsel provides!

We have the very great pleasure of introducing a new friend today. Voilà, meet Meandering Friend! This splendid friend and abettor has already featured in a blog post, but hasn't had her own pseudonym till now.

This toilet is in the Lux building at Lund University, and features a pair of festive eyes!

We also have a picture of a very fucked-up Welsh pub toilet (a contribution from Welsh Gangster Friend) to show you, but we know from experience that our readers don't respond well to being overloaded with bog material. We choose, today, to be kind to everyone's intellect, and leave the fucked-up pub toilets till another day.

Both Jonny and Meandering Friend enjoy cycling, in various ways, and today's festive video features a song we find highly amenable to cycling. Seriously, when you're stuck on a dark road in the middle of winter, with nothing but an icy headwind for company, this song will see you through. IT WILL SEE YOU THROUGH.

Festive video - Steve Earle, Down the Road


Related Reading

The previous post featuring Meandering Friend: Disco Fever in Stavanger
All  posts featuring Jonny
All  posts featuring Lund

Melancholy Musings from Mykonos

Well, tally-ho and a rollicking good evening to you, dear readers! We've got some stupendously festive pictures from Jonny and Welsh Gangster Friend (what is it about strapping young men and toilet-picture productivity? Hmm?) to delight and edify you with in the near future. However, the season of mists and mellow fruitlessness is upon us, and we're in the mood for something more wistful just now. Let us therefore lock up our gentlemen friends' contributions for the moment (taking great care, of course, to avoid having our eyes gouged out by the pheasant living in our archive), and make a mental odyssey. To Greece!

We like Greece. The people are friendly, the toilets intellectually stimulating, and the archaeological artefacts really, really fucking old. We have some pictures from the Archaeological Museum on Mykonos which are very exciting indeed, but we'll save them for another day, when we are feeling less listless. The below pictures are from some café or bar or other on the same island, where we enjoyed some extremely invigorating and delicious Greek coffee.

Take a moment to appreciate the clarity of the colours, the rudimentary hygiene, and the fact that one is not allowed to flush bog roll down the toilet. This caused our hygienically-minded travelling companion (the same person, incidentally, who encouraged us to drink so much whisky that we ended up vomiting behind a bus stop that time) to erupt into pretty little cascades of angry snarls.

Believe it or not, but there is soap in this scenario.
And a very pleasant, soothing turquoise colour.

'

Every single toilet we encountered on Mykonos had one of these festive cisterns. Just like on an old-fashioned
Crapper toilet, but with a festive button instead of a pull-handle! Woof!

STRICTLY NO TOILET PAPER TO BE FLUSHED DOWN THIS TOILET.
HOWEVER, YOU MAY SIT HERE AND GAZE MEDITATIVELY AT THE TILES FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIKE.

The tiles are the same dreamy turquoise colour as the Mediterranean sea, gently rocking the plastic carrier bags and loud Italian children on a sunny afternoon. Let's crack open a bottle of rum and pretend that we are on a Greek island and not in the middle of a situation involving the passive voice, a bunch of angry pheasants, and inappropriate pictures of Colin Firth. And let us, for the sake of everything that is holy, have a festive video!

Just like one cannot legitimately use the words "too much" in conjunction with "garlic", it is impossible to get too much girl country.

Festive Video - Pistol Annies; Blues, You're a Buzzkill

Related Reading

All posts featuring Greek toilets

That other time we went all poetic on everyone's asses over the colours of some tiles: Brownian Motion, or, Brownout, or, A Brown Study - Semi-Intellectual Friend's Shower

All about the pheasant situation in our archive

A 19th-Century Scottish Toilet Extension, and Being Fed Up with Self-Righteous Dudes

You know when, during an ordinary - bog-standard, even - rampant feminazi discussion, a friend suddenly remembers a cool toilet photo they took recently in Scotland? This joyous concatenation of circumstances happened to us the other day.

Shewee Fiend Friend says:

I took this picture of a toilet for you.
In Perth, Scotland. The pub in front is from 1633, and the building behind it is older, but I couldn't tell how much.
With awesome wooden toilet extensions! Those must be 19th century!

We love this so much our throat goes all constricted and we have to cough, and blink.

We have many enjoyable conversations with Shewee Fiend Friend. They tend to be mainly about a) rampant feminazism, b) academic matters, and c) toilets. Funnily enough, we have never discussed the song featured in the Festive Video below with Shewee Fiend Friend. For some reason, the topic of Shania Twain has never arisen in our conversations. Ever. But we're pretty sure that Shewee Fiend Friend would agree with the tenet that more women should say, "Dude, that don't impress me much" to dudes who don't impress them much.

While we would never, ever advise anyone to wear head-to-foot leopard-print clothes including an impractical-for-desert-hiking ankle-length coat and a hat box, we still think the below song is totally fucking awesome. Many, many dudes - oh God, so many dudes - persist in the belief that they are desirable to women without making any effort to make themselves attractive. (You know, of course, without us having to explain it, that our use of the word "attractive" here goes beyond mere physical appearance.*) It is time that we - all of us - recognised this, and stopped pandering to dickheads. This is the topic of today's Festive Video.

*Making oneself attractive can include the following strategies:

- Listening to what the other person is saying
- No. Really. Listening. Talking over somebody after half a sentence does not count as listening
- Not assuming that you know better than the other person. (See for instance our infographic for more information on this point.)
- Especially not assuming that you know better than the other person when it comes to things you have zero personal experience of
- Not uttering your opinions regarding topics about which you are woefully uninformed
- Not talking about how great you are in an unironical way
- Not trying to impress another person by using grammatically incorrect phrases in a language which, if you'd take the trouble to ask, you would discover that the other person speaks much better than you
- Not telling another person how he or she is feeling
- Not uttering the words "Why do women put up with oppression?"

Let's have the Festive Video!

Festive video - Shania Twain, That Don't Impress Me Much

Related Reading

An article on the scales patriarchy so painstakingly glued to your eyeballs falling away, and the breathtaking feeling of freedom - and massive inconvenience - this entails: 
Ten Things Feminism Has Ruined For Me

A blog post on the extraordinary phenomenon of dudes believing they own another person's body: 
It Was Easier to Give in Than Keep Running

An article on dudes expecting attention without having made one single stroke of effort to deserve it: 
The Dickonomics of Tinder

Fictional Friend told us about the awesomeness of the Tahirih Justice Center. Tahirih's last recorded words were, “You can kill me as soon as you like, but you will never stop the emancipation of women”.

Are you a mansplainer? Not sure? See our explanatory mansplainer infographic.

All posts featuring Shewee Fiend Friend

P.S.
When we get depressed thinking about all the mansplaining dickheads out there, we cheer ourselves up by remembering some of our favourite people who are male, educated and terribly, terribly nice, and would never dream of mansplaining anything to anyone, ever:

Bogsley Hansson Friend
Enlightened Friend
German Friend
Intellectual Friend
Semi-Intellectual Friend