Will confess that I did not even know that 'rhythmic gymnastics' was a thing, let alone an Olympic sport (will also confess that there are LOTS of things I do not know are Olympic sports until the Olympics come round and suddenly everybody is talking about them).
But it sounds like a classic 'backwards and in high heels' thing that gets put down ( Read more... )

I looked at this and was going: and this is a desirable selling point???
Homes for sale near a football stadium - in pictures
And they all look great, but the lovely pictures exclude crowds of footie fans...
Living in an adjacent area to one of these, our evening travel plans, in the days when, in yesteryears gone by when we went out on Saturday ( Read more... )

Apparently some young (I think he must be relatively young?) bloke writer whose own career must so far be as the mayfly's compared to hers, has delivered himself of his opinion re Virginia Woolf (do we not think, my dearios, that Mrs W would have had him for breakfast and then desired a full English to fill up the space?): Woolf’s novels are not ( Read more... )

In the midst of everything, this is lovely: Turkey embarks on cultural mission to preserve its fairytales: Mammoth task to collate magical folklore of Anatolian plateau involves thousands of stories: '“In folk tales, the heroes are mostly outsiders who suffer the violence of powerful autocrats; for politicians, their defiant tone is dangerous.”'
** ( Read more... )

There must be a dumb, dark, bitter, belly-tension between a man and a woman, and how else could this be achieved save in the long monotony of marriage?
This was one of the thoughts that sprang to mind when reading TS Eliot's whingey statement sent to accompany the letters he sent to Emily Hale which she deposited in the library at Harvard, much to ( Read more... )

The appropriate white-knighting defence to people calling a woman 'fat and ugly' is not, I depose, giving her an unwanted 'forcible and sloppy kiss' and frankly I don't consider it an act of chivalry to make that your defence.
The former England footballer Paul Gascoigne wept as he was found not guilty of sexually assaulting a woman he kissed ( Read more... )

When a good friend cuts you out of their life, it can be as devastating as the end of a romance. How should you cope? You know, I think sometimes we should accept that some friendships are dependent upon contingent conditions and when those go away, it's difficult to maintain the friendship (or maybe I'm still bitter about someone who I used to ( Read more... )

Dept of Yayfulness: a new book by Ronald Hutton, this time on witches: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.
And, Dept of Cults and the fears generated within enclosed communities: An account of the writer’s own life and her father’s in the Exclusive Brethren, and the chaos and freedom that followed the decision to walk ( Read more... )

Mixed martial arts is the fastest-growing sport on Earth.... what does this bloody spectacle say about the world we live in?
I don't know what, if anything, it says about the world we live in, but that article suggests to me someone who does not know a great deal about the history of sport/popular entertainment - I am like, o tempora, o mores, what ( Read more... )

Extreme sport in Tooting: Ultra-running is one of the fastest growing sports, usually taking place in remote, scenic landscapes. Not a running track in London. Will competitors reach nirvana? I'm trying to resist the Tooting jokes based on the preferability of running in circles.
Yet another, not exactly condemned to repeat it, but review of book ( Read more... )