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Doctor, I said on my last trip to the shrink.  My wife has histrionic personality disorder.

What makes you think that?

Last night while stoned on camel dung hash she kept repeating, How do you get this damn thing to stop blinking?  She was trying to figure out how to make her Tamagotchi have sex.

Is she American? he asked.

No, I said.  As a matter of fact, she thinks she’s Queen Elizabeth, queen of fucking everything.  My wife whips me when I disobey, too. Imagine – she has me whipped bloody!

Maybe she’s the self you have to live with, he said with a sigh.

What do you mean? I asked.

Well, he said, shifting in his seat.  Look at Charlotte Roche, author of Wetlands.  She once wrote a book about Angela Merkel naked in the sauna.  Like some landscape artist on crack in London, it was a surreal collage of naked pictures of girls with tube breasts, American females totally shaved in German saunas, pictures of zoo animals with buggy eyes copulating while making screaming granny sounds, nude klingons, photos of naked ladies and girls from Squamish, sex in wheelchair pictures, photos of spanking all over Europe, ending with helpful tips on how to make your own shank out of a toothbrush and things to alleviate cramp.

Look, I said, I couldn’t care less about Charlotte Roche’s chaotic nightmare, saunas or Angela Merkel’s butt.   I’m worried about my wife!  Just the other day she came out with: I’m so British, I shit the queen!

Perhaps you should bring your wife’s cuddly butt into the office next time, he said.

I would, I said, but it might be easier to drag her to a cave dwelling in Capadoccia or skating on canals in Holland.

Hmmm… let’s deal with your wife when the time comes.  You aren’t thinking about quitting blogging are you? he suddenly asked.

What? What gives you that idea?

You, Canadian skier Ian, may be the author of more than 300 posts ranging from chess and Hitler to Dutch canal winter skating,  but you’re starting to look like a Canadian idiot.   An EasyJet crashing into Big Ben wouldn’t make half the mess this blog is turning into.  You’ve got everything from how to make a bike look crappy and the dangers of ipods in saunas all the way to 12-year-olds buying condoms and a nude olive run video clip.

Besides, you hardly ever post lately, and when you do, it’s some take on something that happened 30 years ago.

Don’t give me any of your putrid paranoia! I said. I never set out to write the definitive answer to everything like some Greenland girls’ nude blog.  Those are just search terms that landed here!  And it’s not just text searches, either.  Most of them cough up photos via google image searches.

Really? he said, perking up.   You mean if you post photos, and stick tags on them, they will show up in searches?

Sure, I said.  Everyone knows that, even Derbyshire nude grannies, Canada’s most toxic waste dump/flute player or a jobless bum.  Besides, the less often I post, the more hits I get.  Go figure!

Well, he said with a sigh.  The hour’s up.  Same time next week?

Why not? I said.  I hope by then you’ll have done something about the reading selection in your waiting room.  Monocle Magazine is shit, and the “little red book” of Mao, 1968 is really out of date, don’t you think?  You should subscribe to magazines that answer life’s imponderables, things like what if the world stops spinning, or is nine too young to have a baby?

No way, he said.  To pass the time in a waiting room, it’s much better to read all about camel penis and skunk families in Montreal while peeking at pictures of mausi naked.  Her oldest got sprayed by a skunk, you know.

Just in case you’ve never read my sidebar, every line in this post is drawn from a search that coughed up this blog – most often as an image search.

Hamburg Spring Derby: more than just horses jumping around

I’m really grateful to our daughter for introducing us into the world of horses.  She’s got a horse to take care of at nearby stables, sharing his care with two other girls and getting riding lessons on him three times a week.  I show up when I can to poke around, take a few photos, and marvel at what I can discover about a creature that always belonged to another world.

Today I went a little step further into equestrian culture, tagging along with wife K and the little red-haired girl to the Spring and Dressage Derby, an 80-year-old Hamburg tradition.  We rode our bikes through the sunshine, bought some standing-room tickets, met the girl’s friends, found a spot on the shady side, and settled in to watch the jumping.

I’d watched riding on TV and always found it a bit boring.  Unless you’re there, you don’t feel the thud of the hooves pounding the grass, see the puffs of dirt kicked up, hear the horses snorting, the riders shouting, the crowd falling silent as as the horse approaches that final hurdle, then bursting into roars of approval as a rare perfect ride comes to an end.

They billed it as the most difficult course in the world, 1200 metres with 17 obstacles including two water jumps, three back-to-backs obstacles, and a frightening, near-vertical wall that led to the disqualification of at least a half-dozen riders as their horses went twice to the brink and balked.

This rider went down the wall and through the course beautifully, despite losing points for knocking over a couple of bars.  If you listen carefully, you can pick up wife K’s commentary.

Note to self: pick up that HD video camera you’ve been wanting ASAP.

I’ve not used the wordpress photo gallery feature yet.  Maybe it’s time.  Here goes:

Notice to UK internet providers: ban this!

It’s a funny thing about censorship. Ignore something you find distasteful, and the rest of the world probably will too. But turn around and ban something on Wikipedia, and you can be sure the world will sit up and take notice.

So all you idiots at the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation who thought you were doing the world a favour by getting UK internet service providers to block access to a photo that’s been around for 32 years, will you please censor this post? You’ll have to ban access to wordpress.com, too, I suppose, but if that’s what it takes to make sure people can’t make up their minds for themselves what they can or cannot see, then so be it.

Of course, I have to provide something you twits think is worth censoring, so here it is: a link to a photo on an album cover that was released in 1976 and which you saw fit to censor from Wikipedia.

Guys, I hate the exploitation of children as much as any sane individual. I hate the idea there are children out there right now as you read this who are having their photo taken – or much worse – by people who don’t give a shit about them, who see them as a commodity to be exploited until they’re no longer of any use, tossed aside until the next crop comes in.

What the hell, there are plenty of street kids out there, the supply is limitless. Judging by the number of weird searches that for some reason turn up this blog, so is the demand.

And I realise, too, that there are laws against child pornography, its consumption and distribution, two things the Internet renders practically effortless. And that there are even newspapers out there – Europe’s top-selling Bild Zeitung for example – who sometimes don’t really look too closely at the age of the naked girls they stick on their front pages.

I also find the album cover distasteful.

But by choosing to tell 95% of UK internet users they can’t have access to even one page on one of the Internet’s most active websites, you’ve now called much more attention to that photograph than it ever would have received had you just ignored it.

As this article at The Register points out, the page in question is now among the most popular on the English-language version of Wikipedia.

But thanks, anyway. Growing up in a culturally and economically deprived Canadian backwater in the 1970s, I somehow missed out on it the first time around. Then again, I wasn’t a fan of sleazy German heavy metal either, so perhaps I just skipped over them on a rare trip to a Vancouver record store.

In fact, by 1976 the only chance I’d ever had to even glimpse anything close to what’s on that album cover was the time my friend Mark and I snuck under the floorboards of the girls’ changing room at the town swimming pool one summer afternoon to ascertain whether our schoolmate Lisa McC. was growing roots or not.

Oh, and I’m sure the Scorpions thank you too. Though the cover’s been changed, that same album is available at amazon.com on CD. They’ll appreciate the extra royalties.

Update:  The Internet Watch Foundation has now – five days later – decided to lift their ban:

The procedure is now complete and has confirmed that the image in question is potentially in breach of the Protection of Children Act 1978. However, the IWF Board has today (9 December 2008) considered these findings and the contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability, the decision has been taken to remove this webpage from our list.

Dr. Seuss asks Roald Dahl: whatever happened to The Leaky Brain?

The other day I searched in vain
For some sign of The Leaky Brain

This lady, see, was so much fun
Among my reads was number one

The first I’d go to in my reader
Some days I’d wish I could go meet her.

But then one day near end of summer
She stopped posting.  What a bummer!

Did she get a fake ID
And go to live up in BC?

She failed to leave a mail address
Along her sidebar.  Such a mess!

I wonder if she’s still alive!
Not long ago she did survive

A dive into the world of porn
We all laughed.  But then one morn,

She up and left.  Came back no more,
She only left an open door,

For comments still come far and wide
Though nowadays no source of pride.

Oh I know.  Just let me guess…
She’s found those candies in her dress

But choked on one while a-composing
Another post that’s based on hosing

Hunky guys who wear no shirt
Just another daytime flirt.

Or did those strippers she made fun of
Catch up with her and give her some of

That rice that she was yelling for?
Tell me please.  It’s such a bore

That I can’t find my Leaky Brain
Since she’s not here my life’s a pain.

Maybe she’s in North Korea
With Kim Jong-Il, caught diarrhea

Or is she now a Twitter victim?
In two-line bursts, her wit and wisdom

Lost among the pointless chatter
Of many things that do not matter.

Then again, she is a teacher.
Could it be that, like a preacher,

She had to keep her nose quite clean
Until the day her blog was seen

By the chairman of the school board
Who looked unfavour’bly toward

A teacher unafraid to show her cooter
Instead of teaching kids computer?

Although some blogs have had a boost
From their authors getting dooced

It seems our Leaky Brain has flown
Leaving me to sit and moan.

The web is full of jokes and stuff
Crap and garbage and plain fluff

‘Tis rare originality
Pokes through all that banality.

So if you find The Leaky Brain
The one whose drips were quite insane

Tell her to send a signal flare
Some sign of life.

Because

I

Care.