I have several loyal readers whose comments regularly make me laugh: this, for example. And I almost never refuse a comment unless it’s trying to sell a cure for AIDS or the commentator is too much of a pussy to give an e-mail address. But this one, from a fount of indignation calling Himself “Derrail”, [...]
Since we’ve recently been on the topic of the female brain, I’d like to mark the passing of a very great one. Daphne Park, aka Baroness Park of Monmouth, once a controler of the uber spy agency MI6, governor of the BBC and principal of an Oxford college, died yesterday. With her died an era [...]
The Guardian on Saturday ran a review of The Wisdom of Whores, which is newly out in paperback in the UK. In it, Nicholas Lezard suggests I sound like a fun person to go for a drink with. By conincidence, I spent the weekend with someone who was at university with Nick. He was, aparently, [...]
It’s always dangerous to mix your coms with your orgs. In China, a link from the UNAIDS site takes you to a classic sex cybersquat: it offers links to dildos, fetish and swinger sites. All because the url for the Beijing Association of STD & AIDS Prevention and Control, bjaidsass.com, has “ass” in it. (With [...]
It is with pride that I post my first link to Indonesia’s new-born English language newspaper, The Jakarta Globe. Not just because its editor appears in The Wisdom of Whores, translated the book into Indonesian and is one of my dearest friends, but also because they are publishing fun stuff. Including this reflection on the [...]
So women in Uganda are smearing chloroform on their chests, making men in bars swoon. When they wake up, they find themselves naked and penniless. So reports AFP, in a story predictably but nonetheless delightfully headlined “Ugandan men warned of ‘booby trap’”. My question is, how close does a random punter in a bar have [...]
It’s official: the Bee Gees can keep you alive. According to David Matlock of the University of Illinois, the song “Staying Alive”, of Saturday Night Fever fame, provides the perfect rhythm for the chest-thumping that’s needed to bring someone out of a heart attack. As the New York Times reports, Queen’s just as good. “Another [...]
Stolen from Sean Casey, with thanks.
From Heather, at A Minha Vida, I learned of an interesting compilation of HIV-related slang (originally from PlusNews). As they observe, the euphemisms we choose to say the unsayable often tell us quite a bit about our own cultures. In Angola, for example, getting HIV is like “pisar na min” –stepping on a landmine. But [...]
A couple of recent comments on this blog have made me question the nature of the beast. Jerome Martin of Act Up Paris takes me to task for not speaking to Act Up before commenting on a statement from colleagues at the Treatment Action Group that was critical of Act Up’s work. Jerome is quite [...]
Other people get spam e-mails offering them all night erections and a life free of depression. I get offered syphilis diagnostic kits and statistical analysis software. And now, viral art. The sculpture pictured above landed in my in-box from Bioetch — no, that’s not a typo. And I’m passing on to you the chance to [...]
I’ve had lots of fun in recent weeks pontificating in talks and interviews about sex, drugs and the AIDS biz, usually to people who know a lot more about all of the above than I do. (My favourites of recent weeks: sex worker radio XXBN and Sex Goddess radio Susie Bright, not pictured below). But [...]
Can I get away with posting this e-mail from restaurant reviewer Giles Coren to the Times on the grounds that it has a blow job in it? Or that its author is a wanker (of which more tomorrow)? Read. Enjoy. Remember never to e-mail your colleagues when you’ve had a few. Even if they have [...]
“What motivated you to write this book?” interviewers like to ask. And I give all the worthy, change-the-world type answers, though what I really wanted to do was to write a cracking good book about sex and drugs that would make people laugh and perhaps save some of their tax money. Of course if I [...]
Last week I posted the patented Wisdom of Whores Automatic Proposal Generator (TM) to help you all shake millions out of the Global Fund. But today I found a tool thats is genuinely useful from the ever-helpful Kaiser Family Foundation They’ve put together a fanatstic, really simple tool that allows you to generate charts of [...]
From June 8th to July 4th I’ll be in the US and Canada. I’ll be visiting New York, Toronto, Washington DC, San Francisco, LA, Seattle and Vancouver. My schedule is here. Or you can see my Google calendar. Please come along to agree, disagree, make me think, change my mind, or entrench me in my [...]
There’s another clutch of reviews of The Wisdom of Whores posted to the “What They’re Saying” page. They include Rachel Holmes in The Times (she thinks I’m a nerd, in the best possible way), Michael Fitzpatrick in The Guardian (who seems vaguely disapproving), Stephanie Merritt in the Observer (who is seduced by the mysteries of [...]
It’s been a busy day on the airwaves. Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I managed to hit BBC World TV’s HardTalk interview and be on BBC Radio 4′s Start the Week, both in one day. On HardTalk, Stephen Sackur spent a lot of time quizzing me about my mafia connections. Comments have ranged [...]
Britain’s Office of Government Commerce says its mission is to “drive up standards and procurement”. To help in this dynamic task, they’ve got a new logo. As I understand it, procurement is illegal in the UK, at least when it comes to procuring partners for pleasure. But if you turn the new logo on its [...]
Last night, I happened to be trawling around some of London’s gay entertainment establishments. I was struck by how much things have changed since John Ashbery was moved to write his classic elegy to AIDS, How to Continue. Here it is, lest we forget. How to Continue” by John Ashbery Oh there once was a [...]
