Honey, does this peplos make my butt look fat?

Venus KallipygosMuch discussion of sex and antiquities over at GardenRant this week.

Hank comments “Everything is sex. Either overt or covert. All sex. All the time.” (What, you can’t liveblog from Sweden Hank? They have ‘the internets’ over there I think. Or did you run into the Swedish Bikini Team?)

If I could afford it, I would buy classic statuary for my (less than formal) garden. But when I see Venus Kallipygos, I don’t feel a connection with the ancients based on sex. All I can hear is the most feared question a man is ever asked:

Honey, does this peplos make my butt look fat?

You can buy classic statues if you’ve got the bucks. (Page down. I have no clue why the golfer sorts to the top of that gallery. Ironic.) No thanks. I’m stuck with a pink flamingo (the kind with the spinning wings) and a bowling ball on a piece of rebar.

saronged statuaryI was searching for some images of the tacky modern nude garden statue crap that I remember gracing ads in gardening mags. You know the ones — a hybrid of Hustler and Gary Lee Price. Instead, I ran into this USAToday article Garden Center covers nude statues with velvet sarong.

Ummmm… Leave it to a Bible Belt nursery to make classic statues even more erotic in a tacky twins-in-bondage sort of way. (Yes. Sales increased and customers were caught peaking peeking.) Reminds me of John Ashcroft screening Lady Liberty.

In a perfect world, I’d have sculpture in my garden like what Nicole posted about in More Buddha Park. (She’s got another great slideshow of Asian garden sculpture and much more worth exploring over at her blog, A Carribean Garden.)

Lots more to blog about and lots of pent up pix to purge. But I’ve got to go make hay while the sun shines — or at least it’s not raining.

Update: Keeping with the classical them, Bill Kirchen (formerly of Commander Cody) is coming to town. His latest is ‘Hammer of the Honky Tonk Gods’ — a tribute to a Fender or one of those other classic guitars. I’m clueless, but I get his point:

It was born at the junction
Or form and function
It’s the hammer of the honky tonk gods.

Here’s a taste.

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Saint Francis was right

st francis

Interesting article in this morning’s Washingon Post: If It Feels Good to Be Good, It Might Be Only Natural. It’s about some neuroscience studies conduted at the National Institutes of Health and their implications on moral behavior:

The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.

Their 2006 finding that unselfishness can feel good lends scientific support to the admonitions of spiritual leaders such as Saint Francis of Assisi, who said, “For it is in giving that we receive.” …

The research enterprise has been viewed with interest by philosophers and theologians, but already some worry that it raises troubling questions. Reducing morality and immorality to brain chemistry — rather than free will — might diminish the importance of personal responsibility. Even more important, some wonder whether the very idea of morality is somehow degraded if it turns out to be just another evolutionary tool that nature uses to help species survive and propagate.

Read the whole thing.

Between work, gardening and holiday festivities, it’s been hard to find time to blog. Will start sorting through pictures tonight and be back in action soon.

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May Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day Scans: Cool (w/poll)

Too many things blooming to fit them all on one scanner bed, so here are the blooms from the cool side of the color wheel, more or less. (The warm blooms are here.)

I did them with a dark and light background. Take the poll below to let me know which you like best. Click on images for a larger view.

cool may blooms with black background

cool may blooms with black background

{democracy:2}
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