By Peter Wilhelm
Looking around the Chamber of Doom – aka Parliament – I noted that in terms of hair colour, there were at least fifty shades of grey. Furthermore – but enough. I am not a reporter.
Albert Einstein, who conceived of general relativity, hated wearing socks. There are various explanations – such as that crouched up all day scribbling equations he had a rush of blood to his feet which then swelled up and hurt him. Over time, as he became famous and untouchable, he dispensed with socks.
Indeed, a study of pictures of the great physicist show that footwear in general was abhorrent to him. The man who informed us that e = mc² is frequently observed shod in blue or pink fluffy-bunny slippers.
He has been described as a “slob” but in reality dressed as he saw fit, famously stuck out his huge tongue at a photographer, and – a carefully suppressed factoid revealed by an envious colleague – loved women, and the commoner, dirtier, and smellier they were the more he loved them.
No wonder many feminists are outraged by Einstein. Indeed, some of them recently – but unavailingly – sought to validate the claim that his actual work was done by his first wife, certainly one of those sad figures who gets shunted aside as men grapple obsessively with numbers to the detriment of their unfortunate partners, who never get a mention in Nobel acceptance speeches.
In Einstein’s defence, there’s the fact that when Madame Curie was being vilified in France because she had taken up with a married man (Monsieur Curie had long departed, she was lonely, her lover’s wife was mad) Albert wrote to and supported her, telling her to ignore so-called public opinion.
Now that women have taken to wearing raggedy-edged shorts that appear to climb upwards into their northerly regions, I wonder whether Einstein’s true influence lay not in physics (where quantum mechanics, though not at all understood, rules thought experiments) but in fashion. However, for formal occasions he did wear shoes over his puffy feet and might balk at the invasion of the barefooted folk.
I first became aware of this trend many years ago when my then-publication invited a locally-famed green guru to explain why climate change was real. He was a common, dirty, smelly hippie (resembling, in the 1970s, Charlie Manson, if you remember him) who padded from his hive across town to our slithery, silky floor in Diagonal Street and proceeded to talk batshit.
An Ice Age was upon us, he said. It would arrive by the 1980s. As he gabbled I wondered whether he knew that the pavements he had been treading contained an infinity of viruses and bacteria, actual batshit, and assorted filth shed by innumerable revolutionaries and their ilk. His extra-long, greasy hair slid over his head as he spoke.
Now of course, he would not arouse any distaste or rebuke from the crowds of persons in burqas, floral tents, T-shirts exposing distended stomachs, P ‘n P shoppers with puppies in their bras, bikini atolls, and great horny toenails scraping the tarmac. We dress as we wish.
Another surprise is how swiftly mainline sexual behaviour has been relegated. When I went to the movies the other day to see some science fiction CGI, there were immense lines of (mainly women) patrons round the corners in every direction. They were eager to see Fifty Shades of Grey.
At first I figured that feminists would revolt at the popularity (toned down) of actual scenes of bondage and sado-masochism. Wrong again! Mainly male critics expressed disgust; yet many, many female ones boldly said they didn’t mind since mommy porn was perfectly allowable for women with fantasies that exceeded what their poor mates had ever dreamt of.
Indeed, many of this tribe complained that Fifty Shades is an offence to the true BDSM “community”. I didn’t know there was one. I have never trolled the Dark Internet. Further: we are not alone in our confusion in owning and cultivating a “cultural tradition” of drunken oafs beating up and raping children.
Touch a female colleague’s shoulder in error and the sinister accusation of “sexual harassment” hovers in the air like a dragonfly. Never suck her toes.
This customary practice was made popular by the Duchess of York and her “financial advisor” (doubtless a patron of BizNews), though there were no edible handcuffs or spanking ping-pong paddles in sight. Had there been, Fergie might have been applauded as a woman reclaiming the rights to her own body.
Do SA women really want to be tied up and filmed being intimate with giraffes? Is this preferable to the usual vanilla regime at home? Perhaps all it means is that we are all influenced by those in the Chamber of Horrors for whom we didn’t vote. Power has its own revolting influence.
