Mummy

Happy Halloween. The boy is going out tonight dressed as a mummy with his friends. The costume wasn’t finished by the time I left for work this morning, so I don’t know what he will look like. I will try and get home early enough to see him in action. I’ll put a picture here when I have one.

* Found one! *

* There it is * I’ll see if I can get a picture of him in it for tomorrow.

I’ve been away from the boy and the dragon for a few days to look after mother. She’s just had an operation on her foot and is all plastered up. I got back last night. I think she was impressed with my cooking skills. I also took the opportunity to set up her new computer. Brother and I went out and bought it for her a couple of weeks ago and I hadn’t had a chance to set it all up until now. It all went well. I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird as an email client. The auto config facility is rubbish, but once it’s set up, it’s really quite good. It’s not over complex like Outlook.

Today’s nudity story involves YouTube. Apparently they can’t decide whether naked manboobs should be age-restricted or not. personally I can’t see how this ever became an issue. It seems to me that you’re only going to consider making nudity age restricted if it’s arousing, and no one gets aroused by manboobs do they? Problem solved! Am I being naive here? I suppose one coul dargue that naked manboobs are too horrific for children. Incidentally, it seems YouTube have decided that manboobs should not be age-restricted.

On the subject of titillating nudity, there are hundreds of stories circulating now about how Vincent Tabak was into some intensely freaky porn. Tabak was found guilty last week of murdering Bristol woman Joanna Yeates. As usual people are concluding that the porn caused the murder. Here is an example from the Daily Mail by Stephen Glover. I love the phrase in the second paragraph, “But there can be little doubt that the images which Tabak found online literally corrupted his imagination, and influenced his behaviour”. I’d like to see that backed up. I’m not aware of any evidence to suggest that porn causes sex crime. In fact I can think of at least one academic study which suggests quite the opposite. Who’s to say what these people would be doing if they didn’t have porn to satisfy them?

If you look through the comments on the Mail article, quite a few people have made some interesting points. One asks if Jack the Ripper was corrupted by internet porn. Another points out that you have to be looking for extreme pornography to find it, so Tabak must have been into it before he became a murderer. I’d suggest that since millions of people look at porn every day without murdering anyone, it’s likely that one does not cause the other, and until you can demonstrate a causal link, you can’t ban it.