First magpie swoop of the season. The season usually starts about August 1st,or even end of July, so the cool wet weather has delayed breeding. Such fun!

The sexual encounters between a husband and wife find their deeper meaning not in the personal pleasure of the moment but in the way those encounters are intended to strengthen and reinforce the unique relationship that exists between the two partners, one shaped by a shared past and present and open to a shared future. Carl Trueman

We had some rain in the region last Thursday, and Eulah Creek is looking fabulous. It is usually dry, but when the water comes down the mountain, it flows fast.

After a few days off because of the weather, it was good to get out on the bike again. We had 42 mm of rain in 24 hours, equivalent to our average rainfall for the entire month. There is a lot of water on the roads, so I didn’t go as far as I intended.

The photo is a wattle tree, a generic term for a range of Australian acacia trees and bushes that all look very unremarkable until spring when they become covered in bright yellow flowers.

If freedom and happiness are epitomized in sexual satisfaction, then pornography becomes a medium, perhaps the obvious and certainly the easiest and least personally costly medium, of liberation and fulfillment. Carl Trueman

Hefner’s genius lay in the way he was able to remove the social stigma typically attached to pornography and the selling of sex as a commercial interest.  Carl Trueman

The purpose of surrealism was profoundly and aggressively political: to overthrow Christianity (and its corollaries—families and moral codes governing sexual behavior). And it was to do this via an emphasis in its various works of art on human desires and their attainment through the self-actualization of the individual. Carl Trueman

Sex as revolution or sex as commodity: both are predicated on the idea of sex as the answer to human ills, and both assume the kind of psychologized, sexualized self that has emerged over the last three hundred years. Carl Trueman

Good to be out on the bike after a few days off. It looks like there might be rain about, so getting out early may have been smart.

Society now intuitively associates sexual freedom with political freedom because the notion that, in a very deep sense, we are defined by our sexual desires is something that has penetrated all levels of our culture.  Carl Trueman