flying a kite

A Letter to The Times from the Reverend Wilfred A Tighe:

“Sir, Aeroplanists should keep their eyes skinned for agents other than human at the earth end of a kite string. I have seen a horse flying a kite.

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It was in Hong Kong twenty years ago. The kite swooped into a paddock where horses grazed: the string snapped, leaving perhaps 30 feet of its length still attached to the frame work: the free end fell across the rump of a horse: a twitch of the tail secured (mysteriously) the string; the animal moved, felt the drag, moved faster, became frightened, began to gallop – and the kite rose and soared beautifully and in partnership with its flier round and round the paddock for almost a minute.

Alexander Graham Bell’s Horse Kite found here

Three others saw this with me; they are all alive today. For the benefit of the unkindly suspicious, this equine feat was observed during the last of three hard sets of tennis and more than two hours after a very light lunch.”

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unlike women, pictures can’t talk back

Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen- Bornemisza De Kaszon, who died in 2002, was one of the richest men in Europe (his fortune had been estimated at more than $5.4 billion) and the owner of one of the world’s great art collections.

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During his lifetime, the baron was considered a prime kidnapping target. All his houses were equipped with closed circuit surveillance, bodyguards and dogs. The author Dominick Dunne was acquainted with one of these guards whom he described as a cross between Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood. He packed two weapons beneath his suit, a pistol in a holster and what appeared to be a sawed off machine gun tucked into the back of his trousers.

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”Heini” Thyssen inherited from his father, Heinrich, a collection of 400 old masters, to which he added another 200 as well as 900 modern works. By 1986, the collection had overwhelmed the Villa Favorita. Thyssen was concerned that the bulk of it should be kept together after his death and had secured an agreement with his children to that effect.

Villa Favorita found here

He then asked the Swiss authorities to fund an enlargement of his museum, but they offered less than $3 million. Piqued, Thyssen embarked on a search for a new site outside Switzerland which would be worthy of his patronage. Both Prince Charles and Mrs Thatcher flew to Switzerland to put in a bid for Britain; President Mitterrand lobbied for France; the Getty Foundation offered millions of dollars for the United States; and the Swiss Government tried to block the paintings’ export.

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But in 1993 the pressure of the bedroom decided matters in favour of the birthplace of the baron’s fifth wife, Carmen ”Tita” Cervera, a former Miss Spain 22 years his junior and widow of Tarzan of the Apes actor Lex Barker. She negotiated successfully with the Spanish government who donated the Villahermosa palace in Madrid, near the Prado, to house it.

Carmen and Lex found here

Thyssen collected beautiful women rather as he collected homes and works of art – though he once observed that ”unlike women, the pictures can’t talk back”, and, as one newspaper put it, old mistresses tended to be more troublesome to him than old masters. He married first, in 1946, Princess Theresa de Lippe, by whom he had a son, Georg Heinrich.

In 1953 Thyssen began an affair with 17 year old Nina Dyer, an English model, to whom he gave a Caribbean island, two sports cars with gold-plated ignition keys, a black panther and a fortune in jewellery. He divorced Theresa and married Nina in 1954.

Nina Dyer found here

But it soon transpired that Nina loved an impoverished French actor. ”It sounds silly,” Thyssen once remarked, ”but I hate to divorce. It’s a most disagreeable operation.” Nevertheless, he swiftly divested himself of Nina who moved on to marry Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan. Indifferent to gender when it came to love partners, Nina also dallied with a selection of ladies, who called her Oliver and vied with her husbands to shower her with jewels.

Nina Dyer’s black pearls found here

Heini’s third wife was another English model, Fiona Campbell-Walter, whom he married in 1956. She gave him two children, Lorne and Francesca. But Thyssen divorced Fiona in 1964 and took as his next wife Denise Shorto, a Brazilian banker’s daughter, who was to remain with him for 17 years and bear him another son, Alexander. Denise was known to have had an affair with the baron’s art dealer, Franco Rappetti, described as a playboy, gambler and drug user, who shared women with powerful men. In 1978, 38 year old Rappetti fell or was thrown to his death from the Meurice in New York.

Denise Shorto found here

Heini’s fourth divorce was his most acrimonious. In 1981 Thyssen met his fifth wife, Carmen ”Tita” Cervera, while holidaying on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia, but marriage had to wait until 1985, when the legal battle with Denise was settled. Relations between ”Baron Heini” and his older children were aggravated by this marriage to Tita, whom Francesca described as ”the wicked stepmother”.

Carmen was an amateur painter with flamboyant tastes in interior design. The couple became an almost permanent feature of the pages of Hola!, the Spanish progenitor of Hello! magazine. Thyssen adopted as his fifth child Carmen’s son Borja, whose natural father she never publicly named……

Carmen and Borja found here

how does one lose four husbands?

Enid Kenmare lost four husbands, all by death

“She was a member of the Australian Lindeman wine family, and she thought nothing of walking through Mayfair with a cheetah or flying to Kenya on safari by private aeroplane in the 1930s.

Lindeman’s vineyard found here

Enid, a celebrated beauty, married four times, the first time in 1913 to a New York shipbroker when she was 21. Two of her husbands were fabulously wealthy and left her fortunes. Three of them had titles. All died before her and two died less than a year after marrying her.

Her second husband was Brigadier General Frederick Cavendish, better known as Caviar Cavendish. Enid is reputed to have slept with every officer in his regiment for a dare.  

caviar found here

In 1933 she married the very rich Lord Furness, known as Duke, short for Marmaduke. He had a private railroad car, two yachts and an airplane. They were each other’s third spouse. Lord Furness was himself no stranger to homicidal rumour and controversy. His first wife, Daisy, had died aboard his yacht while on a pleasure cruise and he had buried her at sea.

Marmaduke found here

Enid’s last marriage, to Valentine, the sixth Earl of Kenmare, took place in 1943. He was an enormously fat man, 225 pounds, who once accidentally sat on a dog and killed it. Previously he had been married to Doris Castlerosse who died of an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol. When Kenmare also died less than a year after his marriage to Enid, his inheritance was to pass to his niece. But Enid, in one of her boldest ventures, claimed to be pregnant, although she was approaching fifty. She was thus able to hold on to the income from the ancestral lands for an additional thirteen months. 

Valentine found here

Her great friend, writer Somerset Maugham, dubbed her Lady Killmore. 

The beauty of the much married and much widowed Enid Kenmare was so renowned that it was said people stood on chairs in the lobby of the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo just to catch a glimpse of her as she passed through.

Lobby of the Hotel de Paris found here

She was also a constant and successful gambler who frequented casinos nightly. “She had fantastic posture, wore cabochon emeralds and dressed in diaphanous gowns” remembered one of her friends. She seemed to inhabit another sphere.”

Enid’s “other sphere” was dope. “She was a legally registered heroin addict” recalled a gentleman in New York whilst another gentleman in London said “Opium was her drug of choice.”

Opium smokers found here

“I don’t think Enid killed anybody” said a friend of her son Rory, “but she may have given them drugs and helped them along.”

what happened to Percy and Jack?

Percival Fawcett was an archaeologist and explorer who disappeared around 1925

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Fawcett’s first expedition to South America was in 1906 when at the age of 39 he travelled to Brazil to map a jungle area at the border of Brazil and Bolivia at the behest of the RGS. Whilst on the expedition in 1907, Fawcett claimed to have seen and shot a 62 feet long giant anaconda, for which he was widely ridiculed by the scientific community. He reported other mysterious animals unknown to zoology, such as a small cat-like dog about the size of a foxhound, which he claimed to have seen twice, or the giant Apazauca spider which was said to have poisoned a number of locals.

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In 1925, with funding from a London-based group of financiers called The Glove, Fawcett returned to Brazil with his elder son Jack for an exploratory expedition. He had studied ancient legends and historical records and was convinced a lost city existed somewhere in the Mato Grosso region, a city Fawcett named “Z.” 

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Fawcett was a man with years of experience traveling with all the necessities, things such as canned foods, powdered milk, guns, flares and of course a sextant and a chronometer for gathering latitude and longitude. His travel companions, both chosen for their health, ability, and loyalty to each other— were his oldest son Jack Fawcett and Jack’s long time friend Raleigh Rimell.

Jack Fawcett and Raleigh Rimmel found here

The last communication from the expedition was on 29 May 1925, when Fawcett telegraphed his wife that they was ready to go into unexplored territory. A final letter, written from Dead Horse Camp, gave their location and was generally optimistic.

Many presumed that local Indians had killed them. Both of the younger men were lame and ill when last seen, and there is no proof they were murdered. It is plausible that they died of natural causes in the Brazilian jungle. During the following decades, various groups mounted rescue expeditions without results. They heard only rumours that could not be verified. In addition to reports that Fawcett had been killed by Indians or wild animals, there was a tale that Fawcett had lost his memory and lived out his life as the chief of a tribe of cannibals.

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On 21 March 2004, the British newspaper The Observer reported that television director Misha Williams, who had studied Fawcett’s private papers, believed that Fawcett had not intended to return to Britain but rather meant to found a commune in the jungle based on theosophical principles and the worship of his son Jack.

Theosophist Madame Blavatsky found here

Before Jack’s birth in Ceylon, Buddhists and soothsayers had predicted that he would be born on the Buddha’s anniversary, May 19, 1903, one month later than the expected date of birth. They also predicted that Jack would have a mole as birthmark on his right foot, unusual toes, and that his eyes would have an “obliquity,” all of which turned out to be exactly what happened as per Fawcett’s article for the Occult Review. Thus, Fawcett believed the prophecy that his eldest son was a reincarnated spirit destined to become some kind of messiah. Fawcett wanted to deliver his son Jack to the “Earth Guardians” of the Great White Brotherhood…… 

unusual gecko toes found here

soul searching

James Kidd was an eccentric copper miner with an interest in the supernatural

James Kidd was no relation to Jimmy the Kid

Kidd mysteriously disappeared in 1949, and was declared legally dead in 1965. Arizona authorities found among his possessions a handwritten will in which the prospector directed that his estate, worth $198,138.53, be used for “research or some scientific proof of a soul of the human body which leaves at death.”

Soul leaving the body found here

Although he boggled at the unusual bequest, Superior Court Probate Judge Robert L. Myers ruled that the will was legitimate, ordered a hearing to find out whether anyone could properly qualify to carry out Kidd’s wish. As the trial got underway, it was apparent that there were plenty of soul-searchers eager to tackle the task. No fewer than 17 organizations and 78 individuals put up the $15 filing fee and were prepared to stake their claims. Among them:

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Nora Higgins, 57, housewife and self-described clairvoyant from Branscomb, Calif., who maintains that the soul has no physical substance but consists of a hazy, tinted form resembling that of the body. At the hearing, she insisted that she had detected Kidd’s soul in the courtroom, “pacing up and down with his hands behind his back, shaking his head at the proceedings.”

Peck in courtroom found here

Another California housewife, Jean Bright, 48, of Encino, who claims to be in constant contact “through my entire nervous system” with a dentist friend who died two years ago. She asks the dentist’s soul yes or no questions about the beyond, Mrs. Bright asserts, and it replies by causing her head either to nod or shake.

amateur dentist found here

William A. Dennis, 64, of Balboa, Calif., a geophysicist who contends that the soul is a center of cosmic vibrations. When the human body is alive, he says, vibrations from the soul give man the power to think and act. When the human body is dead, it is unable to accept or record these vibrations.

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Virat W. Ambudha, 51, a lieutenant colonel in the army of Thailand and author of a book called Increasing Brain Power, who arrived from Bangkok on leave to fight his case, which he based in part on the enigmatic contention that the soul is a “most wonderful, delicate, small thing.”

Dr. Richard Ireland, founder of the University of Life Church in Phoenix, who claims the power to communicate with souls and frequently dons a blindfold to demonstrate his powers of mental telepathy.

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Since the court hearing was announced, Judge Myers, an Episcopalian, has received more than 4,500 letters of advice suggesting proofs for the soul’s existence. Most of them argue that the answer is to be found in the Bible, although a letter from India suggested: “Take a man who is about to die into a small room. All the doors, windows and ventilators should be thoroughly closed so that there is no place for the soul to get out. As soon as the man dies, his soul shall pierce or crack the window glass, thus giving proof of its existence.” Courthouse observers estimate that the hearing will last all summer, but Myers considers himself fortunate in at least one respect: “I don’t have to rule whether or not man has a soul.” That, he explains, is a matter outside his court’s jurisdiction.

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the luckless duck

A letter to the Editor of The Times, May 1878

Sir,

Last year you recorded the curious incident that a wagtail had built her nest on the framework beneath a third class carriage on the London and South-Western Railway, running between Cosham and Havant four times daily. The male bird was regularly observed by the station master to be waiting with manifest interest and anxiety for the return of his family from their periodical tours.

Australian Wagtail (image by David Satterthwaite)

I would like to again report the somewhat remarkable coincidence that this year the same bird has returned and built her nest in precisely the same position under a third class carriage, and with her family of four little ones, takes the same daily return journeys from Cosham to Havant.

Cosham Home Guard found here

The framework being nearly the same in all the carriages, it is difficult to account for the selection of third class. The same interest and anxiety has been evinced by the male bird. During the absence of his family he promenades or rests impatiently on the telegraph wires, but no sooner are the carriages shunted into the siding than he enters the nest, doubtless to exercise the supervision of a good father.

Good father found here

And from The High Peak Advertiser, August 1893

Nearly 300 years ago in 1601, a duck was seen flying towards an ash tree in the village of Sheldon. It entered the tree and then mysteriously disappeared. This tale was passed down from one generation to the next and the tree became known as the duck tree.

Flying Duck Game found here

Recently the tree became decayed at the bottom and it was cut down and sold to Messrs. Wilson and Son, joiners of Ashford. When it was cut open, two boards taken from the centre gave unmistakable evidence of the genuineness of the lost duck story.

Duck carved from a single grain of rice found here

On one side of each of these boards, about an inch in thickness, was the perfect form of a full sized duck, minus the feet and tail. The body measured 8 inches across and the length from beak down was 21 inches. The bird appears to have flown head foremost into a hole which was known to be in the tree, and couldn’t get out again. In the course of time, the parts became united and thus there was an end to the duck.

recipe for Duck with Root Beer Glaze found here

how to speak to aliens

Have you ever had a wild desire to control those pesky clouds that blot out the sunshine or cause rain when it’s inconvenient? T. Chase shows us how….

see more amazing clouds here

“I think I am a pretty good cloud psychic. I have found that to do this I have to speak in a low tone, and command the cloud to disappear or grow. I find it helps if I try to get excited and angry. And I try to speak in a low voice: “Cloud disappear”, with the word “cloud” sounding like “ooom”. And I try to turn my eyes upward.

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This ability can also come in really handy if you are on a sailboat and there is no wind as happened to me recently. I was on a cruise and they said “sorry there is no wind”. 5 minutes later after a little chanting by me the wind was blowing strongly and the boat was gliding along fast.

Futuristic sailboat found here

Many have the ability. It is a gene. A matter of focusing the power. A relatively small percentage have the gene, under 5%, and most of them never try to use it. It enables energy flow to the clouds, faster than light in the 5th dimension. The energy goes through another dimension of space-time, refer to String Theory on this. It’s an exchange of nuclear particles in another dimension.

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On August 31, 2009 I tried to send rain to Los Angeles and California which had been suffering from a severe prolonged drought from lack of rain. It took a while, but in January 2010 both LA and California saw major rainstorms occur.

T. Chase also recommends we read the books of Ted Owens. Here’s an extract from his “How To Contact Space People”

“In 1965, after I discovered it was actually UFOs that I was dealing with, they gave me a system to use to call upon them, just as if I’d pick up a phone and talk. They showed me, in my mind’s eye, a small chamber. Inside the chamber were two small creatures, resembling grasshoppers, and insect like, but standing on two legs. These creatures looked down into a large, round oval machine. In it they could see me. If I talked, they heard the sound, but the machine quickly turned the sound into symbols, then the symbols into very high-frequency sound which they could understand.

So, you say, dear readers, “how do I go about communicating with flying saucers?” Just by reading how I have done it, you can imitate the method.

The Si’s have told me that they put me up to this: giving out my secrets, which up to this time have been disclosed to no other human. For they wish to try to communicate with other humans besides myself. They have even constructed, in their own way, a sort of ESP channel or frequency by which this can be done by persons using my “chamber” method, with Tweeter and Twitter (the two strange insect-like creatures inside) in the chamber looking into the oval machine.

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They have told me I am the first human since the days of Moses to be able to withstand the reception of their mental sending power. They have found other humans who were peculiarly adapted toward Si reception, through the years, but when they beamed or projected or whatever it is they do, the humans either cracked up or had strokes or cerebral hemorrhages that destroyed them.

If a UFO ever does come to you, force yourself to sit still. Put your hands out, palms outward, on the ground by your side, or in your lap. As it comes close, or as the intelligences get close, you may want to scream, and a sort of force or pressure may make you want to run run run. But if you can stick it out, you’ll meet the Si’s. I went through that ordeal one time, and will never forget it as long as I live. My hair stood up on my head; I could hardly get my breath; It was ghastly!

But wouldn’t it be worth it – to meet a Si ?

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was there hanky panky at Hanko?

In Norway in 1934, Mrs Ingeborg Koeber was accused of drowning her father Judge Dahl at Hanko Beach. Several months prior to this impromptu dip, Ingeborg had predicted the manner of her father’s death while supposedly in a sleeping trance.

Ingeborg

She reportedly heard him call for help and swam out to rescue him, bringing him to shore where he died in her arms. At the inquest, his deputy, Christian Apenes, told the coroner that in December 1933, he attended a Spiritualist séance with Judge Dahl. The medium was Ingeborg Koeber, who communicated a message allegedly from her dead brother, Regnar Dahl whilst in a sleeping trance. The message was that their father would die within a year, but that Apenes must not tell anyone this, including Ingeborg, who would not remember the message when she came out of the trance. The spirit also stated that the same message would be communicated to another medium, a Mrs. Stolt-Nielsen, who was to place it in a sealed envelope.

Judge Dahl

After Judge Dahl’s death, Apenes asked Stolt-Nielsen if she had received the message, and she produced the sealed envelope. Opened in the presence of witnesses, it contained the message, “In August 1934 Ludwig Dahl shall lose his life in an accident.” When these prophecies were revealed by the press, there was considerable scandal and controversy. Some people thought the mayor might have committed suicide under sub-conscious suggestion, others that his daughter had drowned him before bringing him back to shore. It was even suggested that Christian Apenes had hypnotized her and suggested that she murder her father.

The investigation lasted three years, during which it was revealed that the judge’s life insurance policy had expired on the day of his death. The court ultimately found that Judge Dahl’s death was accidental, but the his wife, who had suffered great strain, committed suicide before her daughter’s name was cleared.

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According to Arthur C Clarke’s World of Strange Powers, the Judge had been a passionate believer in his daughter’s powers and wrote five books on the subject. Much of the family’s money had been spent on supporting and promoting Ingeborg’s strange powers and her mother had gone so far as to purloin funds from her work as a community treasurer. As she later wrote in her suicide note “My husband felt it was his life’s work to bring Ingeborg’s message to mankind. In doing so he took a great and unselfish task on his shoulders. But he was quite innocent of the demands of daily living and did not realise that our family economy was threatened.”

It was predicted that Ingeborg father’s death, and the sum of his insurance was identical with the sum which his wife had misappropriated from her office.

In researching this sad story I’ve had to rely a lot upon translations. In the interests of giving my readers a lighter postscript, here’s an example of what I found:

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“Much muffins:

In Købersaken that ended in the courts were dug up a lot of muffins. The autopsy of Louis Dahl showed a flaw in the neck, initially downplayed, it was fully focused on. Ingeborg had killed his father, conscious? But why should she? She adored the father even though he was also a dominant hustyrann.

Købersaken would also eventually be about money. Recorder’s wife who worked in his office had in fact helped themselves of the box. The amount proved to be the same as the life policy they got paid. Lay the motives here?

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alligators from heaven

The story that alligators haunt the sewer system of New York City is thought to be an apocryphal one, possibly started by Thomas Pynchon’s mention of it in his novel V. But tales of out-of-place crocodilians have persisted for years.

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“On December 26, 1877, no less than the New York Times reported the following: “Dr. J.L. Smith of Silverton Township, South Carolina, while opening up a new turpentine farm, noticed something fall to the ground and commence to crawl toward the tent where he was sitting. On examining the object he found it to be an alligator. In a few moments a second one made its appearance. The doctor looked around to see if he could discover any more, and found six others within a space of two hundred yards. The animals were all quite lively, and about twelve inches in length. The place whereon they fell is situated on high sandy ground about six miles north of the Savannah River.”

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A similar story emerged in 1957, courtesy of writer John Toland, who told the story of the U.S. Navy airship Macon. In 1934 the Macon had participated in maneuvers in the Caribbean and was sailing westward on its return trip. As it was entering the sky over California on the afternoon of May 17, the commander, Robert Davis, heard a loud splashing over his head from one of the ballast bags.

Concerned, he climbed into the rigging as the splashing grew louder and louder. He opened the ballast bag and looked in. Swimming around excitedly was a two-foot alligator. No one had any idea where it came from. They had been in the air for several days and it seemed highly improbable that this big, noisy creature could have been with them all that time without being heard. Moreover, Davis had been up and around the ship ever since their departure, and he had seen nothing so out of the ordinary as an alligator.

The only possible explanation – though it made no sense at all – was that the reptile had fallen on the ballast bag from above.

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Most people have heard of fish and frogs falling from the sky. The explanation usually given is that a tornado or strong whirlwind picked up the animals from a shallow body of water and carried them some distance before dropping them back on land.

Mouse rides frog during Indian typhoon

In 1890, Popular Science News reported that blood rained down on Messignadi, Calabria in Italy – bird’s blood. It was speculated that the birds were somehow torn part by violent winds, although there were no such winds at the time. And no other parts of the bird came down – just blood.

J. Hudson’s farm in Los Nietos Township, California endured a rain of flesh and blood for three minutes in 1869. The grisly fall covered several acres.

“Blood Rain” India

The American Journal of Science confirmed a shower of blood, fat and muscle tissue that fell on a tobacco farm near Lebanon, Tennessee in August, 1841. Field workers, who actually experienced this weird shower, said they heard a rattling noise and saw “drops of blood fall from a red cloud which was flying over them.”

The most amazing of these stories was actually proven factual… but not supernatural. Sometime around 1990, a Japanese fishing boat was sunk in off the eastern coast of Siberia by a falling cow. When the crew of the wrecked ship were fished from the water, they told authorities that they had seen several cows falling from the sky, and that one of them crashed straight through the deck and hull. At first the fishermen were arrested for trying to perpetrate an insurance fraud, but were released when their story was verified. It seems that a Russian transport plane carrying stolen cattle was flying overhead. When the movement of the herd within the plane threw it off balance, the plane’s crew, to avoid crashing, opened the loading bay at the tail of the aircraft and drove them out to fall into the water below.

image from Canstructions

healthy strokes

Since this is (or was) a hospital blog you’re probably expecting a post on TMS to be about transcranial magnetic stimulation. This is not the case today as it’s my sad duty as a medical professional to instead warn you about the dangers of traumatic mastubatory syndrome.

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TMS is the habit some males have of masturbating in a face-down (prone) position. Some TMS practitioners rub their penises against the mattress, pillow, or other bedding, or the floor, others lie on their stomachs and thrust into their hands.*

These sensations are not easily replicated in conventional masturbation or in sexual intercourse. It’s a common experience among males who are used to masturbating face down to engage in sexual intercourse for over half an hour, fail to have an orgasm, and then try to reach orgasm in an atypical way, such as thrusting the penis against his partner’s legs, palm, or bed. Needless to say, the female partners of these men find their behavior unusual and disturbing.**

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Conventional masturbation is a basic sexual skill for males. By not being able to masturbate conventionally, these males are lacking a basic sexual skill. Dr. Lawrence I. Sank reiterates that masturbation is supposed to be performed with the hand while lying supine. The very nature of TMS means that it can only be done in bed. Normal males can masturbate almost anywhere.

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Most men with TMS, if they can have intercourse at all, are usually limited to the “missionary” position. They also report an inability to achieve orgasm from fellatio.*** Since they are unable to manually stimulate themselves to orgasm, naturally they are unable to have manual intercourse performed on them by a partner. The majority of males who masturbate conventionally have had intercourse successfully in at least five positions.

Let’s take a step back from masturbation and talk about ejaculation. It’s necessary for males past puberty to ejaculate. The male sexual organs produce a number of fluids that have to be eliminated periodically. Doctors specializing in sexuality generally agree that a male must ejaculate at least once every two weeks to avoid damage to his sexual functioning.

A rule of thumb in males under 30 is

M = 8 – (2 * I)

where M is the weekly masturbation frequency and I is the weekly frequency of sexual intercourse. So, a male under 30 who has intercourse twice a week probably masturbates four times a week while one without a partner probably masturbates eight times a week.

A sign that you’re masturbating in a healthy fashion is that you recognize that orgasm is imminent but consciously decide to put it off for a while so you can enjoy masturbating longer. That’s a skill that will be most useful when having sex with women.

Friends who’ve met me in real life have heard the sorry tale of nursemyra and Mattress Man. Yes, dear reader, long long ago I met a somewhat amusing, seemingly intelligent and not too unattractive male who inveigled his way into my bed. There was some kissing, a touch of foreplay, an unsuccessful attempt at fellatio….. followed by some frantic thrusting and the deflowering of my Sealy Posturepedic.

Mattress Man lay back upon my ravished sheets in a state of post coital bliss. Having not then attained the wealth of medical knowledge I now possess, I could only look on in wide eyed horror and dream that one day in the future I’d be able to laugh and share this poignant moment with a few hundred strangers around the globe……

from Married To The Sea (click to enlarge)

* Tick

** Double tick

*** Triple tick