The result was that the scheduled execution of one of the most abominable criminals of the age degenerated into the largest orgy the world had seen since the second century before Christ. Respectable women ripped open their blouses, bared their breasts, cried out hysterically, threw themselves on the ground with skirts hitched high. The men's gazes stumbled madly over this landscape of straddling flesh; with quivering fingers they tugged to pull from their trousers their members frozen stiff by some invisible frost; they fell down anywhere with a groan and copulated in the most impossible positions and combinations: grandfather with virgin, odd-jobber with lawyer's spouse, apprentice with nun, Jesuit with Freemason's wife—all topsy-turvy, just as opportunity presented. The air was heavy with the sweet odor of sweating lust and filled with loud cries, grunts and moans from ten thousand human beasts. It was infernal.

“Every woman's fantasy is having two men at once, but most men don't realize that in the fantasy, one man is cooking and the other is cleaning.”

This may be true for normally socialized women who have had their inner rampaging wenchbeast extinguished by too much contact with slope-headed, testosterone-poisoned fratboys who couldn't find a clitoris if it were two inches across, glowed bright green, and played John Philip Sousa marches when it felt perky. Such women are easily brainwashed into Martha Stewart syndrome, in which normal, healthy urges to fling cute geek guys onto the nearest soft horizontal surface and pounce on them, snarling and biting, are sublimated into an unhealthy fascination with cleanliness and interior decorating.

I, for one, can think of much better things to do with two men at once, and have done most of them. And before you start drooling about double penetration, let me tell you, that's a logistical nightmare that should not be attempted in a gravity well—though get me into free fall with two cute geek guys and some bungee cords and it's another story. No, I am talking about the shiny happy situation of having two mouths and four hands available to turn one's neural tissue into radioactive jello. Three men at once would be really optimal, but the difficulty of finding people for group sex who all get along and whose emotional baggage does not heterodyne makes this a statistically farfetched scenario. Damn it.

Some men use hens as a sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an all-purpose channel for wastes and for the passage of the egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in some cases she will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in order to intensify the convulsions of its sphincter. This is cruelty, clear and simple.

They talked with their bodies. It wasn't all hands, as I'd thought. Any part of the body in contact with any other was communication, sometimes a very simple and basic sort—think of McLuhan's light bulb as the basic medium of information—perhaps saying no more than “I am here.” But talk was talk, and if conversation evolved to the point where you needed to talk to another with your genitals, it was still a part of the conversation. What I wanted to know was what were they saying? I knew, even at that dim moment of realization, that it was much more than I could grasp. Sure, you're saying. You know about talking to your lover with your body as you make love. That's not such a new idea. Of course it isn't, but think how wonderful that talk is even when you're not primarily tactile-oriented. Can you carry the thought from there, or are you doomed to be an earthworm thinking about sunsets?

I am almost sorry to admit this, but more than 30 years of sex have convinced me that the male orgasm in itself is not much more satisfying than a desperately needed pee. It is my strongly held conviction, having been doing this stuff since the mullet haircut was unironically fashionable, that, because of the disappointing nature of their orgasms, it is men who crave the romantic garnish of the slow build-up, the wistful gazing, the expression of undying love around their sexual meat and two veg. Women, however, blessed with a vastly more satisfying orgasmic mechanism, are able to be more pragmatic about enjoying sex for sex's sake.

Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers.

Painting is special, separate, a matter of meditation and contemplation, for me, no physical action or social sport. As much consciousness as possible. Clarity, completeness, quintessence, quiet. No noise, no schmutz, no schmerz, no fauve schwaermerei. Perfection, passiveness, consonance, consummateness. No palpitations, no gesticulation, no grotesquerie. Spirituality, serenity, absoluteness, coherence. No automatism, no accident, no anxiety, no catharsis, no chance. Detachment, disinterestedness, thoughtfulness, transcendence. No humbugging, no button-holing, no exploitation, no mixing things up.

Wherever computer centers have become established, that is to say, in countless places in the United States, as well as in virtually all other industrial regions of the world, bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken glowing eyes, can be seen sitting at computer consoles, their arms tensed, and wanting to fire, their fingers, already poised to strike at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice. When not so transfixed, they often sit at tables strewn with computer printouts over which they pore like possessed students of a cabalistic text. They work until they nearly drop, twenty, thirty hours at a time. Their food, if they arrange it, is brought to them: coffee, cokes, sandwiches. If possible they sleep on cots near the computer. But only for a few hours—then back to the console or the printouts. Their rumpled clothes, their unwashed and unshaven faces, and their uncombed hair all testify that they are oblivious to their bodies and to the world in which they move. They exist, at least when so engaged, only through and for the computers. These are computer bums, compulsive programmers. They are an international phenomenon.

As Kennedy's ambassador to India, Mr Galbraith preferred to write to the president direct: sending letters through the State Department, he told Kennedy, was “like fornicating through a mattress”.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;

For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

Those of you young and technologically inclined may find this difficult to believe, but the average cell phone user cannot use many features you may find standard, such as call-waiting, call-forwarding, and conferencing. Apple has made these features completely accessible to all but those dangling their legs off the far end of the bell shaped curve.