The Deceased Wife’s Sister Act may seem no more than a legislative curiosity today. Yet while it remained on the statute books it was the focus of intense, even obsessive, interest as Parliament continually renewed the well-rehearsed arguments for and against its repeal. By the end of the nineteenth century its notoriety made it an easy butt for satire: “And he shall prick that annual blister,/ Marriage with deceased wife’s sister”, promises the Queen of the Fairies in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe. Like Monty Python’s dead parrot, the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act had become humorous through incessant repetition. Yet although it was increasingly ridiculed the Act’s strange hold over the Victorian imagination cannot be denied.

Sarah Brown, University of Cambridge
The Literary Encyclopedia

The Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907 was a statute passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Previously, it was forbidden for a man to marry the sister of his deceased wife. This prohibition derived from a doctrine of Canon Law whereby those who were connected by marriage were regarded as being related to each other in a way which made marriage between them improper. This doctrine was reflected in the Table of kindred and affinity in the British Book of Common Prayer. Prohibition of marriage between certain degrees of kindred outlawed what is known as incest; prohibition between degrees of relationship by marriage (affinity) as opposed to blood (consanguinity) seems to have reflected an analogous taboo. At least one novel, Felicia Skene's The Inheritance of Evil; Or, the Consequences of Marrying a Deceased Wife's Sister addressed the topic in polemic fictional form.

wikipedia
from a foray into John Collier's life and work
started by ArtMagick

Desperately Longing for Something Original

Rafal Oblinski
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A white scarf was discretely added over an artist's depiction of a mermaid with an exposed breast on a poster advertising the 2006 Miss World contest, after officials in Warsaw's conservative administration deemed it too suggestive, the artist's agent said Wednesday.
CNews
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It was discretely added. What the mayor of Warsaw and his cohort altered there is substantially more important to the city than a poster by a local artist.
Warsaw's civic avatar is a mermaid, often depicted armed with sword and shield - naked, as mermaids are wont to be. She's a symbol of resistance and strength.

The people of Warsaw are proud of their symbol, which appears in many art forms, as the one on the left from the weekly magazine "Tygodnik Ilustrowany" in 1900. But however presented, the mermaid is always shown with sword in hand to indicate the fighting spirit of the citizens. Indeed, the people of Warsaw rebelled several times in the 19th.century against the Russian occupiers of the time.
In recent years, this spirit manifested itself in the continual struggle against the Nazis during World War II, culminating in the disastrous uprising of 1944 as a result of which the city was almost totally destroyed, and tens of thousands died. The maritime theme was also evident in the stylized PW symbol in the shape of an anchor that was scratched, painted, chalked on buildings, vehicles, signposts, throughout the five years of occupation.
The PW stood for Polska Walczaca, "Poland Fights."
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Among the lesser-known legends is the one written by Maria Krüger entitled "The Noble Griffin and the Beautiful Mermaid." According to the legend, the security of the medieval city of Warsaw was guarded by a manly and noble Griffin. When he once took a journey with the river boatmen to the Baltic, he met a beautiful Mermaid. They fell deeply in love and the Mermaid swam with them back to Warsaw. From then on, they both watched over the townspeople.
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The Little Upriser

Oracle at Delphi
Road to Damascus

Tai-Shan Schierenberg
"These instinctive visual images refuse to betray the plasticity of the medium."
'physically intense and aesthetically detached'
Flowers

"Billions of dollars are spent on advertising in this country. Advertising companies hire the very brightest, wittiest young people to write for them. Not one single sentence of it is worth repeating. Why? Because it wasn't meant. It was all written, not because the writer felt something and then said it (if you feel a thing the more simply you say it the better, the more effectively), but because he tried to impress and inveigle people, convince them something is very fine about which he himself does not really care a button."

Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write
Garner's Usage Tip of the Day
Oxford University Press

"...a device you carry that, when switched on, tells a satellite exactly where you are every few seconds."
Momus
Wired
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Click Opera
-

"A world of laptops and jet planes" as against "A world of cars and cell phones"

[is that all you do]

is that all you do
is put things together I
asked the prophet Ezekiel what
he coughed do you mean
well I said...

Jon Woodward
Verse Daily 26.09.06

"...or you'll find yourself giving it advice, which it does not need."

The Scale
Steven Kenny

The masterlode of Stanfoolery of the verbally thrips oratory

He'd always had a love of languages and was a fan of James Joyce, Charles Dickens and great speakers like Isaiah Berlin.

Big big world Jamaica Sweden

big big world Viet Nam

that I too will miss you much China

harassed by racially intolerant neighbors and the clandestine infiltration of state and federal law enforcement authorities

last days of the cross-bred lions too weak to eat

Corn Smut Lasagne

soul owner

Comedian uses dead pig as boat

All you need to know about John Updike's review of Le Carre's new novel “The Mission Song”, in the New Yorker:

"In “Absolute Friends” (2003), the sore spot became le Carré’s fury at the American and British intervention in Iraq."

That's a resound from Updike's cite of Lowell's poem “July in Washington” - the stiff spokes of this wheel / touch the sore spots of the earth - which technically would make Iraq the sore spot, not Le Carre's anger at American and British intervention.
But in fact the book[Absolute Friends] isn't about anything so facile.
It's a frighteningly vivid portrayal of a new Other, faster, smarter, far more powerful, treacherous, amoral - almost another race - sharing our time and planet with us, doing what it wills when it will.
The image is pretty scary, and totally convincing, so it's understandable Updike would feel the need to trivialize it. But it's inaccurate to say the book's driven by "fury".
As always with Le Carre's best books it's compassion that's holding everything together, not anger.