inkbluesky

How do I tell my new girlfriend that I have my Ex’s name tattooed on my back.

That said, there is only one option for you now: Explain your body art sooner rather than later—before you wind up in the middle of the conversation you dread having during a “hot” moment.

Honesty, blunt in your face honesty is not always the best policy, but in personal relationships the failure to be honest almost comes back to haunt you. Very personal tattoos do seem to bring another to facet to that oft held belief that this is the one, the relationship that will beat the odds and last forever. It used to be dividing up the furniture and deciding on who had custody of the kids on which holidays. Now we can include the costs, financial and otherwise of having Xavier or Michelle lasered away.

memory and regrets

Vlad the Impaler (1431-1476) for those that don’t know served as inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Outside Romanian folklore the reputation of Vlad Tepes is considerably darker. Vlad III Tepes has been characterized by some as exceedingly cruel. Impalement was Tepes’s preferred method of torture and execution. His method of torture was a horse attached to each of the victim’s legs as a sharpened stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was usually oiled, and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp; else the victim might die too rapidly from shock. Normally the stake was inserted into the body through the anus and was often forced through the body until it emerged from the mouth. However, there were many instances where victims were impaled through other bodily orifices or through the abdomen or chest. Infants were sometimes impaled on the stake forced through their mother’s chests. The records indicate that victims were sometimes impaled so that they hung upside down on the stake.

A 15th century figure so we can be sure that he never read Playboy or Cosmo, watched the TeeVee, went to any Saturday afternoon matinées or was under the spell of any intellectuals or feminists. Um, conundrum, who or what can we blame for his behavior.

Nature Overrun

There are now nine million off-road vehicles, meaning all-terrain vehicles and dirt bikes (snowmobiles are a separate category). And their owners, with little resistance from the authorities that ought to be policing them, are transforming some of America’s most sensitive public lands into their personal playgrounds.

As Felicity Barringer and William Yardley wrote in The Times recently, there are responsible owners who stick to designated trails as well as renegades who go “off trail” with grave consequences for animal habitat, fragile desert soils and historical artifacts. The real problem, however, is that the important decisions about where off-road vehicles can go are not being made by the federal Bureau of Land Management, which is supposed to protect these lands and regulate these vehicles, but by the owners, user associations and rural county officials who are under their thumb.

I know some of these people and they could probably say they love nature and still pass a lie detector test. Another instance of having a kind of abusive love affair.