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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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TIL that should I ever venture onto Pornhub, all the videos will be about cleaning the grout in your bathroom, weeding the garden, the precise temperature at which your roast is perfectly cooked, and giving that mucky wall a good scrub.

Or, to quote Field & Stream,

"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley's Lover has just been reissued by the Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper.

"Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savor these sidelights on the management of a Midlands shooting estate, and in this reviewer's opinion this book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping".

Rather like Branch Cabell's Jurgen - why no, prurient minded reviewer, all the passages about Jurgen labouring mightily in the night time with a lady friend on mysterious symbolic tasks are not about sex, how could you think that? (Reader, it was about sex). Suffers from being too clever-clever - if you're going to write fantasy, even satiric fantasy, it has to be less heavy-handed. Reading it today, it's hard slogging because the author cannot help but nudge you in the ribs every so often about "do you get it? do you? huh?"