Well, if you're going to live near a tourist attraction...

As sometimes I have nothing to say about spanking (or, better phrased, sometimes I have no time to write what I would like to write about spanking), I can at least take a moment to post about something just as good - a woman's bottom.

I found the above picture by chance. I'm reading a gorgeous novel by Nicholas Christopher called The Bestiary, which is about a man's quest for a lost text detailing the animals denied passage on Noah's Ark. It has nothing to do with women's bottoms, but as the universe can't help but lead me to them anyway, so too did this book.

While reading this evening, I was struck by a passage in which the narrator blacks out and wakes in a room filled with lifelike jade statues of animals, along with "statues of the Buddha, his mother Maya, the goddess Kwan-Yin, and the Zen patriarchs, Bodhidharma and Huiko. Mara, the Evil One, was carved in cinnabar, as with his army of winged demons."

I am not well-read in Buddhism, but I do have a favorite room in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that I have called, since I was in elementary school, the Buddha Room. It is a medium sized room, so dimly light it is near dark, in which a collection of Buddhist statues is housed, each in its own display around the perimeter. The first time I visited it, I stood before a statue, golden in color and strangely slender compared to the others, and I remember feeling, "This statue does not like me." I am long time believer that statues are alive, in a sense, and perhaps this is the root of that belief. I told my mother, who agreed that the statue did not feel right, and we wondered together if it fought with the other statues. Interestingly, after a remodel of the Buddha room, this particular statue was moved into the room next door and encased in glass near no other statues. Museum folk know: art is alive.

Anyhow, upon reading the passage, I wondered whether that same unnerving statue of my childhood was Mara, so I looked the name up in Google images to see if I could find an image of the entity or of the actual statue from the MFA. I couldn't find it, but being Google images, I was treated to various ladies in their sexy poses and states of undress. And then there was the image above.

It is a mermaid, despite her bottom and legs, and stands in Kerala, India. The Google image is from a blog called Mermaids are Real. The author conjectures that perhaps the statue stands in tribute to a possible history of female divers in Kerla, female divers (for food, not sport) being the actual subject of the blog. The statue seems shockingly large, but after a while, I can't help but wonder if residents even see it as they pass by. I'm not sure I'd want to become so accustomed to a naked bottom that it no longer impresses me when I pass by. Then again... I guess most of us never tire of these lovely things, do we?