A man in Germany was caught by the police making a novel attempt to cool off during Europe's record-breaking heat wave: riding his moped naked. Like most of Western Europe, Germany is facing scorching temperatures as hot air comes in from the Sahara, leaving officials looking for ways to keep populations cool and avoid deaths. But a man in the northeastern German state of Brandenburg had his own solution, taking off all his clothes as he rode his moped through the streets. Read more: The heat wave in Europe is so intense that the weather map of France looks like a screaming heat skull of death. The Brandenburg police shared images of the man on Twitter on Wednesday, with one suggesting they pulled the man over. The police said that when he was stopped, the man replied: "It's warm, eh? Other German police departments weighed in with jokes, with Frankfurt's police tweeting : "Citizens in Frankfurt pay a lot of attention to their health and skin, and normally are dressed when they're underway. Parts of Germany have seen record-high temperatures this week, with one area near the Polish border recording a temperature of

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Every time I use the bathroom at one of my grandchildren's school events, I flash back to my own childhood. Coming face-to-face with the communal trough urinal and door-less toilet stalls triggers my feelings of juvenile embarrassment. In case a man has never used one of these urinals, eHow offers up advice on "How to Use a Trough Urinal. Communal bathing and spas have been around for thousands of years, but the concept of modesty is a relatively recent one for Western culture. Many indigenous people would play sports without any covering, and athletes in ancient Greece also competed naked. Taboos against nakedness grew in Europe in the 18th century. Women began to wear more layers of clothing and protected their modesty and avoided the gaze of men at the beach by entering the water through elaborate bathing machines. But certain aspects of the tradition of naked competition still existed when I was a young man growing up in Chicago in the early 's. One of my worst experiences was being forced to swim in the nude in high school. This was a common practice in Chicago and other large city schools until the 's.
Remember Me. Long understudied in early modern Northern art and visual culture, the male nude is attracting new kinds of scholarly attention. Theories of embodiment and performance, and the rise of masculinity studies, have all contributed to broadening the previous focus on issues particular to female nude in Northern art. Recent scholarship has focused on how the Northern male nude constructs notions of virtue, classical stability, pastoral beauty, and pathos across a range of media and functions including prints and drawings, drawing books, portraiture, history painting, and the emerging genre of male bathers. Such new inquiry demonstrates a diversity of animating questions and interpretive methods for considering how the male nude produced significance for various audiences in the Netherlands. This panel aims to reassess the male nude in relation to artistic production and reception; early modern humanist, natural, and material knowledge; and classed systems of status and power, fashion and body ideals.
Looking at naked men is what the European art tradition is all about. The male body was the most fascinating fact in the universe for ancient Greek sculptors like Polykleitos , who strove to depict perfectly proportioned young athletes. Male beauty was a bit of heaven on earth, to be apprehended by a truly philosophical love, as Plato explained and as Greek statues assert. Two exhibitions this autumn show how that ancient Greek ideal has goaded, and permitted, later artists to dote on the male form. The Male Nude at London's Wallace Collection explores how French artists in the 18th-century studied backs, biceps and buttocks.