Isn't it time

that American movies came with English subtitles
not just for the deaf but also for the inhabitants
of other English-speaking countries ?
I watched recently All the President's Men 
(made way back in 1976) and could understand
only about half of the mumbled dialogue.

'Legal' or permitted 'Highs'

become illegal
and criminals prosper -
'enforcement agencies',
prison employees,
social workers...
and police likewise.

As Nation-states come into being

and develop over the years,
looting, mayhem and extortion are replaced
by taxation and 'the rule of law',
and The Body Politic and lower classes
(all the village lads and lasses)
labour for an entity with a vast central stomach
and only vestigial ears.

After visiting Mycenæ

Adolf Hitler wanted his public monuments
to be designed eventually to decay
to beautiful ruins.
Languages also crumble, collapse and pass away.

Although readers of my blog might not imagine it,

I'm happier and calmer (almost serene!)
now - aged seventy-four
than I have ever been before.
Might this be the result of a reduction
in my testosterone-production
following the fracture of my femur
under a full moon
last year in June ?

A correlation ?

As public (and detected) crime in the UK
diminishes, domestic violence, child-abuse
and on-line 'hard-core' pornography increase
- alongwith the tendency to become obese.

It is to me a very murky mystery

that the English and the Americans
- unlike the French, the Germans,
the Japanese, the Spanish, the Portuguese...
and even the Italians, Canadians and Swedes -
feel singularly untainted by their history.

The men who blighted my mother's life,

either by a single impregnation
or continual and stupid masculine advice,
also blighted mine.  They told her
that teaching me early on (and badly) to swim
in the rough, cold North Atlantic
would harden me up,
that attending a school with a militarist training corps
(I joined the Scouts!), obsessed by rugby
and other mindlessly-competitive games
would knock the corners off.  I was not,
however, so much a sissy, Mary-Jane or
(fatherless and brotherless) a 'spoiled' Mummy's Boy, 
a craven softy, wimp (more deviant than consciousy defiant)
and 'butter-fingered' handless critter
as a Non-participant, a book-stealing outsider
whose outlook on life was (compared with
these pathetic, malignant and - yes - bitter
males) already much more reflective
(if at the age of eight somewhat inchoate)
more independent - and much wider.

Helping the world

by reducing energy-consumption
and emissions of  CO₂
merely and at best will allow more humans
to cram themselves and ridiculous crops
like cattle-feed and cotton onto the tired planet.
Go figure! (as they say in the USA)

My Indian friend

wondered if, outside Islam,
there is now any room for modesty
in our capitalistically-sexualised world.
I replied that it is very difficult to separate modesty
from (a) mindless conformism, and (b) 'cynical' hypocrisy.

Toast !

When I was growing up in Belfast in the 1940s and 1950s, Protestants and Catholics mostly lived in defined areas, some of which amounted to ghettoes for 'slum-scum'.  The relatively few Catholics who were well-off and had status (and hadn't moved to England) lived amongst Protestants in the wealthy parts of the city.  But schools were strictly segregated, because the Catholic church did not want its already-abused flock to have 'a godless education', or to go to 'a godless university'.

I did not make a Catholic friend until 1964 (when I was 22 and already, and for evermore, on the dole). Francis lived in one of the middle-class mixed areas, and I met him through the Folk-music Revival of the 1960s, which was very big in Ireland.  I had what amounted to a non-sexual 'crush' on him. (I did not think of myself as homosexual, bisexual or even sapiœsexual at this time, though I later, regrettably for the most part, was to have sexual crushes on men with beards.) Unfortunately, the beardless Francis and alcohol did not have a good relationship - which situation caused me some distress, embarrassment - and money.

My biggest cultural surprise when I visited him, however, was not the drink-problem, nor pictures of the Pope and the Virgin Mary in his house (only the cold front sitting-room of which I ever saw), but the fact that the family made one-sided toast !  I had by this time lived and loved in Denmark, and been surprised by pickled herrings with sour cream, beer-and-black-bread soup (øllebrød), boiled cod with horse-radish, stikkelsbærgrød med fløde and liver-paste smørrebrød (open sandwiches) as well as the various kinds of buns, breads and pastries.
But one-sided toast was beyond the pale.
Was this why Catholics lived in ghettoes ?  A culinary- rather than a colour-bar

I was to find out that this was not the case ten years later when, in prison, one of my jobs was to make toast to order (or, as Americans would say 'to go' ) for high-status, non-violent prisoners who were very particular about its colour, thickness and texture.  I would not say, however, that I am a toast-expert.  More a jam-expert (crab-apple, quince, blackberry, damson, wild pear...)...

Winter's a good time

to visit my grave with its view
above Saint-Antonin and its river
(where I don't live any more, but 8 miles away).
I admired the Toulouse violets on it today,
the snowdrops, the dark Christmas Rose -
and thought (yet again) :
such a beautiful place to decompose.

In what we think of as 'liberal' countries

how sad it is
that defiance
is seen and punished
as deviance.

https://aeon.co/essays/we-should-listen-to-the-defiant-not-diagnose-and-medicate-them

The deaf

are less obvious
than the blind,
and the dumb
less obvious
than the deaf.
(Maybe not a rule of thumb.)

The Gendering of Power ?

The cosmetic industry world-wide
is more valuable than even
that of armaments and weapons.

Bowdlerised Bible ?

Surely it wasn't the inedible head
of John the Baptist which Salome
claimed at Herod's feast,
but the delicacy of his balls ?

Masquerade.

A law from 1268
forbids the apparently common
(and very Romantic, post-Courts-of-Love) practice
on certain festive occasions
of putting on a mask (i.e. masking)
and throwing blown eggs filled with rose-water at
desirable Ladies - or maybe even women.

The only reason he got up out of bed.

The thought of breakfast
made his willy go hard.
Was it the croissants ?
Was it the cheese ?
Was it the waiter down on his knees ?
Or was it the myrrh and spikenard ?

We intellectuals know

(or maybe not)
that most people tell lies
most of the time.
But that the constant little ones
often mask the few enormous ones
we perhaps do not deign to realise.

Bear Kills Son and Herself On a Chinese Bear Farm.

This Chinese bear, captured while a cub, will have spent almost its entire life in an iron straitjacket
while a dirty metal tube inserted by "superior" animals directly into its liver
drips "magic" bear-bile, like rubber to be sold as a fortifier to the rich...

"Amazing stories about the cognitive skills and emotional lives of other animals abound. Recently Chinese media has reported that a captive bear on a Chinese bear farm killed her son and then herself after she heard him cry out in pain when a catheter was jammed into his abdomen so that bile could be extracted from his gallbladder for human medicinal purposes. Around 14,000 bears are kept in horrific conditions and routinely tortured on Chinese bear farms. In this case 'a mother bear reportedly broke free after hearing her cub's cry, causing [bear] 'farmers' to run away in fear. She then ran to the cub's side and immediately smothered it, then ran headlong into a wall and killed herself instantly.'

"Captive bears spend upwards of 30 years in tiny cages where they can barely move their head and neck to feed and drink water. As they get larger the bears are crushed in their cage so that more bile can be squeezed out. While the details of this case are still being investigated, most, if not all, of these bears suffer extreme psychological and physical damage, including severe depression, gnawing off paws, rubbing the skin off their face and nose on the bars of their cage, chewing on the bars and losing teeth, and banging their head into the sides of their cage. Liver cancer is quite common as well. The bile that is extracted is used for a variety of ailments in the name of Traditional Chinese Medicine, but there are more than 100 synthetics and herbs that are actually better and cheaper and experts agree that bile is no longer needed. Surely, it's time for a change. 

I've worked with moon bears who have been rescued from bear farms at the Moon Bear Rescue Centre outside of Chengdu, China, founded and run by Animals Asia. To date they have rescued 361 bears and have a very active campaign specifically designed to end bear farming. While I've seen unimaginable suffering I've also met some awesome individuals and have written about them in some of my previous essays. As a wonderful example of what the Animals Asia team accomplishes, consider Jasper, who, after spending 15 years of torture in a tiny crush cage, has become an ambassador for forgiveness, generosity, peace, trust, and hope (pictures of some crush cages and a relaxing Jasper can be found here). Jasper welcomes new bears into the rescue centre, breaks up fights, and plays with others who were lucky enough to be rescued. While tears flow for many other captive and rescued bears, individuals like Jasper bring smiles to our face and give us hope for the future. 

Clearly, it's time to end bear farming now and a petition can be found here."

But hundreds of thousands of animals of many kinds suffer just as much mindless cruelty
in Western and Israeli laboratories.
In the "democratic" USA no figures for animal torture can legally be published,
for free speech on animal welfare has been criminalised there.

History (and Herstory)

- crime story.
Histories (and Theirstories)
-crime stories
in the Great Conspiracy
of Optimism.

Van Gogh Gaga (with some help from Derain).

Late Summer behind the Dyke..

My pleasant neighbour is a rich painter.
This picture (92 cms wide)
could be yours for €1,000 / £720 / $1,100 ...

Courtly barbarism

Some of the European rich
used to eat larks' tongues
to improve their voices.
Presumably the rest of the little birds
were eaten by the courtly cats or rats.

The curse of the Irish

upon Roman Catholic Christianity
was the introduction of continual confession
(weekly or monthly)
in place of confession at the end of life
favoured hitherto and by other Christian sects.
This led to morbid introspection by all,
including children, who invented minor sins
and became obsessed by hellfire following
mere thoughts about their genitals and sex.

Synthetic or syncretic ?

My dreams have, recently, become more vivid,
and, for the first time in my life, I remember bits of them.
Last night's involved the tattooing of the cock
of a faceless philosopher,
and I had a problem with remembering
the second part of the text which I had chosen, so,
with great embarrassment, I decided to tattoo
 Γνῶθι عليكم
(Gnowthi Aleikum, which is not grammatically correct)
- and then awoke.

Why have poets not sung or written

of Happy Melancholy ?

Young men

usually and wilfully progress
from the banality of sport
to the banality of marriage
and back again.

The Ultimate Accolade ?

Your Google+ profile has been suspended

(for several years)

because some of your text, images or other content

appear to violate the User Content and Conduct Policy.

Yet, for some reason, I have ten followers...

Life, luck and timing.

"Losers" want only to reduce tension.
"Winners" want only to achieve goal after goal.

e=mc²

So what!
We can calculate anything
except the harm that we do.

In the Perfect Society

everything belongs to all
and not much to anyone
through the infinite generosity
of dogs and the dead.

It is certainly interesting

if not significant
that the commonest cancers are those
affecting the reproductive organs
of men and wœmen.
One of the few advantages of being queer
is that you can quite easily get some
not-unattractive chap to feel your testicles,
balls, goolies, nuts, goonies,
couilles, eier, cojones -
and even more pleasantly your prostate -
so that you can catch the cancer deliciously early.

Data beget(s)

data

Mad data
beget(s)
mad data

beget(s)
madness

begets
data

We may realise too late

that our science
is as infantile
as we are.

Never mind

the land-mines.
Eradicate
the mind-mines !

Life is

appalling
and
endlessly
interesting

Evening view from my balcony.

click to enlarge

New Year Sententiousness

One of the most important tricks in life
(let me remember at the start of two-thousand-and-sixteen)
is to be able to convert a crisis into an opportunity,
to treat hurt and fate like a trampoline.