In 1948 (also a leap-year)

a year before the pseudo-Marxists
came to power in mainland China,
George Orwell published 1984,
a hugely-influential book
recently translated into Uyghur
and published far to the west in Turkey.

Many of the horrible predictions
that Orwell made have come to pass,
not in Russia nor elsewhere (apart from North Korea)
but in Xinjiang,
so as to wipe out the 'dangerous'
Muslim and Turkic culture of the Uyghurs. 
Children are taken away to be 'educated',
women are 'encouraged' to marry
Han-Chinese men,
and all are instructed to sing
happy songs of love for China, the Party
and Big Brother, Xi Jinping.



Xinjiang's capital, Kashgarh is an oasis
between a sand-desert to the east
and the mountains to the west
shown on this satellite view.
The Uyghurs have enough to contend with
besides forced education and suppression of their language.

If copies of 1984 in Uyghur are smuggled into Xinjiang,
will it do anything to help the huge province's
small number of Turkic inhabitants ?

A possible cure for constipation

- if the sufferer could actually think
of besmirching such an exuberant object.

Man attacks left-handed waitress.

Nantes, France, February 26th.

A customer in a coffee-shop threw his cup of coffee in the waitress' face
and slapped her because she served him with her left hand.

The left hand is tabooed by Islam because (in right-handed people)
it is designated to be used for arse-wiping.
Of course, we left-handed people use our right hands for this purpose,
and our watches are on our right wrists,
so you can tell a left-handed person, a 'southpaw' in American parlance,
from yards or metres away.

I wonder which hand he slapped her with...

Literature

concerns itself with our failure
to connect with each other.
Science concerns itself with such things
as tinkering with DNA
and sending computers to the sun.

(In other words, we are brilliant
at breaking down and measuring,
but utter rubbish at simple mutual harmony.)

Time and its quality.

Least-mentioned and most-enduring
of colonial evils
was the introduction of necessary employment.
Its absence is now seen as
(and has often become) personal
or cultural failure, catastrophe
rather than an opportunity
to celebrate Free Time.

The freedoms that nation-states bestow
do not include free time or nourishment,
because capitalism's cult of numbers,
growth and 'going forward'
turns people into mere economic
units, groups and classes,
a to-be-closely-regulated spate
of consumers and providers.

Money is holy. The world is not.
Time and its quality are defined
and doled out by the State.

see: https://dsdnt.blogspot.com/2019/10/good-travellers-are-heartless.html

When I listen to music

I hear three things at once:
my ever-present tinnitus,
my almost ever-present ear-worms
(which vary enormously from Machaut
to Mahler, Marley and Methodist hymn-tune),
and the music I have voluntarily chosen.
There might be background noise as well.

If someone talks above all that
I am involved in tiring, cerebral acrobatics.

And if I turned on speech-radio
rather than music it is all too much, too much.

While reading John le Carré's "Mission Song".

John le Carré is certainly, like me,
ashamed to be a Western European
pinkish grey-skinned person.  I suspect that,
like me, born British, he might be ashamed to be human.

I hope he is about to write about the latest White Man's Shame
of childish panic about an alleged pandemic
(2% mortality rate, less than 50% infection rate)
while slow and bloody, ultimately efficient
genocide is quite cynically permitted to occur in Syria
by almost every politician outside Syria.

Who is worrying about the effect the latest influenza virus
might have in the ignored-by-all
(except the Turks and Kurds and Syrians)
crammed refugee camps of south-eastern Turkey ?
Almost no-one.

Sic progressit - And so it goes...on and on...and on...

Can language-abuse get any worse

than
ADVISEMENT ???
which I came across the other day.

Just one more little thing to make me lose the will to remain on the planet.

An unrelated language-note:

The English word journey
comes from French journée
meaning the (sunlit) length of a day.
So a journey was a day's travel.
by horse or on foot.

The French for journey or trip
is voyage, (from voie: way or path)
whose meaning
has in English been confined
to a sea-crossing.

There are hundreds more examples
of how meanings slip - and sometimes reverse -
from French to English, and even
(as with etiquette and ticket) back to French again.

Technology breeds

technology
and technology to counter
technology.
It can only end in tears
and fire, not ice.

Zoö-pornography - food for disgust.

More than one and a half million
pornographic films of animal sexual abuse
are freely available
and watched
every year in France and the UK... 
Many more in North America.

More than 10,000 human beings
visit online ads for sexual experiences with animals.



from mesopinions.com (France)

Shakespeare was wrong.

The world is part-stage,
part-abattoir,
part-holding camp,
part-prison,
part-environment-to-cherish,
and for most it's
just a place wherein to perish.

Wonderfully-wacky Word of the Week

Deconfliction.
Go figure!

Most intellectuals

have little understanding.
Those with understanding
tend not to be intellectual.
On the radio the other day
I heard that hairy men
tend to be intellectuals
(and/or the other way round ?).
My aunt had a sweet little moustache
but was not an intellectual,
and was always forgiving
but rarely understanding.

I did not care for princes or princesses,
but fancied hairy ogres when I was very young.

The problem with people

(I find)
is not so much that they are so limited,
but that they are so self-limiting.

Happiness

doesn't just happen.
It has to be permitted.
In The Real World
(which I luxuriously keep at bay
though Consumer Choice)
thought is a complication.

Carrière,

the French word for career
also means quarry.
The English word quarry
also means intended victim.
I have done what Yevtushenko
(whom I have not much read)
recommended in his poem about Galileo*,
and pursued a career (not a quarry)
of not pursuing one.

* Kарьера (Career)

Cool swells.

North Americans (but never British)
used to say that things (or people) were
swell.  
A male person could be A swell.
Swell swells have gone.
Now they (and some British) say
that people (or things) are funky
or are cool.
But now there seems to be a semantic rule
that neither male nor female is ever called
A funky or A cool.

"...men have invented God -

[as] a being capable of understanding."
- Graham Greene, The Quiet American.
...of understanding the cosmic joke
of bird in the hand and pig in a poke.

And lo! The first intelligible

(if not very intelligent) message
to reach Earth from Outer Space was:
We are going to make Wolf 359* 
GREAT AGAIN !

*Wolf 359, a Red Dwarf, is not at all bright.
'Two planetary companions are suspected, but as yet no debris discs have been unmasked...'

Soteriologistics

Even if we had the faintest idea what they might involve,
Enlightenment, Redemption, Salvation...
Saving the sad Planet from flood and fire
would still be merely
infantile desires for abstractions of desire.

The cosmic joke

is a pig in a poke
a bird in the hand
a bridge too far...
and not a nasty existential yoke.

Somehow

I got off the conveyor belt
after refusing to worship
the god of getting on.

Heard on the radio today:

"From the point of view of a photon
the entire universe is perfectly still."

Which means that such a particle of light can get off
and away if it wants to without risking injury.

'You can bet your bottom dollar'

that capitalism will thrive
on strategies
for manufacturing and marketing
value-added, bogus remedies
for climate change.

(Incidentally: as long ago as 1967 Isaac Asimov wrote that we were trashing the planet irreversibly.
 That was just before the oil companies started a big drive to increase the consumption of oil.)

"Too young to die."

Obviously,
no-one is...

any more than
anyone is
too old to die.

From your pedantic uncle.

With reference to my post of 28th December last
(Homage or insult to Miss S.)
Gertrude Stein's alleged poem, Pigeons on the grass, alas!
has almost-imperceptibly more meaning
if you imagine that the aforementioned birds were close to a notice:

or, since she spent so much time in Paris:

I might be wrong about this,
but she certainly published a recipe for Hashish Fudge in 1954.

Peduncle Wofl

Truth is a little boy.

And what are little boys made of ?
"Slugs and snails and puppy-dogs tails."
That is what Truth is made of.

It has to be my lupine ancestry

that makes me sure
that humans are supremely stupid.

Slick Simile.

I slip into bed
like a frozen chicken
into a microwave.
I have never slipped
a frozen chicken into a microwave.
I have never had a microwave
and for thirty years or more I haven't eaten chicken.

But I slip into my
electro-blanketed bed gratefully
and with abandon.

I snuggle into bed
like I used to snuggle whole chickens
into an earthenware pot
of golden cardamomed, tarragoned
and saffroned onions with segments of three lemons,
before slipping it into the oven
to be served (with fluffy rice) an hour or two later.

The Defeat of France

by Prussia in 1870,
and the subsequent decline of French power in Europe,
led directly to "The Race for Africa",
the brutal scrum of colonialism
which has destroyed the world.

A Kind of Poem.

Unlike kindness,
love comes in different kinds
like the kinds of water:
stagnant, spring, tap, sea,
puddle, polluted river,
pond, salt-marsh,
weedy canal, cascading,
soft, hard...
Unlike water,
love can be manic,
but no love is oceanic.

"The Jewish Problem"

and the Israeli problem
is the tragic triumphalism of the chosen.

The late John Baldessari,

notorious "conceptual artist" 
(who famously burned his terrible paintings)
declared that he would never make "boring art".
Unfortunately, almost all "conceptual art" is boring,
mind-numbingly, eye-frustratingly boring
at least after the first five seconds.

https://www.barnebys.com/blog/photography-was-not-exhibited-in-art-galleries-it

Today's YogArt

Three Ages of Confusion

The young
try to make sense of
the present

The middle-aged
try to make sense of
their future

The old
try to make sense of
their past