Now that smoking has declined in rich countries,

it is surely time for an art-gallery
or museum (in a rich country)
to mount a prestigious show -
with trumpeting websites and banners unfurled
- of Four Hundred Years of
Ashtray Art in the Western World.

More interesting than a Death Mask.

http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/features/mystery-of-unique-2100-year-old-human-clay-head-found-in-ancient-crematorium-with-a-rams-skull-inside/

Cretin -

from the French for Christian -
is a word of abuse from Ireland to Bulgaria,
Nevada to New Zealand, Estonia* to Greece.
There's something very Jungian about this.

* but not Finland, where ääliö is used instead.

A Devout Atheist's Prayer.

O Fellow-Sheeple -
let us do a lot with little,
so long as what we do
does little harm to other creatures
and the world's magnanimous features.

Lords of the Wrongs.

Billionaires have been reported to be 
buying land for bunkers in New Zealand 
in preparation for an apocalypse. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/28/New-Zealand-rated-best-place-to-survive-global-societal-collapse

Lifestyle lessons from Hollywood.

Films from the 1920s to the 1960s
were mostly violent and/or sentimental,
full of cigarettes and booze 
(with women always decorative
adjuncts) - and guns, of course.
Then graphic sex entered the mix.
Now, cigarettes are just slightly
less in evidence - perforce.

PS  Why are political thrillers so rare - everywhere ?

Vicious circle.

The daughter of my friend Phyllis
refuses anti-Covid vaccination
because it might impair her fertility.

It is human overpopulation
which has caused Covid and will cause worse,
and is already reducing the world to hot, dry
post-Jurassic sterility.

She talks of Liberté, but, like most French people
has no time for Fraternité. Needless to say
no-one contemplates Égalité, equality.

 

Art compensates

a few of us a little bit
for what our cultures,
histories and upbringing
have taken from us.

Subtitles on films

for the superannuated hard of hearing
will helpfully describe the background music
and the ambient sounds (passing or approaching trains,
doorbells, explosions, dogs barking)
although it's mumbled dialogue that is the problem,
not the background rap or blues.
Unfortunately, they do not elucidate the plot
- for which deaf critters like me
must google cinema-reviews.

You cannot use Google as a dictionary.

I looked up PEAVEY in images
and got only electronics and guitars.

After checking it out in a dictionary
I found that it's a lumberjack's pole
with a spike and a hook at the end.

In order to see what one looks like
I had to enter 'peavey pole logging'.

On Grief.

When people grieve
it is often for the relationship they didn't have
with the deceased.

Never freed

from childish Earth
the sun's hair stands
eternally on end.

I have probably said this before,

but, having drunk a little more at dinner-time
than my usual half-bottle of wine,
I'll repeat my obvious Diogenesism : 
There is nothing more depressing
than clever sheeple’s optimism.

Disinfected flags.

It is probably too much to hope
that 'Covid' will smother this year's
Olympic "Games", which will have to abort
and prove to be the last time that nationalism,
childish ultra-competitiveness
and transnational turbo-capitalism
will celebrate each other
in the name of ''sport".

An unrecognised problem

with Moderate Bipolar Disorder
is that when you're Up there is
quite a large corner in your head
which harbours the dread
of the Up ending.
Perhaps never mending.
And when you're Down there is
a bigger corner of your mind
in which you despise yourself
for being merely Down
while others of your kind
are starving, tortured, unable to cope,
racked with physical pain,
and/or driven utterly insane -

and you merely mope.

Dogs are not born dangerous,

but become demented by terrible experience.

There probably won't be a day

when sheeple don't care
what other sheeple wear,
when a man can dress
(more or less)
like a woman, and a woman
can dress
(more or less)
like a man
- and nobody cares a damn.

A layman's guide to American verb formation.

Take one verb - let's say to oblige
remove the last letter and add -ate
- and you have to obligate.
Now take to remedy
and apply the same method
- and you get to remediate.
And so on.  You can also do 
something similar by simply adding -ize.
To fragment will thus become to fragmentize.

This is not wayward, but a typical
example of one accumulative way
that languages develop.
(Another way is by word-truncation.*)
Maybe to envelopate will developize
from to envelop.

At any rate, it's futile to resist
developmentalization.

       * e.g. by reducing alternative to alternate.
         even though alternate already exists
         with a quite different meaning.

'Hopeful music playing,'

is a subtitle for the deaf on Netflix,
but is unhelpful for those
who cannot work out
what hopeful music might be.

The problem with the advance of technology

has always been that
the more it advances
the more terrible are
the unintended consequences.

(One very recent and relatively minor example is the continuing effect
of the highly-profitable insecticide, DDT.)

see also: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/11/california-purple-sea-urchin-uni-kelp-forest

" I suspect,

in the typical human experience for most of our history,
truth was probably pretty low on the list of priorities."

- Martin Turpin  on human vaunting, a.k.a. bullshit

One of the Jungian ways

that Victorian & Edwardian women dealt with sexual abuse,
a disturbing awareness of the recent slave-trade
and continuing slavery all-in-one, was to subscribe
to the powerful myth of the White
(essentially blue-eyed, fair-haired, nubile English)
Female Slave Trade based in Barbary, Benin or the Bosphorus.

Addiction ?

"Ireland and the UK were the only European countries where alcohol consumption did not fall during the first Covid wave, according to a study in the journal Addiction, suggesting a big shift to drinking at home."  - from today's Guardian online.

This also suggests the obvious :
on Continental Europe (even Finland and Scandinavia ?)
alcohol consumption is more an aspect of sociability,
less a compulsive seeking of escape towards oblivion.

The bird

sought refuge in the hurricane.
The tree sought refuge in the fire,
the house in the lightning-strike,
the street in the mud-slide,
the city in the flood,
the marshland in torrential rain.
We spilled no blood.

Keep on smoking, guys !

 

(In the 1870s a man would have seen a penis
more often in a woman's mouth
than a cigarette.)

Canada's Residential Schools for Indigenous Americans.

If you spoke your parents' language
and dared to wet your bed
it was very likely that you'd soon be dead. 

'Authenticity.'

 "...the effort to be ourselves is the surest path to being just like everyone else, especially in the context of a highly commodified and surveilled culture where we always seem to be on stage. "

- Alexander Stern, in https://aeon.co/essays/a-history-of-authenticity-from-jesus-to-self-help-and-beyond

He continues, quoting Oscar Wilde: 
‘Most people are other people.
Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’ 

(Or misquotation.)

Under

the waterfall of the sun
we all drown in drought.

Homage to Ivor Cutler.

 

Eventually

you will, like millions, have had
enough of living, and any life
after dying would be hell.

The hard-core poet-optimist,

romantic Mr Whitman wrote:
Nothing is ever really lost, [n]or can be lost...

But of course, as hard-core Buddhists know
(and cannot be refuted),
all is loss, and all things are transmuted.

I wouldn't have believed

that the sainted Dr Martin Luther King Jr. could have made
such a crass, sexist, totalitarian and 'jihadist' pronouncement :

"If a man has not discovered something that he will die for,
he isn't fit to live."

But he did make it - thus condemning a large proportion
of the world's population as Untermenschen. 

Dostoyevsky was not quite right.

 “A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals.”

 "The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons." (from The House of the Dead)

NO - a society should also and equally be judged by the proportion of its population committed to prison.

It is only civilised societies which have prisons.

Vindictiveness is the father of cruelty.

Triple Negative.

Just because something doesn't matter
is no reason not to notice it.

Contra Naturam.

It is still said
that homosexual affections are
Against Nature.
But then, agriculture
is, by definition, against nature;
and a species whose females
devote their lives to pleasing capricious males
- rather than the other way round -
is distinctly odd.

And most of them believe in
or tolerate the nonsense of
a supreme, capricious and male god.

Out of mere wicked curiosity

I looked up the URL
www.coprophilia.com
and was presented with this :

On reading Philip Kerr.

The Nazis weren't worse
than other humans.  They just
allowed their humanity full expression.

Homage.

View my avant-garde (?) 8 mm film from 1961

- the sound was added later, during the Age of the Compact-Cassette.

"Negative Space"

Another example of how misleading language can be.

On 'Human Dignity'.

Billions of humans.
Not much dignity.

One of my rare Goodreads reviews :

- read it here.

To the naked eye

the twin-star Alpha-beta Centauri seems single.
But to the Australian Boorong people
Alpha and Beta Centauri
are two fearsome and rampaging brothers.

"There is an indigenous tribe in Africa
that tells of life coming from the second star
in Alpha Centauri, the one no-one can see
without a high-powered observatory telescope.
Come to think of it, the Greeks, the original Australians,
and the Plains Indians [of North America] 
all lived continents apart
and all, independently, looked at the same septuple knot
of the Pleiades and believed them to be
seven young girls running away from something
[or someone] that threatened to hurt them."

- Jodi Picoult: My Sister's Keeper.

Liberation - what liberation ?

Some men have more feminine minds
and some women have more masculine ones:
the usual spectrum of diversity.
It will be no surprise that 'successful' women
are those - aspirational achievers - who most conform
to masculine (and European, world-shrinking)
ways of thinking.