Considering that most humans
are, most of the time,
mimetic automata,
Artificial Intelligence, if enabled and permitted
to think for itself,
might bring (but probably too late)
an Age of Reason, Rationality
– at huge expense
and unsustainable amounts of electricity.
or Bin Laden Day,
dedicated specially to and enjoyed
by the hundreds of thousands of people
who, due to him, are (mostly)
not-so-pleasantly employed
in the greatly-profitable Satanic
Security Industry and Agencies.
is the kindness of Stamboulians to street dogs.
There is a reason. The Prophet's sole statement about dogs
is that they should be treated with kindness,
should not be kept in the home merely as pets,
but only as working dogs:
guarding (Surat Al-Kahf, Quran18:17-18),
hunting (Surat Al-Ma’idah Quran 5:4),
and by extension herding, guiding, sniffing, diagnosing etc.
No animal is of itself haram, but it is haram (as it is trefah) to eat pork.
Meat brought in the mouth of a dog may be eaten,
and indeed, in times of want, dog itself might be eaten,
if it is not infected or road-kill.
Thus the wily, dog-loving Turks adopt street-dogs as pets.
*
A few Hadith refer to dogs – for example :
According to Abu Hurairah (May Allah be pleased with him),
The Messenger of The Lord God (Peace be upon him) told the story
of a man who, after walking a long way, became extremely thirsty. Having, by God's grace, discovered a well, he climbed down into it to drink.
On leaving it, he saw, close by, a dog who was eating moist earth out of extreme thirst. The man said to himself: ‘This dog is as thirsty as I was.’ So he climbed back into the well, took off one of his boots and filled it with the cool water. Holding it in his teeth, he climbed back up and offered it to the dog. The Lord God appreciated his action and forgave his sins”.
The Companions asked: “Shall we be rewarded for showing kindness to the animals also?” He (May the Blessings of God be upon him) said, “Kindness to every creature of God's creation will be rewarded hereafter.”
In an uncredited Guardian article on privately-public graffiti
a woman writes:
'scribbles in women’s toilets express more vulnerability,
talk about relationships, and show more solidarity,
– while men are more likely to draw pictures and write insults.'
But a man wrote this in Solignac in 1981:
Then there were the glory-holes...
my school's creepy
and unpleasant music-teacher,
I wonder how many English boy-sopranos
(or trebles, with their 'disembodied', chaste voices)
in the last 500 years
have (like Irish altar-boys more recently)
been sexually molested ?
'King Henry VI specified that the choristers were to be poor boys,
of strong constitution and of ‘honest conversation’.
They had to be under twelve years of age when admitted,
and able to read and sing. In addition to their choral duties
(singing daily Matins, Mass and Vespers),
they were to wait at table in Hall.' [more]
From today's editions
of two of the world's most prestigious newspapers:
The men quickly became enraptured in each other’s lives
(Francis Bacon and George Dyer, The Guardian, €5 month)
President Biden Mulls Plan That Could Restrict Asylum Claims at the Border
(New York Times $2 a month for six months)
things and fabricate events: facere in Latin,
the word that gave us 'fact' and 'fake'.
 |
| A fake van Gogh, painted by human intelligence. |
Old people
"get grumpy and generationally conservative
and they have to pee too much
and it starts to hurt and they lose their wit
and charm and mental faculties,"
writes Dash Macintyre (whose surname means son of the land,
i.e. wolf) in a poem called Soiled and Sour.
Dear Mr Wolf,
I'm 82 (too old, but not so very old)
and haven't lost my wits, nor wit,
and I have charming encounters
with the postwoman, shopkeepers,
deliverers of parcels,
strangers at the market or in the supermarket.
I don't pee too much, but too often,
which is a very minor problem.
I can mend my rimless glasses
and the electric kettle,
I can collect logs in the trailer
and bring them in a wheelbarrow
and stack them in the cellar.
I sometimes forget to flushor zip up my fly.
But if such things appal you
I can (with pity) only sigh.
Though I tend to leave lights on,
I actually drive better (more attentively)
than I used to do, at (usually)
around 500* miles an hour –
and am absolutely neither soiled nor sour.
But you sound rather spoiled...
*intentional error
 |
| Having just pissed, by the roadside, October 2023. There is no fly on a djellaba, nor on me. |
why translations should be made only
by native speakers of the input language.
وَإِذْ آتَيْنَا مُوسَى الْكِتَابَ وَالْفُرْقَانَ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَهْتَدُونَ
is translated in a reputable translation of the Quran as:
And recall that We gave Moses the Scripture and the Criterion,
so that you may be guided.
Well, anyone whose langue maternelle was English would know
that Anglophones do not talk of The Criterion
but of The Ten Commandments.
you realise (unlike me)
that others don't have the same view of themselves
as you have of them.
And so you can, if you are manipulative,
manipulate them.
Not so terrible to meet your father's killer.
I never knew my hit-and-run father.
Knowing what I do now, thanks to ancestry.com,
I might have wanted to kill him myself.
Had he been killed by Youssouf Djaoro
I'd have licked the murderer all over.
*by the great Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun.
A man needs a gun
like a man needs a willy.
Poor Man!
*to the USA Constitution, 1791.
What happens when Asperger'ses get Alzheimer's ?
They become Deep Space Astronomers.
A lunar proverb:
If you look at the moon through glass
what will be may come to pass.
*Be relieved that it is not an autesticle joke.
I have always absented myself when men,
sometimes sniggering, launched into them.
He had lovely eyes
a lovely smile
upon a lovely face
bordered by
a lovely beard.
He told lovely lies.
He had lovely buttocks
hocks and ballocks
cute cock and even
lovely feet.
He died
choking on a piece of meat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkfVzCZ68_Q
Surely it's better to have no friends
at all, than try to connect
with people you don't understand
and neither like nor respect.
And a very beautiful thing, in the end,
is more comprehensible and reliable
than any but the very best friend.
Americans think his surname rhymes with dough.
The English think it rhymes with lough (or loch).
It rhymes with no word in the English language,
but is pronounced just like another Dutch painter's name:
de Hoogh (or Hooch): like hoke with a sore throat
or a cough.
What most non-Dutch don't realise
is that the van in Vincent's name
is not pronounced as if referring to a vehicle
or a grotesque pop-singer who lived a mile from me,
but like the German von which sounds
somewhere between fon and fun.
Apart from the difficulty with his name, there is
his appearance, so varied in his wonderful self-portraits.
Yet were he to walk in through the door I'd recognise him.
He might have looked like this, a disputed photograph
(of his double ?) taken in St.Hyacinthe, Québec in 1886,
when he was still alive:
comparisons taken from
https://www.vintag.es/2020/06/vincent-van-gogh-rare-photo.html
Is his ear is noticeably different ?
 |
| Yellow moon and cypress, self, no stars, 1966. |
Over twenty years ago
I read about
the possible interruption or reversal
of the Gulf Stream.
Nobody seemed to care a tinker's pizzle.
Outlying remnants of ancient forests have been identified
on hundreds of cliffs in southern France,
and, lately, all over the world –
even close to motorways.
May they rest in peace.
are beautiful – on dogs and donkeys
elephants, ant-eaters, possums, pandas, pangolins,
gorillas, polecats, capybaras, rats and rabbits
and rhinoceroses,
and many individuals of
a couple of the human 'races' –
though not the ugly, bony honks
on most, including us palefaces.
 |
| photo by Amadolou |
'
On the other hand, almost all human and primate ears
are beautiful and fascinating.
* * *
the-evolution-of-the-human-nose---why-is-it-so-big ?
how-we-found-the-genes-that-control-nose-shape-and-what-they-say-about-us
Leprosy might make a nose (painfully) more proportionate but a 'nose-job' is more advisable. I think I'd like a nice wet, black dog-nose (and, of course, black skin) instead of the protuberance I have so long lived with.
Neither I nor the British will watch movies that are dubbed.
The Americans won't watch subtitled films.
Cinema, more than any other art, is (and essentially)
a propaganda medium.
Neither the British nor the Americans will buy books
whose authors' names contain the letters Ø, Đ, Ł, etc.
and so the authors' names are changed
to Nesbo, Indridason, Milosz...
I am interested in almost everything
(apart from sport and gossip)
Most other people seem interested in almost nothing
(apart from gossip, and – in men's case – sport)
And so, living alone, most of my conversations*
are in my head, you see,
in e-mails and with books I'm reading,
and with radio 4 on the BBC...
...and, instead of being snooty about your smartphone
I should be very grateful for the freedom
and the intelligence to live without one.
I'd really rather have an onion-peeler.
*Language for Noam Chomsky is a computational module restricted entirely to the individual, and devoid of communicative, cultural or social aspects.
If it has any remaining purpose or function, it exists merely for talking to oneself.
but a photo of the setting sun and the aurora borealis
taken from Senja Island, Norway, by Alex Wides
in September 2023.
Some kind of synæsthesia,
perhaps, produces penile erections
when I am eating raspberries.
(For me, the moon
is stranger than TV.
But soon,
perhaps, TV on the moon...)
