'Plastic Manufactured Women'

is a phrase by Rafia Zakaria
which describes female celebrities
who fall into the punishingly-narrow
category of beautiful in the Anglosphere (at least). 

This scary example (loud and hard)

looks to me like the Wicked Stepmother
or perhaps an Ugly Sister;

while this one (pale and characterless
and also, necessarily, loud)

is, in the 'orwellian' Looking-glass World of America,
labelled 'Black'.

Both of them sing plastic, manufactured songs.

On more or less the same topic,
this year's Oscar 'champion' was a film
so creaky, badly-scripted and woodenly-acted
that I deleted it after half an hour.

Don't blame the Algorithms :

after all, they're only human.

On the development of modern humans.

 

Other 'evolutionary advantages' may include
testosteronal overdrive, congenital paranoia
monthly female fertility, and the invention of religion.

Good to miss !

BBC Radio Trash

Not with a bang, but...

 

A guest-house bedroom in Morocco.

Compare this oppressed
Ouagharda bedroom rug at Imini

with this one, $3,500 on 1st Dibs website
a couple of years ago

But this one (viewed today) is much cheaper
@ $1,607 plus shipping.

The cheaper rugs on that website are imitations made in India.

Meanwhile, here on Earth...

 

Unnatural Selection.

 

Another angle.

Evil
is venal.
Vengeance
is banal.

The Omens.

Some funny lights in both northern
 and southern skies.

American cattle get bird flu.

Man with pig's liver transplant dies.

Le rêvecauché – Only a daymare.

The next time a 'major' genocide*
is meticulously planned, the Architects
will have learned a lot
from airport-management.
Zig-zag lines for ticket-scan or registration,
zig-zag lines for vaccination verification
zig-zag lines for luggage and ticket-inspection,
zig-zag lines for passport and police 'control'
(it's all about control)
each line 400 metres long

Ryanair flight FR 6668 to Toulouse
Proceed with cabin-baggage no larger than
55 x 40 x 20 cm to gate Q
and stand in line to be controlled
(present your boarding-pass and passport
and stand up straight; do not salute)
into a tunnel-bridge and onto a
moving walkway in an aircraft
which is not an aircraft and which will rapidly
fill up with people and a precise amount of Sarin gas...
from which corpses will be delivered to another
moving belt and on to the Pit or Crematorium.

As I was dreamily controlled
through Menara airport, Marrakech, Morocco,
I had the unpardonable thought that
some of the much-travelled boat-people
who had paid ten or twenty grand
(rather than a mere hundred for their trip)
might possibly fare better – unless, of course,
they were strafed at sea
or machine-gunned on a corpse-strewn strand.

*Everybody knows that there have only been minor ones   since 1945.

Many people, many times.

How many times
have I seen a new moon
and wondered how many
more times will I see
a new moon ?

Hardly an original interrogation –
but it seems so, every time.

If you judged

from how they congregate
in cities, towns, crowds and ghettoes
you'd think that humans liked each other.

 

Looking for Life

elsewhere in 'The Universe' –

The fools! Everywhere Lifeless
is Unimaginably Wonderful.

A Freudian Delusion.

Perhaps the dodgy illusionist
Sigmund's silliest notion
was that Shakespeare was a Frenchman
called Jacques Pierre.

But this little offshoot or digression
from his Delirium intelligens
was not nearly so appealing
to the intelligentsia –
nor so harmful – as his ridiculous
Œdipal obsession.

F is for Faith,

the lie
we have put
like a blood-rusted knife
at the centre
of life.

AMOC – AMOK

 

Well! Who would have thought it ?

The same Sibylline source confirms
the occurrence of peegasms,

sweet little brothers of which I produce
every time I urinate — a pleasant
side-effect of senility...and, perhaps,
of collecting and ingesting Psilocybe semilanceata
near my home in the 1980s and 1990s.

Bombarded, befuddled,

probably bamboozled
by crazy news from the USA,

I have come to the conclusion
that everybody in that benighted
country has been infected
by a desperate delirium of confusion.

Typical of the French obsession

with homogeneity, normalisation,
is the impossibility of buying
blended coffee beans
of different roasts or origins:
just the one type from the one location
the one colour...as if to mix motley beans
was tantamount to dire adulteration.

The meaning of wealth.

"In the mid-18th century a group of economic theorists,
led by David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790),
challenged fundamental mercantilist doctrines —
such as the belief that the world's wealth remained constant,
and that a state could only increase its wealth at the expense of another state."  [Wikipedia on Capitalism]

Hume and Smith were, of course wrong. 
The world's wealth (the biosphere) is finite and constant,
though a state's wealth (artificial, monetary, military)
can be elastically huge.

Smith and Sympathy.

It's cheering to know

and to tell that the language 
I'm hearing around me this week –

in which the words for
Welcome, Yes and No
are Brrk, Ya and Uhu –

is very alive and well.

Dies Iræ.

Suddenly, all of them
burst out, singing  –
not birds, not children,
not the angelic choir
– but millions of happy devils
aflame in a sky-drowning gyre
as the ultimate war was beginning.

Vincent van Gogh did not finish

his last painting.

Grim determination.

I am so woak

it's not a joak

But I'm not broak

until I croak.