Theatre of the Bizarre.

Rummu, Estonia

Mechanical diggers perform a scene
during an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
where heavy goods vehicles and cars
take on the roles of the characters.

Photograph by Janis Laizans

Hand-me-down hideousness

that has probably cost
thousands of dollars
and, seemingly beheaded,
is flaunted as Beauty
to millions of crawlers.

Not many people know...

...that Donetsk in Ukraine was,
in the bad old days
re-named Stalino, just as Tsaritsyn
(now Volgograd) was re-named Stalingrad.

[I am like Oliver Goldsmith's rural schoolmaster in the poem
The Deserted Village in which people marvelled
that one small head could carry all he knew !]

Russia is where idealists die.

America is where they resurrect
as vampires.

A Performance Poem

by The President of the United States.

"I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor. You can’t – in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working. The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it’s really not. It’s horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You’re washing whole – water barely comes out it’s ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can’t just change it.”

from The Guardian.

Almost-Divine Truth.

'A nation without religion
is like a man without breath.'

~ Josef Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment
and Propaganda, Germany, 1933-45.

A kind of eruption

known as a Mound Spring,
in (usually dry) Kati-Thanda
(Lake Eyre), Australia.

The Camera Does Not Lie.

Selfie on a Good Day.

Selfie on a Bad Day.

At prayer in Gaza.

The best-documented outrage in history.

 

photo by Abdelrahman Alkahlout

'They go together like a horse and carriage.'

The sexualisation of affection
and
the romancing of lust;

factory farming
and
mass extinction.

The Cliff Bookshop.

Hechi, China.

 

It would be fun

to create a blog consisting only
of details of famous pictures.

Here is a detail of a begging-bowl
from one of the first masterpieces
I ever saw (in reproduction): Bruegel's
The Blind leading the Blind.

French heat.

Today's temperatures.
I live in the purple zone.
I have a headache.

Kol Nidrei...

9 Tishrei.
There is no atonement.

Except suicide.

'Little Brown Jug'

I remember that there was a book of songs
kept in the Piano Stool in the Front Room
(along with the scores of Chopin Nocturnes) 

which included Sowannee River, Old Black Joe
(which made me weep),
Won't you buy my pretty flowers ?
(which made me weep),
a bowdlerised version of Hinky-Dinky-Parley-Voo
which was quite jolly,

and Little Brown Jug, which was sung
by many (including Bing Crosby) right up to WW2.

I was reminded of this by learning the other day
that the Dutch equivalent of a Kneipe in Germany
and an Estaminet in France
was called a Bruine Kroeg or Brown Jug.

The first verse as I remember it was:

My wife and I lived all alone
In a little log cabin we called our own.
She loved gin and I loved rum
I tell you we'd lots of fun...

Our Rosy Future.

 

'There was a bluebottle

crashing against the glass.
It explored the edges, and seemed
to search for an opening
and then went straight at the panes of glass
in a series of small assaults,
and then back to the edges again,
and then it rested,
and then it went for the glass again,
hitting itself, and it didn't stop,
but carried on with it,
trying to get out and not getting out
and trying again.'

– from The Outcast, by Sadie Jones, 2008.

Two Cities.

Warsaw 1940.

Warsaw 1945.

Gaza 2025.

I feel it calling.

• Astronomers have identified what could be
  the biggest black hole known in the universe,
  estimated to be around 36 billion times more massive than our sun, and  approximately five billion light-years away.

Gary Shteyngart :

'My parents got me out of Soviet Russia at the right time.
Should my family now leave the US ?’  

Where would you go ? 
Finland is too close to home. 
Costa Rica might be too close to the USA...  

Aléxandre Dumas (the elder)

won 600 glasses of absinthe
in a double or quits game of billiards. 
But he didn't claim them.*

He estimated that they were worth 90 francs,
the equivalent of 12 times the coach-fare to Paris.

He was described as "fond of the ladies",
which probably means that he was a serial rapist.
He claimed to have 500 offspring,
but 'recognised' only five,
one of whom, Aléxandre Dumas (the younger)
was the author of La Dame aux Camélias
(converted into the opera La Traviata by Verdi)
and shared at least one of his father's 'mistresses'.

*Ce jour-là, pauvre père Cartier ! – je veux parler du jour de notre partie –
ce jour-là, pour me servir d'un terme de joueur, je lui arrachai une fameuse dent.

Nous jouâmes cinq heures de suite, et, toujours doublant, je lui gagnai six cents petits verres d'absinthe.

Nous y serions encore, et jugez quel océan d'absinthe Cartier me devrait, si Auguste ne fût venu le chercher.

Auguste était un des fils de Cartier ; son père le craignait beaucoup ; il mit un doigt sur sa bouche pour me recommander le silence. Je fus généreux comme Alexandre à l'endroit de la famille de Porus.

Je laissai Cartier libre, sans lui demander de gage.

Seulement, nous fîmes nos comptes, Gondon et moi.

Réduits en argent, les six cents petits verres d'absinthe produisaient un total de dix-huit cents sous, c'est-à-dire quatre-vingt-dix francs.

Je pouvais prendre douze fois la voiture de Paris, conducteur payé.

[from his published letters]

see also www.beyond-the-pale.uk/absinthe.htm

Hiroshima Day.

 Since 1945  the world’s nine declared nuclear-armed states have amassed a firepower equivalent to 145,000 Hiroshima bombs – enough to destroy the world many times over.

In Britain, Prime Minister Starmer recently announced plans to spend an additional £15bn on developing submarine-launched nuclear warheads, as well as the purchase of F-35A fighters from the United States to enable the UK to re-introduce air-launched nuclear weapons. This, of course, brings the prospect of nuclear war measurably closer – all in the name of making Britain, in his words, “a battle-ready, armour-clad nation”...

while Trump and Putin engage in sabre-rattling (such a quaint expression) with weapons of mass destruction.

The only countries to abandon nuclear weapons have been three former republics of the USSR, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus - plus South Africa.

CND was such a waste
of time and energy misplaced.

Faust is German for 'Fist'

and is the title of Goethe’s famous play about the successful but dissatisfied scientist Dr Heinrich Faust, who makes a deal with the devil. 

Faust has been performed, referenced and read in schools in the German-speaking world for more than two centuries.

The most tragic character in this tragedy is not the unpleasant protagonist, but his “love interest”, Gretchen.

She is a teenage girl groomed by Old Man Fist, impregnated and, of course, socially ostracised for his crime.
So she drowns her “illegitimate” new-born child, accepts her death penalty and rejects The Fist’s offer to save her from prison.
In God’s mercy, the Christian girl seeks salvation (maybe with the help of the criminal Catholic mega-business, The Sisters of Bon Secours. and off goes Dr Faust with the devil to new adventures in Faust, Part Two...

Rustic Car.

 

Rubus fruticosus & Parthenocissus quinquefolia

Feeding the brains of the old to babies in Palestine

How things seem is not so much how they are
than how we seem to ourselves, flatteringly
or not.
How they are is no more than partly-knowable,
fleetingly half-describable by
migrant world-devouring words.

Neutrinos. Galaxies of galaxies. People.

Like disappearing birds,
they exist somewhat insubstantially
until they threaten our hopes or health or habits
or our own seeming existence,

though there is no finale of seem,
just the apparent filth of fate,
the sheer meanness of annihilation,
the petty planetary scream
muffled by hereditary hate.

Thinking of Wallace Stevens,

Too conscious of too much

Too conscious of too much consciousness

To be too conscious

Doesn't mean too conscientious 

But could mean too contentious

Geronticus eremita

is listed as an accidental species
of African bird in Spain.
It may already be naturalised.
I know how your feel, dear,
even without a red rim 'round my eyes.

Northern Bald Ibis

History

"is best told as a story of organised crime."

Dr Luke Kemp

"I find it hard to accept

the contemporary view that [human] life of any kind
no matter how restricted and feeble
is better than no life at all.

The thing doesn't seem to me to be
worth clinging to at all costs, regardless of its quality.

Like an ancient Roman, I would prefer
to get out while I'm ahead..."

John Simpson (famous BBC correspondent and presenter)
in Strange Places, Questionable People.

vividmaps.com

I love maps.
I love 'eccentric' maps.
Wondering about the borders of the Hungarian Empire
before 1914,
I found that it stretched from Bratislava (in modern Slovakia)
in the NW to Brasov (modern Romania) in the SE,
and from Mukachevo (n Ukraine, Hungarian Mukács)
to the present Mohács (still part of Hungary). 

On its southern border, Újvidék is now
Novi Sad in Northern Serbia. 

Hungary has been horribly truncated.

However, I was cheered up by this page
of amusing, tongue-in-cheek sociological maps
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
from a 19th century Austrian point of view.

This is one of them.

"The best way

to deal with suffering
is to imagine worse."

~ Tahar ben Jelloun, The Blinding Absence of Light.

A bit of Kinigling

American English is full of Yiddish terms,
just as American foreign policy is  full of Israeli leadership,
i.e. by the nose. 
This morning I came across 'rube' and 'tookus', which mean, respectively, Yokel and Buttocks. 
Maven, another rare word which I had looked up before,
also comes from Yiddish (a language, Judäisch, owing much to German.

The only non-foody Yiddish word which is very common in European/Commonwealth English is 'Glitch'...
though there are also 'spiel' 
(a repeated speech or piece of persuasion),
the rare 'chutzpah' which hasn't replaced 'brass neck',
and the very rare 'shemozzle' which came from Irish
through American English and Yiddish,
and means a scrimmage in the vicious Irish sport of Hurling.

Continuing down the kinigl-hole to Wikipedia's page
on Yiddish words used in (American) English I came across:

• feygele or faygeleh (Yid. פֿייגעלע‎): (pejorative) homosexual (literally 'little bird', from Old High German fogal; cf. modern German Vögele, also possible cf. German word Feigling, meaning 'coward'), could be used for anyone slightly effeminate, "Ugh, that, Moishele washes his hands, what a faygel." Often used as a disparaging term for a homosexual male.

This pansy-bird (that never wert) word
is also reminiscent of 'faggot' and 'fey',
so it's surprising
that it is not in general use in the USA.

Today's neologism.

TECHNO-SOLUTIONISM.

Book Disease

 Reading :
the most refined
of addictions.

'Escape into a good book'
is usually cheaper than
a spliff or a substance,
especially if second-hand
or from a library

though possibly contagious.

Sailing by*

They're coming to live in hotels.
They're coming to take our jobs.
They're coming to rape our daughters.

But I doubt if they'll ever arrive.

*The theme-tune of the British meteorological report
and forecast for the seas around the British Isles.

Electronic anæsthesia.

It is not nearly so pleasurable
to receive an e-mail from Empuriabrave
as a postcard from Posterholt.

Death of another hero,

who declared that he passed
from adolescence to senility
with no intervening maturity

and whose songs, he said,
spread like herpes. 

"Words were invented...

 ...so that lies could be told." 
– Mary Ellen Pleasant.

If “perception is controlled hallucination”
morality is imposed insanity.

Nietzsche and the Crocodile.

"I haven't the slightest wish for anything to be different from how it is."

– Friedrich Nietzsche: Ecce Homo 

As for the crocodile, click here.

RIP GWR.

Today I finally got round to using the Tor (gateway) browser, and found that it is theoretically very much easier on the dark web to hire a killer, buy polonium, or find very nasty porn sites than to (for example) find a suicide forum.  

In theory, you can buy Sodium Pentobarbital online,
but almost certainly you will be scammed.
I used it once as a very beautifully-dreamy sleep aid.
I also had a shy and gentle, caring friend who was an early member of the Paedophile Information Exchange.

Given that suicide is not a crime, but hiring a killer, adding polonium to gin, and looking at horrific 'kiddie-porn' are definitely criminal, what can we conclude about our Great Western Civilisation ?  The sooner it goes the way of the Great Western Railway, the better. 

Jony Ive,

"a darling of Silicon Valley
since overseeing the design of the iPhone, claims that

'Humanity deserves better'".

Another nail in your coffin.

 

After five whole days

of a catchy theme from an early
piano concerto by Mozart, my ear-worm
changed this morning to a few bars
from Dvořák's 12th string quartet.

In days of yore, adolescents like me
would write to East European embassies
to ask for the freebies they lavishly bestowed.
From the Romanian embassy I was sent an LP
of music which they insisted was not
Romanian Gypsy Music which I had asked for,
because music was either Romanian or Gypsy, not both.

Accompanying the Supraphon LP
from the Czechoslovak embassy in London
was an irritated cold-war note to say
that they objected to the tag American
on Dvořák's loveliest quartet,
which he composed in the USA.

A long time ago

(just a few decades)
my poems and haikai were praised
by respected, pacifistic
writer, reviewer, translator,
poet and haiku-composer
James Kirkup,*
and I was invited to his Pyrenean home.
Unfortunately, he (famously eristic)
'fell out' with me soon after.
Why couldn't I for once
have been a 'brown-noser' ?

*who translated the Guinean
writer Camara Laye's disputed 
Radiance of the King 
(Le regard du Roi) into English.
It is the title of one of my paintings:

Summertime -

and the fishing is easy.

A Gatekeeper Moth.

photo by Wili Cave

 

After the last two

(if not three) Covid-19 vaccinations
my mood dropped considerably and unpleasantly
for at least two weeks.

"COVID-19 vaccination increased the risks of depression, anxiety, dissociative, stress-related, and somatoform disorders, and sleep disorders while reducing the risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Therefore, special cautions are necessary for administering additional COVID-19 vaccinations to populations vulnerable to psychiatric Adverse Effects." 

   
– https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02627-0

I will not be getting another.

But see here.

The phrase (or meme)

'I'm not dead yet'
has been uttered by all and sundry –
princes, billionaires and goat-herds,
(and Monty Python, more famously).
But it has never been quoted
as anyone's actual last words.

*

The actual last words
of a prisoner of conscience
to a torturer
in an Assad-period Syrian prison were:
I'm going to tell God what you did.

I was born to disappoint

my ravished-virgin mother,
and I never let her down.
Even better,
she never knowingly let me down,
and in due course she seemed
quite happy with her lot.

One of several coincidental factors

which led to the unfortunate success
of early Christianity was the laziness of the plebs*
who were first attracted by it. To be able
to stay put and pray and worship a conveniently
invisible god was a good deal easier than to traipse
from shrine to shrine, statue to statue, temple
to temple to offer money or petition for a better life
which was unlikely to arrive.  For much less effort
and ritual (apart from once-only baptism) they
could expect eternal happiness in an afterlife
in an overworld quite unlike the underworld that
Greeks, Romans and Germans expected.

* The demos of the Greeks, whose oafishness
will inevitably destroy demo-cracy.

Ne obliviscaris.

The Nazis,
occupying vast Eastern territories
could transport Jews (and others)
for extermination almost wherever they liked.
The Jews,
with selective tunnel-vision
and occupying only the coveted West Bank,
can only annihilate the (relatively
small number of) Untermenschen-

Philistines on-site in Gaza.

 

Circuses, no bread.

It is unpleasant to consider
the trillions of dollars spent
on making mindless entertainment
for well-fed millions, while
even more millions live
in misery and want.

 

'Bon secours', ha! ha! ha!

Bon Secours is satanic shorthand for
an ever-present help in trouble,
perpetual succour
for the needy and distressed.

The Sisters of Our Lady of Bon Secours order
is part of an international healthcare conglomerate
worth billions in the US,

and guilty of mass infanticide in Ireland alone.

The crimes of the Catholic church are global.
and perpetual.

Other churches also are active.

Memory

is a liar to itself,
as, often, is romantic love.

The Capitalist Dream.

Harmonious inequality.

It's a matter of opinion, really.

Which is more worth-while :
the memorising of accumulated facts
or the widening of awareness ?

It is rare to experience both equally
through education.

'Roomster'

was the model of a car
I saw today.  How long
before I see the ultimate model,
Doomster ?

Oh! me, of little understanding.

I have never had it.
I don't understand it;
I'm fairly sure that it is
cultural-parental:
Fear of The Other,
to which I've always been attracted.

Brilliant neologism.

Bring it on !

DE-DOLLARISATION.

Bad news.

There is no good news.

Bombastic Museum

diminishes the artefacts it houses.

The shame and the guilt

descend, not because I dribble
before and after,
but that I contribute even more
to ecological disaster
by changing my underwear every day.

Wealth won't buy you sanity,

much less happiness.

The world’s richest man regularly consumed ketamine, ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms during his rise to political prominence, anonymous sources familiar with his activities told the Times. 

His drug use reportedly intensified
as he donated $275m to Trump’s presidential campaign. 
He later wielded significant power through his role spearheading the “department of government efficiency”,
or DoGE.

He is one of those joyless people with unlimited wealth, medicated health and depressing paucity of mind and spirit.

meanwhile, in another part of the forest of newsprint,

Azar Nafisi, Iranian-American author of Lolita in Tehran
and Republic of the Imagination,
says she is starting to feel the same fear
that she had in Iran before she fled.

Though wolves are not mentioned

hatred of them spread
in North America
like and with the Gospel.

*

Rarely since the death of Jesus
has the Catholic church taken
a moral stand on anything beyond
or above the height of human genitals.

'Half of the Tree of Life'

has died since I was born.

Haute-Couture

photo by Robert Wun

 

Dumpling for thought.

'Great talent can produce bad art.'

Anselm Kiefer, self-proclaimed genius.

Despite the lack of buccal interpenetration,

the good thing about solo sex
with prostate trouble or senility
is that you can daily enjoy
the excitement and expectation
of genital and nipple stimulation
without the disappointment
of ejaculation.

Snail-song.

It is of the greatest importance
to be unimportant in earnest
and at home in silence. 

Ah, Progress.

The paranoid concern
of 19th century European patriarchs
was Self-pollution, which now has,
due to them, become Global.

The worst thing

about hotels today
is that no mature and bearded groom
stretches protectively across the threshold
of my room.

Ireland's Empire

was its world-wide web
of missionary priests and nuns.
Now that we know of the lusts
and cruelty of psychologically-maimed
Sisters, Brothers and the ordained
in Ireland, it is reasonable to ask
(and ask journalists to probe)
what Christian abominations were inflicted
upon vulnerable people across the globe.

 

No nostalgia for the 1940s.

It's a long time since I could take my shoes to the cobbler
to be re-heeled ('They'll be ready Friday')
nor my jug to the milkman with his horse and cart
for milk and buttermilk sold by the quart;

nor give vegetable peelings to The Pig-Man
nor the scissors to The Scissor-Man for sharpening.

It's 60 years since The Old Shawlie
beggar-woman came to our door
and I was reprimanded
for inviting her in (she pissed on the floor).

Not even in this old French village
do kids play on the empty street...
I remember
skipping-ropes and hopscotch, whipping and guiding
a tyreless bicycle wheel along roadways with a stick;
being terrified while hurtling
down a hill in the go-cart that my cousin made
using roller-skate wheels with ball-bearings in them
(now I am incapable of more than hirpling).

I didn't rob birds' nests nor torture cats
nor join in bullying (I was the mildly bullied one),
though for a while I had a beetle-trap.

Nothing was organised.  In our free time
we had free movement,
almost unhindered comings and goings.
I liked to play in building-sites
and, alone, in ruins.

This man paints

many variations on the same still-life,
and seems not to get paint on his beard.

Claude Tournie, Montauban.

Bedint.

In a biography (of odious Upper-Class people,
notably Vita Sackville-West) which I am reading,
the very rare word 'bedint' (as noun or adjective) is used to describe a bourgeois or a 'respectable' person without 'class',
not 'well-bred' or superficially-sufficiently 'cultured'
to be acceptable to posh Edwardian society
and the post-war social whirl of the 1920s. 
Perhaps a 'naff' nouveau-riche or social upstart.
It does not appear in the etymological dictionary online,
but I found a wonderful if pedantic disquisition on the word here.

Was The Great Gatsby a bedint ? (It rhymes with 'pedant'.)

It rhymes with 'pedant'.

Herewith I add my own piece of pedantry:
the word is very similar to the Danish word Betjent,
which means an attendant or servant of the upper classes,
e.g. a maître d'hotel, or a servant of the government.  
Tjene means to serve.
(cf the Middle Dutch dienen, from the Old Dutch thienon, from the Proto-Germanic þewanōną and meant “to be of assistance to, to serve; to serve at a tavern.)
Danish Policemen are known as Politibetjente, or simply betjente.

I remember a restaurant in the early 1960s, formerly a warehouse,
latterly a night-club in Copenhagen, called Laurids Betjent...

from "The Lucyverse" substack.

 "I’ve always wondered how you become a model for Temu. Do you even have to exist? If they are human, though, I get the feeling that these people probably didn’t explicitly give their permission to be shown ejaculating oil from their belly buttons, wearing Creative Raw Sausage Tee or being the before picture for Crepey Skin Tightening Firming Cream (£8.93).

"I mean, do you think these two really understood that the afternoon of ‘work’ they did in an anonymous white-walled studio in 2022 would result in this? "

Isn't it FRIGHTFULLY interesting

that one can buy an anti-EU sticker online (in French)
but not an anti-USA one ?
Long live Freedom of Choice !

The Abolition of Dominion

will never happen,
because abolition requires dominion.
and dominion is self-perpetuating
until The End.

Meanwhile,
The anonymous author of the pamphlet Tyranipocrit Discovered (1649), condemned both ‘our Indian merchants’ for ‘robbing of the poor Indians of that which God and nature hath given them, and … mak[ing] them slaves’, and the English for ‘hunt[ing]’ the ‘poor Irish’.

The Royal Dingoes.

painting by Vincent Namatjira

 

My second-favourite ineffectual politician says

 

Meantime, my favourite ineffectual politician,
Jeremy Corbyn 
is 'being wooed' to co-found an actual
British socialist party in the Trump-Starmer
soon-to-be-yet-another-police-state.

Keeping him clean in Chemnitz,
formerly Karl-Marx-Stadt.

The primary function

of human memory
is selection
of what to remember.

What to forget
goes into
the mind's gas-chamber.

Ah, those were the days !

'Picture Post' 1945

 

Income-gaps.

In some human hierarchies
the poverty-stricken
can afford to employ
the destitute.

Dear Philippa,

Can climate change affect me bowels ?
Twenty years ago I shat (sorry to be crude !)
three times a week;
now it is twice a day. Occasionally three.
No blood.

– Anthony, SW France.

“Rich screams, wealthy whispers”

but billionaires actually run whole nations.

All of them are not just poisonous,

but also, between them, own

all sources of poison that are so far known.

European Green Lizard

 

"Death, Death to the IDF"

declared a performer at a famous English music festival.
The Israeli Defence Force is the most efficient
and soulless national killing machine outside Russia,
but the poor old BBC has got into trouble again
from Zionists, weapons-manufacturers and
slimy politicians for relaying the performance.
Hamas, quite rightly, is denounced daily,
but few whine about Islamophobia.

*

During the three-day jamboree, attended
by over 200,000 non-violent people at Glastonbury,
there was not a single riot or fracas.
So 'the gutter press' had to find something
to be outraged about.

*

Every army in history has been defeated
or betrayed. And still they arise
like dragon's teeth to defend motherlands,
fatherlands, third-cousinlands, civilisation,
Christianity, Islam, Buddhism...

Death! death! to every DF.

Here is the Dastardly, Vile
long-haired, half-naked Villain.
The BBC is again chastised.
The IDF is True unto God.

European and white American women wore

whole birds upon their heads
150 years ago. George Bernard Shaw
complained about a complete seagull
on a woman's hat,
but, more modestly, the St Kilda Wren,
unique to a tiny group of islands,
was in great demand.

Data

is a curious word, meaning no more
than Information Offered, or, in French
[informations] données, which may well be
or be compatible with idées reçues. 

But let's be clear,
data are like you and me.
If you torture them for long enough
they’ll offer up anything you want to hear.

Being a doom-nihilist, I hope not.

 

Israel is proud of its democracy and Rule Of Law.

 

Electronic Fossils are Impossible.

The plastic pen with which you write
your shopping-list could last
fifty million years.
Fifty million of them have been manufactured
in the last six months. 

Let's not bother to consider your
(largely plastic) electric car.

Only those who consume the most
have the time and education
(bur still require the inclination)
to reflect upon the Sixth Extinction.

Long after which
I hope I'll look as beautiful
and mature as this.

Homage to van Gogh.

 

Anselm Kiefer: Crows [in winter]

Crime and Virtue-signalling.

If the Well-fed of the World
were told that they could
Save the Planet
by wearing the same clothes
for a fortnight (as I do)
rather few would do it
(and certainly not to save water)
– and certainly not
by giving up internet porn,
their cars, their cats,
or (as alleged in ancient times)
their first- or last-born.

So let not the black pot of the bourgeoisie
condemn the black kettle of the arms
manufacturers, the oil behemoths,
the mining conglomerates
and the juggernauts of the food industry.

The problem for me is that I would eagerly
give my willy or my life to save the planet
– but not to save humanity.

Sometimes it is difficult

to cope with one's own consciousness
let alone other people's.

The Book

most-shoplifted
in Russia is

In the Water Wars to come

and the total war thereafter
they will bomb the dams
and free the rivers.

 

Job description.

My two political heroes:
the artist and the comedian.

Edi Rama & Volodomyr Zelenskyy

 

Two works by Edi Rama:

and a link here to a page of his watercolours.

If I want to feel

less bad about being human
I imagine that I'm just
a small root-ache of a tree.

Kraftwerk at Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire.

Not worth watching on youTube.

Poor guy!

Jarbridge (Nevada).
He looks worried.
Strange wording:
are his current friends not good enough
or has he none at all ?
Or has his best friend wandered off
like an errant cat ?

Even at the apogee of our advance*

alpha-males rule the roost.

*In the military-industrial sense only.

A recent piece of research commissioned by the UK's Channel 4 TV suggested that more than half of people aged between 13 and 27 would prefer the UK to be an authoritarian dictatorship.

BUT

Elsewhere I read that although there is an alarming trend towards the far right among young males (those that interest themselves in politics, which may be a smallo number), it is young women who stand out as the more politically interesting demographic, as they are turning in ever greater numbers towards the left.

MEANWHILE,

Work in anthropology and psychology shows convincingly that humans tend to believe what others around them believe, especially those they see as successful. 

From plastic to paracetamol.

I got a headache from reading about
the process.

The lion replaces the lamb

and the sun still shines.

 

from Flags of Iran.