bloginafog

was, in medieval times, sometimes called the Fruit of Paradise ...long before United Fruit established plantations & régimes in Guatemal...

by Richard Baker  

do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained*; and the restrainer or Reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.' Willi...

than angry. Sadder and wiser ? Poor God!  And so he has abandoned us to Judaism, Christianity and Islam in that order. Plus our other own de...

As usual, the News Organ spends five minutes telling us what has actually happened in the war between the Shahatollah and what the late latt...

release from sweet confinement in the womb into the sad captivity of the world. And then, if you are very privileged, a tomb.  

 ...and a good Monet would be much cheaper. Scientists have captured  in unprecedented detail a beautiful image   of the vast Milky Way gala...

 If – instead of having my tonsils and adenoids removed in 1948 – I had been given TRT ( alias ART ). I might have gained the energy, stamin...

There once was a writer  who wrote far too much. and didn't really want to be read.  He didn't like people too much, and most of the...

65 centimetres wide and placed in the little niche on the other side of the street from my house (my smallest piece of garden), this limesto...

You can Do with a Penis.

Had it been possible I would have written a letter of appreciation of his short stories to Kafka, and of praise for his portraits to Vincent...

only I feel so good after dinner and a modest measure of wine, that my socialist disposition makes me want to share the pleasure.

Adam and Eve dropping from a Tree in Autumn. Among withered leaves and a sloughed-off skin, no tomb, Fall Guy and Fall Doll.

Can Artificial Intelligence be creative ? Memoirs aren't improved by total recall. Is Artificial Intelligence capable of curiosity ? (a...

 very much.  Leigh Hunt (who might even now be called a seditious agitator, and be arrested for supporting the Palestinian cause) was sente...

 – as when Lent and Ramadan endure for the same forty days, or as nearly as dammit. Though not necessarily when Israel starts a religious wa...

(don't we all in this vale of dark deceit ?) It belonged to a lady with good taste and slender wrists just like mine (in contrast with m...

means nothing until it strikes, arrives, or sidles in.

They sell music-box mechanisms on eBay (hundreds of them) without informing us of the tunes that they play !

"Always resist those who say Work hard to live badly. " This is the state of social involution. Laurent Binet wrote: "Sport ?...

No fear. * Right-minded is left-leaning.

that my Fair Trade coffee from Rwanda is harvested from trees tended by happy, trained mountain gorillas ? How I would like to !

But he's better now.

The extraordinary whistling dogs are falling silent... ...

environmental footprint is not only a hundred thousand times the size of the footprint of a hunted hare, but many hundreds of times larger t...

Pusher of Christian Values Deprives Valentine Of 1,800 years Of sainthood

that has to be policed is worth perpetuating. As for democracy , the Athenian experiment was hardly worth the name, run by mono-ethnic, high...

the pogroms, the hate and the greed. Golden Jackal, Jordan.  

  … Right now, somewhere, not very far away, someone is either being beaten, locked in a cupboard, being raped, being abused, being coerced ...

by Conrad Felixmüller. How I love the German Expressionists and the Weimar Republic! It was possibly as Advanced as Civilisation will ever ...

with upright tentacles folded. Schmidt Ocean Institute  

SOMNOT Smelly Old Men Not Welcome. I was not invited to lunch. Faint odours of piss and scrotum and fennel or camomile, or even vetiver. are...

Let us give praise to the Pharmaceutical Industry. Amen! Our sacred  Serenity Pills are addictive, and thus we are gratefully condemned to ...

on her superbly brave decision to have the trial of her vile pimp-husband rapist  held in open court : She said that if she had been 20 yea...

to learn from rather than merely tolerate each other. But for our petty brains it's too much bother.

 What will they be wearing ? Unaccountably, Planet Earth has been banned allegedly for its more than sixty thousand uninterrupted years of s...

There's not much of it about not even in peaceful, super-democratic, quadralingual, multi-ethnic Switzerland.

by the ignorance of Germans of what was going on in the concentration-camp next door. But do you want to know what is going on in the neares...

in Mississippi now remember with pleasure the days of Jim Crow . photo by Anuwar Hazanka  

capitalism demands conformity, not liberty – let alone equality –  and fierce competition rather than fraternity for all eternity.

No, just a scary sunset, some derricks, and a statue of hypocrisy photo by Charly Triballeau

    Read all about it ...

make you rethink how you relate to the world.' – Tracy Chevalier My literary life - so far - has roamed for eighty years from Little Gr...

apart from the 'enslavement in Babylon', the expulsion by the Romans, the ghettoes, pogroms, Shoah, mass-muggings, unending insults ...

The crocuses and violets are blooming. When I insert my hearing-aids I hear the kettle (but no birds) sing.

are a constant quantity.' - Estragon, in Beckett's Waiting for Godo t. (But it's the quality that matters, says the priest.)

for when I've looked in them I have never seen more than an image, a curious simulacrum no more real than a photograph, a life-like pupp...

Famous people are not necessarily worth knowing any more than are 'hard workers'.

 from Wildlife Photographer of the Year . photo by Mogens Trolle