From merely creating

disastrous monocultures
we have now become one.

Black Hole.

 

Messier-87

A tiny chunk of a neutron star,
the size of a sugar cube,
could weigh a billion tons. 

More challenging than
the mysteries of astrophysics
is the infinitesimal question of how
the animal minds that can approach
(and indeed photograph) them

can wage senseless, bloody
wars for ownership of bits
of the tiny, ultimately ownerless Earth.

The nearest that Nature

gets to Everlasting Life upon this planet
is the eternal, equal fight
between its two smallest, most basic critters:
bacteria and viral bacteria-eaters.

One day's headlines from one newspaper.

 

Why is it so rare ?
It is such wonderful
and justified revenge.
I love Lorena Bobbitt –
and the brave few others.

Unfortunately, it is
an extremely slow method
of population- and hence
of CO₂- reduction.

I'm quite sure that
over the millennia
quite a lot of men (millions, maybe ?)
have savaged women's breasts
and nipples...

Elektric Kundalini!
especially when accompanied by Rachmaninov.

Ashamed to be Queer.

When I decided that I was not bisexual,
or confused, but queer, I assumed
like a typical Aspy that all other queers
would be lovely, sweet. liberal, gentle men.
I was taken to Heaven on Leicester Square, London:
horribly noisy but wonderful, colourful fun.

However, I read today,
at the same time, 'from 1974 until 1993,
9pm to 2am, seven nights a week, men
packed the dance-floor of Studio One,
West Hollywood, California.'
“It was the happiest place on Earth,”
remembers one patron, who, of course,
had not been pushed out of the door
for being a Person of Color.

Studio One, West Hollywood, 1980s

God is Grape!

 عنب أكبر
Wine
is the Blood of the Tortured Vine

and Art
the pressings of the hardening heart.

It's not surprising

that an American pick-up truck company
is called RAM,  as in the verb, though
its logo is, misdirectingly a male sheep. 

A recent model is a 'mini-tank' that anyone can drive –
requiring no special aptitude, no life-or-death decision –
into the Capitol or down Mexico way.

The RAM 1500 is 'lethal in a collision'.

“A truck is a tool*, but a Ram – a Ram is life.”

 

*Old slang for penis.

The principle of totalitarianism:

everyone you don't know is the enemy
and also some of those you do.

Even so, it sometimes seems to me
that to plant a tree might be more
beneficial than to support democracy,

one of whose main problems is the
induced and wilful ignorance
of the electorate.

The other may be the parliamentary absence
of the secret ballot.

If the starry sky

is not the Creator's memoir,
perhaps it is Their
astral appointments-diary ?

'Smoking Kills'

and

 

Optimism,

said Salman Rushdie
(not my favourite writer)
in an interview,
is a disease,
perhaps an infection.

I think that it's more
of an addiction.

"I hang my pyjamas in the forest

so the animals get used to my scent."

Hamza Yassin

After birth

the truest intimacy
is with death.

About Japan

most people know
little more than sushi;
certainly not
孤独死  kodokushi
which can be translated as 
just left to rot.

Eighteen treated for severe nausea

in Stuttgart after opera of live sex and piercing.

“Good technique in dance to me is not just someone who can do a perfect tendu, but also someone who can urinate on cue,” said choreographer Florentina Holzinger.

Psychedelic.

I don't think we want to expand
our oppressive minds so much as
to escape them
by means of liquids, powders, work,
day-dreaming, games, gaming, books,
sport, sex, pornography, risk, war...

Hurrah! Hooray!

The tenth of October
is World Porridge Day.

It comes in many forms
and can be made from any grain,
but for me the quintessential
epicentral sludge has to be made
from pin-head oatmeal (not sissy flakes)
soaked overnight (or at least an hour)
and served with sour milk, sour cream,
fromage blanc, curds or even kefir,
with a sprinkling of brown cane-sugar
(maybe with cinnamon for kids ?)
on the top for crunch.

It can also be made with full-cream milk
instead of water, but is then a tad too rich.

Depression

has a hard shell
protecting it
from grief.

Foretelling the Near Future.

Trouble (I'm Evil) 
Donald Trump's Victory Song, November 2024.

because...

Teeth, to many of us,
are a disturbing glimpse of madness, mindlessness
or death in a living human face.

'The grief of losing 20 relatives in Gaza.'

Imagine having 20 relatives to lose
(or even a father) ...
I'm glad that I have none.

In another newspaper article 
I read that people's lives collapse
if their mobile phones are snatched. 
Leave the totalitarian things at home !

A.H. - the disease

unrecognised
and most prevalent
in the USA :
Aggressive Hedonism.
Now let us pray.

If only more commercial premises

advertised themselves so subtly!

 

Bathroom furniture.

A famous person is doubly so
for having a urinal in his house
because of the inconvenient height
of water-closets which are too tall 
for the health of our bowels
(bidets – good also for feet – are just about right),
and  too low for standing-up men
& 'the handicapped'.

Perhaps it is utilitarian like this:

or verging on the obscene like al-Fayed's:

Washbasins, good for hands and torsos,
are too low for washing the face,
and slightly too high for many men
(and adolescents) to piss in,
though easy to rinse with taps
and even wash the willy afterwards.

Emotional ambiguity.

Petty pleasurable guilt I had,
and guilty pleasure on learning

that the domineering neighbour
I had come to dislike
had had a massive stroke. It will be fine
to see no more the weekly row
of six black underpants upon his washing-line.

Peculiarly,
instead of resentment that he had
succeeded in expiring before me
and (painlessly, swiftly as I hope
to exit) had 'pipped me at the post' –  I felt
a horrible triumph at outliving him.

I am as muddledly
mean-minded as anybody else.

One of his contemptuous autumn paintings.

Barbara Kingsolver

succinctly on Trump:

He's not even interested in the Presidency.
He's only interested in Winning.

Word of the Day:

Degrowth

 ? ? ? 

Another (unrelated) word:

(to) present (as in a film or other spectacle) 
seems to be much the same in all European languages
and comes from mediæval Latin præsentare, presumably from the presentation of the Host at Mass.  The modern French for a knick-knack or objets-d'art shelf or cabinet is présentoir. 

As for the noun: it came into English around 1200, from  Latin, 

The difference between present and gift is felt in the fact that one may be willing to accept as a present that which he would not be willing to accept as a gift : a gift is to help the one receiving it; a present does him honour, or expresses friendly feeling toward him. A present is therefore ordinarily to an individual; but in law gift is used, to the exclusion of present, as including all transfers of property without consideration and for the benefit of the receiver. [Century Dictionary]

Let us consider a new word and what it might mean: Depresent.
(After all, we have Degenerate.)

* * *

I recently bought a Stainless steel casserole with lid.

This description appeared on the packing in every official E.U.  language (plus Russian and Turkish) except Icelandic, Irish, Albanian, Catalan, Luxembourgeois, Nynorsk, Swedish and Danish.  

The following puzzled me: Dengta keptuvė su Dangčiu
(which I identified as Lithuanian because of the ė),  
Kastrolis ar Vāku (Latvian because of the ā) ... 
but Skirts Troškinimui and Karstumizturigs....might one of them be Maltese ?

It could be...as I read somewhere...

"The Bigger the Brains
The Tighter the Chains."

So much stuff, just stuff.

The over-washed people

in the museum :

are they there to gaze,

to worship or fill in time ?

The Individual (left)

and 'Social Media' (right)

Hymn of the American Republic

(to a familiar tune)

Amazing,
Gross

(indecency)

The breaking down

of gender barriers & stereotypes
would be a lovely and beneficial thing
if men became more womanly
and women stopped becoming
more and more like scary men.

Save the Soup : Just Stop Monocultures

of Sunflowers

and Rapeseed and Wheat and Maize...

The pipsqueak who sentenced the soup-throwers to many months in prison would not have acknowledged Van Gogh as a human being, much less bought one of his paintings. 
The sunflower series is the most popular and least interesting of his amazing output.  This action should make us think again about these paintings.

A writer in the Guardian points out that the great Vincent would not have wanted his paintings (other people thought of them as 'daubs') to be venerated, much less entombed in the terrifying concrete mausoleum of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

'During his lifetime, Van Gogh was a pariah. No one would buy his paintings, and he suffered from numerous untreated mental illnesses. He also lived in desperate poverty.'  

He wanted his pictures to hang on domestic walls, he wanted to share his uplifting and inspiring vision of landscape and people.
I think that he would have been appalled to learn where they have ended up.

Sad to relate,

where I live
in sterile Europe
there are no street-dogs.

Just passing...

Last here 5,000 years ago.

The comet C-023 A3
above a bank of cloud just before dawn.

 

Survivors.

Jews,
who have been persecuted only throughout
recorded history,
should spare a thought for wolves,
persecuted for at least ten thousand years.

Unfortunately, they spare few thoughts
for their nearest fellow-humans
who live their whole lives beset by howling fears.

Today's photo.

 Kathmandu, Nepal.

The Myth of Cerberus

Whereas we (mostly) can't 
tune into each other, dogs
can tune into shepherds,
sheep and other dogs
almost simultaneously.

Destruction before Discovery.

More than 100,000 plant species are thought to be undiscovered,
the majority of which are believed to be at risk of extinction...

Lying on the beach

on Easter Island.

The Moon and Dinosaurs.

Following my interest in little girls' groins,
long before Jurassic Park was dreamed up
and satellites were launched,
my earliest passions as a child

were Dinosaurs (1949, after seeing Brontosaurus
and, I think, Diplodocus
at London's National History Museum)

and Astronomy (1950, triggered by
an old book in the attic with a leather spine
about the solar system, written before
the discovery of non-planet Pluto).

So it was with some glee today
that I listened to a wonderfully insane
broadcast on the BBC World Service about 
Dinosaurs and the Moon.

A phone-stand:

something that you'll definitely
not be able to do without.

Write to Santa!

 

Muslims are taught

that the idea of Perfection
this side of Paradise
is blasphemy.

They would do well
to avoid 'Western' and Eastern
ethics and æsthetics,

and to respect young women
much more than old men
with prosthetics.

Word of the Day:

retro-futurist,

as in a description of FF Coppola's Megalopolis as
A strident retro-futurist folly. 

Dear 'Health-care Professionals',

Lives are not saved
merely prolonged.

(Length versus quality,
mumbles Robert's ghost.

Why bother ?)

Some people say that
only Jesus saves.

And no other.

At work or school,

it's not so much the bullying
that does the damage,

as the perpetual, even life-long
anxiety that it engenders.

It often happens

to most of us
when we look up something in Google.

I started by typing Baltrušaitis...
                                                 and ended with

1. The Weighing of a Soul (where ?) to find out
if its weight of sin is great enough
to send it to Hell;

2. The soul in eternal hellish torment.

And lastly, another capital
from the 12th century church at Saint-Révérien, Nièvre.

Seriously, though.

 

Doggerel.

I have been to Norway and Albania
To Central Africa and Canada
and the middle of the Baltic Sea.
Like most people, I've never been to Paradise*
– I've been too much, too long, in me.

*But where I live is pretty close.

Early War Baby.

When I was growing up in royalist east Belfast,
to talk about The South of Ireland
(at the time, officially entitled The Irish Free State)
in polite society was like
mentioning a 'French Letter'
or Cancer, the Duke of Windsor or syphilis:

The less said (in polite society) the better.

Of the Civil War, and the Free State's
handy neutrality in World War Two,
my friends and I were decent in our ignorance.

Climate Change in leafy Suburbia.

From calm to calamity
From here to eternity