For most of human history

people have come up with reasons why humans are special  and unique, and then scientists like me test it out, and we  find that, actually, maybe we’re not that special after all. 

Kanzi

Israel is, of course, a Middle Eastern country

pretending to be a Superior European one
run by God's Only Chosen.  And, like most countries
between the Atlas Mountains and the valleys of Sichuan,

– New York Times

Being and Nothingness.

A lost jotting by J-P.S.
Une crotte de chien
est plus que rien.

Perhasp if Palestinians learned to 'speak proper'...

Book of Judges, XII,6

לֶת,

Probably the greatest Persian leader

in Iran's 3,000-year history:
the committed democrat
and democratically-elected Mohammad Mossadegh
two years before he was removed in a 'coup'
by Britain and the USA.

1951

The Cannes Film Festival (which opens today)

was established as a protest
against Mussolini's propaganda festival in Venice
where Leni Riefenstahl won big for her Olympic Games Masterpiece.

*

"a well-known French critic had such vivid dreams in the darkness that he became convinced they were scenes in the films. His reviews were full of brilliant analysis of moments that did not exist."

- Agnes Poirier

Not all cats hate water.

Bath-time for Benny … ‘He loved paddling in the bath.’ 

photo by Alan Peevers

Sea Pictures

Jewish refugees, Havana, Spring 1939.

Palestinian refugees, Gaza, Autumn 2025.

The baby-boomers born in 1945 -1955

continue to be obsessed by ageing
and old age. 
Today, just after
David Attenborough's 100th birthday
I learned that Creative and Intellectual Activities
prolong your life (provided you keep off
the drink and drugs and suicidal thoughts).
Moreover,

I'm only 84, after all,
so my fruit eating, coffee-drinking,
creativity and dissident
obsessive thinking
should 'keep me going'.

But, emotionally speaking,
am I up to it ?

Absolutely.

 I asked him if intelligent life begins and ends with us. “Oh, that would   be very disappointing,” Loeb said, sipping from a glass of water.   Humans, he said, “are not that intelligent. If that’s the best that the   universe made, I would lose my respect for the size, the scale and the   length of time that the universe existed.” 

  - from The Guardian, April 2026.

Two splendid paintings not easy to find on subtly-censored Google.

Admire the feet - and the snake !

Admire the belly and the balls and the pale stripe
between - not to mention the facial expression.

The Fibonacci Sequence - sororiously.

"We don’t want to admit it, but fashion is a tool of oppression
for women the world over -
from the slave labour that’s used to make the clothes
to the unfathomable bra sizing system inspired by
The Fibonacci Sequence."

- Lucy Substack-Sweet

Jesus struggled

to get by in an occupied country
of checkpoints, crucifixions,
informers, slaves - and no mirrors.

Render unto Cæsar, he said.
In other words
leave the normals to their rent
and property and tax-forms 
and hypocrisy.
Be itinerant and live in the spirit
and each sad moment of the spirit.

L'imperméable

 
 froideur des Français[es]

People are bad for bird-people.

Super Alpha ++ Brain and semi-divine Being Donald Trump
is correct (Vivat! Vivat!) :

Wind turbines kill up to two million birds a year on land in the USA.
No numbers are available for coastal waters.

This is a tiny number compared with the two billion
torn apart by cats.  Then there are death-traps:
high buildings, lorries, trucks, nets, etc.
amounting to at least ten billion slaughtered birds :

a holocaust.  Where are the Shoah memorials ?
Nowhere.  I can find only cat-turds.

*  *  *

Talking of holocausts...in a dream the other night,
a Corporal Hitler came to me
delightfully naked (rather small willy)
and whispered sexily
into one of my deaf ears,

while angels sang Die Fahne hoch to a delightful melody.
It was moonlight at Stonehenge

Do you think (he gently barked) it may have been a bit 
excessive to make sub-humans pay
a hundredfold in advance
for the war crimes they would commit
in misplaced revenge ?

*

'Rabbi who boasted of bulldozing Palestinian homes lit torch for Israel’s national day.'

Omer Bartov has spent decades researching the second world war, antisemitism, Nazi indoctrination and historical amnesia, and has published 10 books about the Holocaust. So he speaks with considerable authority when he deplores the way the memory of the Shoah has been instrumentalized for political purposes, becoming “a vast fig leaf”, as he puts it in the book: “its lamentable effect to combine self-victimization and self-pity with self-righteousness, hubris and the euphoria of power”.

The American Dream

was so childish and fragile
that it took just one mad, bad,
big baby to smash it.

But the putrid pieces are everywhere.

Underproud.

I remember being told
that I should aim to
make something of my life,
consider my career.

But slowly, slothfully,
disappointingly,
never 'gainfully employed',
I ploughed
my own almost invisible
shallow-fallow furrow zig-zaggily
and (thus far) remain uncowed.

Is this a neo-Wildeism ?

The trouble with The Young
is that they are so Out of Date.

But this is true of the whole
Human Race (to catastrophe).

Essentially obvious.

It seems to me a no-brainer
that existence precedes essence,
since we exist in fact (somehow)
and only imagine essence.

'The Appeasers'

who supported Germany
and Italy in the 1930s
are now, ironically,
Zionists.

« When Palestinians kill Israelis,
it is a 'massacre' and a casus belli.
But when Israelis kill Palestinians,
they are merely exercising Israel's
'right to defend itself,'»
says TheIntercept.com.

Well, obviously.

Drone-master

'Madyar' Brovdi.

Ukraine claims that for the fifth month in a row
Russia has lost more soldiers than it can recruit,
putting deaths at 30,000 to 34,000 a month... 

Horrible, hypocritical

religions engender
beautiful music
(including Quranic chant)
- which in no way justifies
its origin in authoritarian,
misogynistic cults.

The soul is just the self dolled-up.

Anyone can have a medal made

and award it to themselves...
and Noam Chomsky.
I love this guy !

Three cheers for Portugal

 and Pangea !
for Europe's first Elephant Sanctuary.

At the first and only circus* I was brought to
I cried to escape, not only the sight of the poor animals,
but also the ugly, threatening clowns.
(I found the Flying Trapeze less than breathtaking.)

Nor did I last long at Whipsnade zoo:
it was the very hot summer of 1947
and the sight of the polar bear in a puddle of water
in a concrete enclosure was heartbreaking.

*Bertram Mills, London 1948. It was ghastly.
My poor mother had to lead me out when the animals came on.

The death of 'literature' ?

You could read a dozen modern novels
before you came across such a gem as:
"beyond two strips of well-attended fly-paper..."

(not by John le Carré)

In the Real World

it is highly unlikely
that any in the ghastly ranks
beastly billionaires
would ever offer a million-dollar prize
(with accompanying encomium)
to the person who breeds
an easily-peeled onion.

 

Barrels and Buckets

 ...and on to ladles ?

“I’d say Iran has America over a barrel,
but we can’t afford a barrel.
Can we do this over a bucket?"

Stephen Colbert on The Late Show (US)
not really talking about sodomy.

Because it's British and it can ?

 

'Behind the scenes'

at London Zoo.

Emergency operation.

Great for questions about Prohibition

and World War One,
but not about the Holocaust
or the Moon Landing.

A wet morning.

Cacti in the rain.

And Fatshedera, Pieris...

'Womaniser'

is a term applied to men,
though it could, in theory, be applied
to voracious queer women.

The female equivalent
seems to be man-eater.

Need I say more ?

In 1945

the Germans had a magic word:
Endsieg
(much better than the English
'Final Victory').
Of course, it never came.

And the misbegotten concept
has almost vanished from the earth,
even in Iran, even in the USA,
and (almost) even in Russia.

Moonshit.

'Transit'
in French
often has an intestinal meaning.

The Transit of Venus
springs to mind,

and through confused
but linear thinking
(Transit by Ford)
I imagine
this afternoon
that we might be
transitory results
of transits of the moon.

Outside

The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York.

photo by Shannon Stapleton

Capitalism is, essentially, gambling.

So why should anyone be surprised that

'Almost every writer

changes my mind – that’s the point of reading.’

- Katie Kitamura.

*

Also from today's Guardian
two interview-questions for actor Juliet Stevenson:

An apparently neutral word

can fire up a nasty industry.

Adult movies implies
that you're an adult
if you watch them.

'To have the jitters'

in French
= avoir les jetons,

which, going back to the 12th century,
= 'to have the shits'

but jetons are also tokens,
or chips used for roulette or poker :

another (and not the most ancient) connection
between fæces and lucre.

Jews attacked in London.

Christians attacked
in Israel.   And so it goes. 

One rarely sees

happy dogs
on leads.

Great Statue -

 

by 'Banksy'

but of course it will be removed.

Three Kings.

Proud Guardians of our Rubbish
at a "Waste Disposal Facility" near Istanbul.
Turkey is the largest recipient of European plastic waste.
Others include Malaysia and Indonesia.

photo by Sedat Suna

The British Empire when I was born

within it.

Ah, the good old days before WW2 !

The French prison-van

was called panier-à-salade
not just because of the criss-crossed
bars but because, horse-drawn
on rough roads, the prisoners inside
were tossed about like lettuce
in a salad-shaker.

The Catholic Church in Ireland.

Irish travellers to eastern Europe before the fall 
of the Berlin Wall in 1989 
were struck by the sense of familiarity they felt 
in cities such as Warsaw, Prague or Budapest. 

read more >

And I, on the other hand,
a welfare-cushioned
Northern Irish Protestant, rather liked
a similarity of atmosphere in
Belfast and East Berlin.

*

How Proust can Change your Life is a brilliant book
by Alain de Botton.

How Priests have destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives
doesn't bear thinking about.

Not all old codgers are 'vulnerable'

(except to insanity).

 

Wolf-thoughts and Nuclear Power.

 (At no time a good idea for Iran.)

Cocaine.

(after a famous poem by Nina Cassian) 

Call yourself alive? Look, I promise you
that for the first time you’ll feel your pores opening
like carp-mouths, and you’ll actually be able to hear
your blood singing though your genitals,
your nipples and your brain;

and you’ll feel sunbeams sliding
across your eye like the glitzy train
of a Hollywood dress. For the first time
you’ll be aware of gravity
like a rusty nail in your foot,
and your shoulder-blades will ache
for want of silly wings.

Call yourself alive? I promise you
that you’ll be deafened
by desert dust and filmy things
falling on the wormy furniture.
You’ll feel your eyebrows turning into two gashes,
and every false memory you have
will begin a sickening vibration of eyelashes,
a false regeneration.  

Call yourself alive ? When we die we join
yet another queue, a line
signposted Utter Devastation.

some poems by Nina Cassian >

on psycho-active drugs >

The doorbell went at 5am. Six masked men were outside...

Rasmus Munk has been concocting a dish at his two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Copenhagen that will taste of detention under an authoritarian regime, the subject of the entire installation.

A scent has been commissioned, too: it will smell like a freshly dug grave in the Belarus countryside in late August, laid with rotting flowers.

Photograph: Anna Liminowicz/The Guardian

‘It’s a rereading of the Sisyphus story’ … 

Nicolai Khalezin from Belarus with his sculpture of banned books for the Venice biennale.