*

 

The kids are burning the bins in France.

They should be burning
the dustbins of history.
They should be burning the banks. 

And sacrificing the servants

of the bond markets.

Askeophobia

My favourite activities
are eating (with wine), reading, planting,
continuing my researches
on the world-wide web,
and going to bed.

With no aches, pains or handicaps
at the age of eighty-five
I find that moving from chair to chair
is excellent exercise.

The Rape of Albania.

Paranoid Enver Hoxha
covered Albania with concrete bunkers,

some of which have been converted
(even into bars and dwellings),
but most of which are ruined or have disappeared.

Albania's new ruler is doing much worse.

Proposal for concrete towers
on the beach in Lezha.

"The difference between China and 'The West'

 "
is that in "The West" you can change governments
but not [fiscal] policies, whereas in China
you can change policies but not the government."

- Yanis Varufakis

from his Guardian video There is no such thing as Democracy, only theatre (tragedy and farce) and cosplay (but not by Trump), which is for subscribers only. E-mail me if you'd like to download the audio file from Dropbox.

Crucifixion-depictions.

 The other day, I came across a photo of this 12^th-century fragment
 of a Catalan crucifixion, and noticed that Jesus here actually looks Jewish
 – which is extremely rare.

 

His eyes are closed, which is extremely common,
so I did a bit of investigating to see
if there were any dying Jesuses with open eyes. 
There are just a few, and they are fairly unremarkable.
Jesus, unbearded, is well-fed to the point to stodginess on this early ivory,

 

while on this much later Romanesque ivory he is rather overdressed,
but bearded.

St Paul was not a fan of the crucifixion.  His view of the god he had created was as King of Heaven and the World and overseer of Family Values.  He was as ardent a royalist as Constantine the Great.  And for over a thousand years most representations of Jesus were as King of Heaven.

The earliest known Crucifixion-depiction in stone is a satirical Roman  graffito with a donkey's head.

But by the third century, crucifixion-amulets were in circulation.

It wasn’t until the thirteenth century that the lust for blood entered Christianity, ushering in thousands of horrible representations of suffering:
Jesus became more victim than king, but was still king of Heaven.  
It wasn’t until the fourth Lateran Council, also in the thirteenth century that marriage became a Christian rite (hitherto accorded only to kings and princes), not long after Jesus’ mother became a cult figure.  

Later on the ghastly Sacred Heart, beloved of Irish Catholics became (and remains) a vogue.

But, to revert from the obscene to the sublime, this superb Romanesque tympanum treats the subject very sanely.
As I said, Romanesque depictions of the crucifixions are very rare, but (reverting from the obscene to the sublime) this lovely Spanish tympanum, crams quite a lot of the post-crucifixion story into a small space.

Jesus is shown carrying the cross as he stumbles to Calvary, a scene that was uncommon on tympanums of that period.
In front of Christ are two soldiers; behind him, two more soldiers; and following them are two figures: a bearded man in a cassock and a woman with a grimace of pain, clutching her right hand with her left, in the traditional gesture of grief. 

On the outer ring, the three Marys are depicted visiting the tomb (sarcophagus), indicating the Resurrection. On either side, two soldiers guard the tomb. Their bodies lie on the ground in a strange contortion to fit the space. 

Finally, there is the unusual figure of an angel holding a book, maybe the Gospels.

To return to the question of eyes, here is Jesus (white, of course) with his eyes rolled back in pain, by the renaissance painter, Niccolo di Liberatore.  He is clean-shaven.

The thousands of crucified under the vicious Roman empire were always stripped of their clothes, including their loin-cloths.  Only one Western representation (that I know of – by guess who ?) shows the Prophet of Galilee naked and pale - and teen-aged.

Michelangelo: Crucifixion

Doomed (to fail)

There's not much hope
of any kind of oversight or regulation
(let alone control) of the AI industry, given that

Politicians and lawmakers don't even know
the difference between 'The Internet"
and the World Wide Web.

A Difference.

The French and German Nazis
didn't blitz Jewish quarters to bits,
didn't bomb Jews out of their homes –
just rounded them up,

Central Paris, 1941.

and crammed them into transit camps
on the way to Germany and Poland.

Drancy, Paris Outskirts, 1941

The Anatomy Lesson.

I've donated my corpse
to Toulouse Medical School,
and paid in advance for its transport.
Dr Kulp's cadaver might have had
a better time dead than living.
I also have a leafy grave
(likewise paid for) waiting
down the road . Ah, the joy
of post-mortem giving!

Sorry, I can't hear you,

There's a sheep-tick in my ear.

 

The sheep tick, or Ixodes ricinus, is responsible for spreading Lyme disease,
which is characterised by an expanding oval red rash on the skin followed by fever, chills, fatigue, headache, muscle pain, nerve inflammation, and (in some cases involving children) facial palsy.

The symptoms aren’t caused by the tick but by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi it carries and spreads.

The tick also spreads other parasites that can cause encephalitis and a range of animal diseases...

Just thought you might like to know...I once had facial palsy.

Unbelievable.

On poemhunter.com Anthony Weir
has many poems, but no followers –
which makes him 'come all over queer'.

Olivia Colman

is one of my favourite actors,
who has splendidly 'always described myself 
to my husband as a gay man’.

Moreover, she also does not attempt in real life
to disguise the fetching colours of her hair.

The best news ever, in the history of the planet.

 Let us rejoice at the 'miracle-tree'

growing through the thick concrete floor
of Reactor 5, Chornobyl Чорнобиль
Ukraine.  

Will a leaf impart eternal life ?

(Only $25,000 delivered by drone via Amazon.)

Nobody has worshipped it
nor chopped it down, so far...

Sculptural tokenism.

 It is easier to 

erect a monument

than to work against injustice.

Especially monuments to the victims of 'communism'.

Canada had no communist victims.
But the USA had many.

Ottawa, Canada.

Where are the monuments to the victims of capitalism ?

Thinking of Cretan and Iberian bull-cults,

I doubly appreciate this fine Romanesque
scene of a woman dancing
to the sound of a bullock playing a three-stringed rebel or vielle
on a capital at L'Estany in Catalonia.
(Do the circles represent money ?)

Cat-pub kit.

A book nook is a glowing night light/miniature house
that you can build and put on your bookshelf. 

There are many designs to choose from
- including a Feline Wine-bar.

Hello fish-eaters !

Just letting you know that the last 600 monk seals

in the whole of the Mediterranean are dwindling

on the coast of Türkiye - victims of drag-net fishing

for you and your cat.

Lovely picture, but

I wish people wouldn't use
telephoto lenses to photograph the moon.

 

Car thefts rise in South Africa.

 

"I don’t socialize with AI",

said Bill Gates, on NBC.

"It knows I'm a Very Serious Person."

And this blogger, preferring plants,
is too serious to socialise with people.

Super-intelligent AI

(or Independent Intelligence)
will probably perform suicide.

Wise humans, on the other hand,
may get around to understanding
that breathing is air-abuse.

And the Big Smile Giacometti Sculpture prize goes to

 

Tyrannosaurus rex

In bed last night

I heard Bach being played
on accordeon.  It was great.

Think of all the money
wasted on organs
that could have gone
to starving orphans!

The reason why

 

is simply because we have turned children
into totems in our perverted fetishism
of sex and nudity.
To finger a boy of twelve
has eclipsed blasphemy and murder
in the canon of evil. 
The uncle who does it
is the seed of the devil.

But then – I write as
an old-age gerontophile. 

theguardian/film2026/sept.25/chris-hansen-paedophile-show

This atrocious dog-painting

could be yours for only
two and a half million pounds.

Pretty good writer,

pretty poor painter.

 

"I felt extremely tired...

"I saw that nothing can be said on this earth
that wasn't predictable."

- Anne Tyler, The Patchwork Planet.

A scrotum-shrivelling illustration

(more a diagram)
of an swollen and inflamed
prostate gland.
Old chaps out there –
be not ashamed,
but have a good urination!

 

A splendid Romanesque tree,

farmers, and the foppish
Guy, count of Ponthieu
on the Bayeux 'Tapestry'.

Ai Wei-wei:

 

Mushrooms by Ai Wei-wei

"Cruelty is endured and inflicted by the same people.

In Days Without End, Thomas McNulty, an Irish famine victim,
takes part in slaughtering Indigenous Americans; 

in The Newer World, Tennyson, an African American victim
of enslavement, does the same.
It is “never enough for Americans to live in their American paradise. There had to be blood and chaos all the while too.”

- review of the latter by Sara Collins.

Gazing at the view,

I am sitting
on a mink-covered
barbed-wire fence
between living
and existing.

No asteroid required.

After the suicide-species
has done away with itself
(while failing to eliminate
the remnants of other life on the planet
there will be a short perpetuity
of vegetable bliss.

A dead paddy-field. Tree-planting
might have been a better option.

Living in a tub,

My oldest living friend, from 1973.

The same rhizome, often divided.

Nymphæa pygmæa 'rubra'

Brave Slow Fashion.

read more >