Our amazing Progress since Palæolithic times.

"A Recent Survey Found..."

that a quarter of the population of the USA
thought that Noah's wife was...
Joan of Arc
(but not of the Covenanters).
For God so loved Mammon,
that s|he gave up Holi Selassie II
and devoured Cupid
to redeem our Christian debts
and make us rich and very stupid.

The ultimate stupidity:

to combat death,
but the engendering of human life
is the most destructive
waste of breath.

Parents

usually lay waste
a child's exuberance -
then schools destroy
all tenderness.

We are becoming

mere surface and symbol,
artefacts of other people's
glamour and sway,

but life begins as art and artefacts
slowly fade away.

Cheese

has been made in a British laboratory
from bacteria on human skin.
What's so wonderful about that ? 
I grow it frequently on a tiny area
of my body.  Even when it is not fresh
it is very tasty - and not just to me.
Even if we are not what we eat,
we can certainly eat what we are -
sometimes with considerable glee.

But, on another topic entirely :-)
the picture below shows Urechis unicinctus
( 海肠;  海腸; hǎicháng;  螠虫 or ユムシ yumushi;
개불 gaebul) - a species of marine spoon worm.

Let us rejoice

in the hallucinogenic pointlessness of life
if not in its humbling unfairness!

Art of the Day

Bacchus was blind

Eros autistic
and Priapus (of course)
was quadraplegic.

The country that invented the factory-system

which emptied the countryside and created
appalling (yet appealing) cities
to house the working poor
who subsidise the rich,

much later
took the simple ball-game of the poor
and turned it into a monstrous
business-apparatus. 
                                  A game
became a sport and was murdered
by the soulless hand of investment capital.
All this is England's shame.

Lord Byron would kill himself on seeing us.

Celebrity has become
the fawning on the most pushy talentless
by the multitudes of mindless, tasteless.
     I don't have no admiration
     for the aberration
     of aspiration...

Ever since I realised

that I was physically attracted more to
(and was physically attractive to)
certain kinds of men - even pale ones -
than to most kinds of pale-skinned women,
I have been 'uncomfortable' with ghetto-words
like gay, homosexual and (even) queer.
But now I have decided that there is a better,
broader, vaguer anthropological term that could be used:
the term that (probably unnaturally)
divides natural societies into Hunters and Gatherers.
I, like the man-loving men that I know,
am a gatherer, not a hunter. But this is not to say
that hunters do not gather, nor that gatherers do not hunt,
and not to say that all hunters are heterosexual,
nor that all male gatherers are gay...

Making the best - and the most - of "old age".

As Yet-another-Pustule-on-the-Planet,

a microscopic part of the filthy rash
that evolution has infected itself with,
I think more of us should try
very gently, not too hard,
to be - at least - unaspiring pus,
contented trash.

Yesterday, Joe Biden,

the ignorant US vice-president, declared
that the annexation of bits of one country
by a powerful neighbour was totally unacceptable.

He overlooked the fact
that the United States grew and grew
partly by annexation of large chunks of Mexico
(for which derisory sums were sometimes paid
as for the purchase of New France)
or land which it had simply occupied.

The annexation of Crimea by Russia seems paltry by comparison.

If the father

of all perniciousness is property,
the mother is the vicious vanity
of life-after-death.

"Women's Liberation"

resulted in
women working at three jobs
and getting very stressed
rather than two and getting bored.
"Gay Liberation" resulted in oppression
by a pseudo-macho obsession
with anal penetration.
'Freedom' comes with costs
that the heart can ill-afford.

Religious architecture

Mosques carry and contain
an ambivalent sexual symbolism.
They can represent the scalped phallus
of male domination reaching up to God's home,
which is a sort of beggarless Riyadh in the sky -
or on the other hand they can show
the worshipper or casual passer-by
that no matter how big and high
and marble-smooth the dome,
the actual workings of religion are down below.

I am shrinking from thinking

what life would be like
for a person with Asperger's
who ends up with Alzheimer's...

Dom Perineum

- the champagne
of sensual love.

Comes free
without bottle.

Princeton Concludes What Kind of Government America Really Has,

and It's Not a Democracy...

But it could be worse if it were...

Just how wrong can one be ?

Most gods are deifications or
personifications of the penis...

"Dear Mr and Mrs God,

"This letter is to inform you of God's behaviour in class. To be honest, God makes normal school life impossible, as He/She/It is with us all of the time, everywhere. Not even the staff break-room, or the study, is sacred. At this very moment He/She/It has the audacity to be in every fibre of my body and, whilst it is not yet a criminal offence for someone so young/old, I think it shows tendencies better dealt with by more qualified authorities. I am therefore suggesting that you send your Son/Daughter/Thing to one of the many excellent state-run homes for such unfortunate children/young/old people.

"I am sure that you appreciate that I have his/her/its bests interests at heart, and am forwarding his/her/its name accordingly.  I hesitate to mention this at such a time, but we are still praying for a new pavilion.

Yours,

 JH Smallwood, Headmaster."

from Calcium Made Interesting by Graham Chapman.

Such a pity that George

went into politics.
He was a keen pupil
and might have become a Sunday Painter.

George W. Bush: self-portrait in the bath circa 2012

Anthony Weir: Autoportrait dans la baignoire, 1984.

Now that our lives are getting more and more medicalised,

I, long since vasectomised,
am ready to offer the only part of the body
that does not age
and be a penis-donor.
Other parts of my body are as sensitive
and more sensual than my blood-filled boner.

The bizarre popular obsession with vampires

expresses feelings that
we are being constantly drained
of our time, our energy, our laughter,
our capacity to relate
to anything except our labour.

Today might be a day to remember -

like the day in 1936 when Hitler's army occupied the Rhineland,
or the day in 1938 when Hitler's army and SS occupied the German-speaking area of Czechoslovakia.
What will happen in Eastern Ukraine ?
What use is NATO except to infuriate the Russians
and keep corrupt Western arms industries booming at the expense of the poor ?
I am proud to be a citizen of one of only two nations which refuse to join NATO.
(Thus spake an admirer of the younger Cato.)

Money.

Nothing that we buy
is untainted.

A las tres de la tarde...

France subscribes to CET - Central European Time,
Nuremberg-time, L'heure liechstensteinoise -
and not, as its geography would reasonably require,
to WET - Western European Time,
the untrustworthy tempo and perfidious hour of Albion
( & Norway, Ireland, Portugal, Morocco, Mauretania...)
and so the summer sun is at its highest in St-Antonin
at three o'clock in the afternoon.

A sidelight on Western Democracy

There is a higher proportion of women
in the Afghan parliament
than in the shouting-shop
at Westminster.

Kurt Schwitters and I

URSONATE (Primæval Sonata) by Kurt Schwitters

Introduction:
Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu,                                          pögiff,                                                       kwii Ee.	1
Oooooooooooooooooooooooo,	6
dll rrrrr beeeee bö dll rrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö,                                      (A)      rrrrr beeeee bö fümms bö wö,              beeeee bö fümms bö wö tää,                         bö fümms bö wö tää zää,                              fümms bö wö tää zää Uu:

	....
																																																																												continued            HERE

	Since I have been accused of writing Fascist Doggerel, I thought I would publish some Ur-doggerel by the wonderful Mr Schwitters, to whom I dedicated my VOV (Very Own Video) on totally wondrous YouTube:

This seminal piece of work by the spermless wonder 

(not made famous by the splendid Sue Townsend who died yesterday) 

has  had over 1,251¾ viewings -

a mere fifteenth of the number of viewings of his Glimpses of Belfast in 1963,

but over ten times the number of viewings of his
Accidental Superimposition of Compositions by Charles Kœchlin,
which is much, much better...even if (as you'll see and hear) not really comparable...

My (rather good) Bath-bop-aloofah has received only 26 views, alas!

I missed meeting Mr Schwitters by a year or so when I holidayed as a small child on

his erstwhile, involuntary, intellectual-packed island home:the earldom of Man (Eiléan Mannin)
just after World War II¼...

If only...

For thousands of years

human beings wore, carried
and depended on
little amulets (or talismans) like this:

www.beyond-the-pale.org.uk

Now they carry, talk to, and depend on
amulets like this:

How liberating it is
not to be superstitious !

Novelty

(says the spermless sage)
is as timeless
as it is transient.

A crassly-simplistic, Bolshevik point of view

shared on Facebook by a rich
hypocrite mother of two.

(My agents tell me that Facebook is some sort of global gossip club 
for the Devotedly Trivial.)

' If humans were as they ought to be

we would be adored
not feared
by animals.'

- Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Freedom is

being in control not just of your feelings
and sensations, but of your time -
the theft of which is other people's vast
and unacknowledged crime.

Everything we do is just filling in time.

Say that you're proud to be
one of the non-breeding,
prophesying and
undeserving poor,
like Diogenes or Jesus,
and ashamed to be human
on teeming planet Earth
(but not too morbidly ashamed)
while laughingly, lightly
regretting your birth!

Damn and Drat!

As usual,
I missed it.
The International
Day of the Rat.

In the Temple of Rats, Bikaner.

There has been a little revolution,

a stealthy revolution,
which has replaced the old system of control
through enforced deference to the Great and the Good
by the unruly masses,
with a new one, set up under the belief
that human beings are just glorified computers
with faulty hardware, replaceable software...
My Medical Advice to Dummies:
The more you go to the doctor,
the more you’ll have to go to the doctor.

By a strange coincidence

I painted, some 25 years ago,
a self-portrait in the bath
uncannily similar to one
recently unveiled by George W. Bush
(no mean painter of his dog Barney).
It is the only painting of mine
which I have somehow failed to photograph.
Neither of us included the belly, 
but needless to say, I included what
George W. did not - a floating willy.

That which

I value most in life
after food
(of course)
is solitude.

Sex is like marzipan.

A little goes a long way,
and it is the fruit cake
you may not have realised
you wanted in the first place.

Since I am running out of half-intelligent things to say

 

I am re-releasing a blog by Jindra.

Prophet Isaiah he say

"all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment"
Chapter 64, verse 6
An ornery old
(bearded, but perhaps not cuddly)
guy from long ago
certainly knew people. 
He also said: "Woe
unto them that join house to house,
that lay field to field, till there be no place."
Chapter 5, verse 8
He was a guy who valued open space
and had no qualms about expressing hate.

The superficial, representative democracies

may be accountable to some - even to a high - degree.
But good, translucent government, coherent social attitudes,
intelligent planning, rational and sensible foreign policies,
no party nor coalition can ever guarantee.