Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Monday 30 November 2015

Hot Tip for Sensualists

Boys, Dudes and Gentlemen-
Don't wash your hands
after chopping the chilli.
Pull down your pants
and wipe them on your willy.
Girls, women, ladies can (of course) do the same
though their (just as sensitive)
much smaller willy doesn't quite rhyme.

Sunday 29 November 2015

My friend wanted to live with a tramp

 - a homo-hobo -
but of course they don't go about in pairs.
I was the next best thing, suitably queer
in various ways.
We live at least twelve miles apart
for at least half of the year.

Saturday 28 November 2015

In France

the crime of giving shelter
to a refugee who has not applied for asylum
can earn a punishment
of 5 years in prison and a fine of 30,000 euros.

The only film I ever saw in the Grand cinema, Downpatrick,


not long before it closed, was Letter to Brezhnev.

That must have been in 1986.
There is not a single photo on the Web of this modest, late, degenerate
art-deco building, now disappeared - of course - until now,
I have just discovered this rather glum photo of a rather sad building.



















Those which I visited during boyhood in Belfast
(always for afternoon showings of 'fifties trash) have also disappeared:
The Alhambra, Apollo, Princess, Regal, Ambassador, Majestic,
Classic
(later Gaumont), Curzon, Avenue*, Ritz, Imperial, Royal, Strand (which lasted longest), Rex, Astoria, Mayfair (some foreign, X-rated films; later became the News and Cartoon Cinema), Hippodrome (formerly a music-hall, latterly The Odeon)
The Picturedrome, and even, for a depressing while, The Grand Opera House
before it was restored to its original Victorian glory.

It's a very common story -
but, by contrast, in a village of 2,000 people in the south-west of France
an hotel was bought over thirty years ago and turned into a cinema
where (in the last eleven years) I have seen splendid films from France (of course),
Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, Germany, Iran, Italy, Turkey, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Russia, Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, Argentina, Spain, Mauretania, Mali, Australia, New Zealand, Iceland, Canada, Scotland, England...and even (Southern) Ireland.

The first 'real' film I saw was, of course, in London:  Bergman's Virgin Spring.
I have seen almost no trite Hollywood movies since then.
(Though the other night
I watched Thelma and Louise with great delight - and subtitles for the hard of hearing.)

*The Picture House, Royal Avenue:
"The first Belfast cinema proper, with no connection to the music halls, The Picture House was located on Royal Avenue. Always the first cinema to utilise new technology, The Picture House showed Jolsen’s The Jazz Singer in 1929, which was Belfast’s first commercially produced talkie. Taken over by the Odeon group, it became the Avenue, the home of long-running blockbusters. Blown apart by a huge bomb in 1974, the Avenue attempted to come back to prominence, but ended up showing soft porn and putting on bingo. This historic venue was put out of its misery in 1982."
http://www.culturenorthernireland.org/features/film/golden-age-film#sthash.yOmUdsA4.dpuf


The tiny Tudor cinema, in Comber, some 20 km from Belfast
now hosts special screenings for special groups.

Their treat is 'Casablanca'

Friday 27 November 2015

"The lies...

...that have been distributed are so many and so persistent that,
arguably, fiction is the only way to tell the truth.”      
             - John le Carré
      
Best-selling fiction may be the best way to tell some of  'the truth',
but it is also an excellent vehicle for lies and propaganda. 
Truth and Untruth are only apparently separate - and
evidently unhelpful - categories.

Thursday 26 November 2015

The planet's rich (for example: us)

are amazed at how difficult it is
to enter Angola, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea or Sudan -
but, for most of the world, two of the countries
most difficult to enter
are the UK and the USA.

read more >>>

Wednesday 25 November 2015

The pathos of bathos.

You all know, who read me here,
that I'm not a prostitute -
just a once-mildly-promiscuous queer -
who has known grown men to shoot
(that is to say ejaculate)
the moment they got their willies out
into the world of twist and shout.

Tuesday 24 November 2015

If ever we could,

we can no longer
dial M for Orpheus -
musical memento vitæ
in the coffin of consciousness.
In the New World Disorder
where sleep gets rarer and rarer
we can only dial
M for Mordor.

Monday 23 November 2015

Pentecostal

To be Washed in the Blood of the Lamb
would be like being washed in jam.
Isn't religion a ludicrous scam ?

Sunday 22 November 2015

I used to hitch-hike a lot,

but now I'm too
old and odd.
I don't like the other kind of lifts
(which might be elevators to you
and now have mew-sick
as they take you up to God)
- particularly those in ho.arse-spittles.
I climb the stairs
like the staff all do.
No transmittals,
a bit of exercise -
and faster, too.

Friday 20 November 2015

A State of Emergency

is permission from a "democratic" society
with "Western Values" of "justice" and "liberty"
to its police (secret and public) to harass a defined section of the population.

In Northern Ireland it was invoked to oppress Catholics still further
in the name of "security" - the "security" of a colonial semi-statelet which had never known democracy except, most of the time, at the parish-pump level.
It failed.

In France (a country which has never known equality or fraternity,
and liberty only during the course of the 20th century)
it retrospectively justifies, in the view of supporters of "The Caliphate"
(none of whom have read Rumi or al-Ma'arri),
whatever panic-inducing shootings they plan and carry out
in whatever grand temple of obscene consumerism they choose.

The colonial powers bring it all on themselves, stupidly, continually, continuously.
The French learned nothing from the vicious Algerian war of liberation, just as the Americans learned nothing from Viêt-Nam, and – way back – the British learned nothing from the Irish war of independence, which was repeated, with Partition (in itself a Crime against Humanity),
horrors a thousandfold in the Indian sub-continent.

Note: Bombs are 'out', because of increased "vigilance".
Guns are 'in', because they are widely available on the European, as on the North American
continent.
Block one rat-hole, and another one appears.

Thursday 19 November 2015

With apologies to the Weasel Community.

Yet another 'weasel-word' has been invented:
philanthropocapitalism.
Such a creature does not exist
says Alice.

Note: the handsome weasel is one of the huge number of creatures
never to have reached Ireland.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=weasel&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAWoVChMIntO0gaicyQIVQtMUCh0pmwn4

People occupy a spectrum

which runs from sensibility
to the insensibility of those
who think that seeing is only sight
and that lighting is only light.

Wednesday 18 November 2015

Diogenes' Achievement* ?














*an Achievement is the technical term for a coat-of-arms
consisting of an escutcheon, supporters etc.
The Latin motto reads: So that all may see.

Taraxacum

Love is less the lion's tooth* -
more a stain of piss upon a sheet
- that spreads - like sappy, spotty youth -
and soon or later
in defeat
fades in the prick's
particle-decelerator.

*Yeats: Crazy Jane Grown Old Looks at the Dancers

Tuesday 17 November 2015

The Essence

of Existence
is Solitude.
Non-existence stretches companionably
inside the atom's
busy beatitude.

Monday 16 November 2015

Yesterday I received TWO (2) visitors.

By the fertile balls of Zeus!
It's hard to be a hermit
and recluse
even in the waterlogged
winter countryside of [m]Ireland...

In 'The Land of the Free' (2)











the free are nowhere to be seen.
In the Home of the Brave
the Achievement Directorate supervises you
from your cosy buggy to your cold, cold grave.


Sunday 15 November 2015

"Social Security" in Blunderland.

Today I received
my tax-free Winter Fuel Payment
of £200 (€280, $310)
available to all 'British'* Pensioners
including millionaires (to whom
of course it is the average posh restaurant tip
- at any rate, a piddl-
ing amount.

I have already bought my winter coal
(shipped to Northern Ireland from Colombia),
so I think I'll spend at least some of the WFP
on a few bottles of excellent Chilean Malbec
from the wine section of my local Lidl.

*'British' means anyone resident in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,
even if a Waha'bbite born in Saudi Arabia, an Albanian 'economic migrant', or (like me) an Irish passport-holder living in the above-mentioned tight, tiny, statelet-colony.

Luxury is brittle

and easily smashed.
Carthage 146 BCE
Constantinople 1204
Versailles 1789
Petrograd 1917
Paris 1940, 2015

Travail, Famille, Patrie*

Flowers from an unknown garden
left by a nameless person
on the grave of an unpublished poet :

apprehension is both fear and shape
of recognition - then comes the rape.

Justice, Fairness, Truth :
ideas fall apart -  become
prized pieces on a shelf,
the glassy frontier of the Self.

What you know
and what you want to know
can (of course) be very different.
Then there's the immortal drain
of what you need
(or think you need) to know
- which you will never ascertain.

Life is a dandelion-seed.
Life is a keeper at the zoo.

*This triadic motto replaced the more vacuous Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
in Marshal Pétain's rump État Français from 1940 to 1942, when the Nazis occupied the whole country.

Saturday 14 November 2015

Belfast and Paris are the only two cities I can claim to know -

Belfast much-bombed*, Paris yet to be much-bombed.

Whataboutery
is a snide term for 'historical perspective'
encountered particularly
(but less and less) in Ireland.

It can now gain a new lease of life in France,
whose colonial land-grabs
and associated vicious anti-'Arab',
anti-Berber, anti-Hamitic, anti-Muslim
anti-environmental activities
from Morocco to Syria, and especially in Algeria
(a whole country simply confiscated from its native peoples
and 'planted' with the French unemployed - as north-eastern
Ireland was 'planted' with restive lowland Scots)
took or destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands
of the dispossessed, despised and utterly rejected.

The Biblical cliché comes to mind:
Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind -
maybe 150 years later.  This is
'whataboutery'.

*The number of dead in the thirty years of low-level
terrorism/thuggery in Northern Ireland was about the same
as that killed in one day in New York in 2001.

(I have just been reading both Camus' L'étranger
- in which the five-times-shot victim of the semi-Aspergerish
Meursault's circumstantial, semi-accidental crime
is never named, is just 'The Arab' -
and Kamel Daoud's 'whatabout' and undeservedly
prizewinning riposte
called Meursault, contre-enquête,
which, it seems to me, has as much relevance
to 'terrorist outrages' in Paris as has the
proxy-war in Syria,
France's former 'protectorate'.)

When people tell you

that they are being honest,
it usually means that they are just
flashing and flaunting opinions.

Strange :

how human life uniquely
is a constant reminder of death.

Friday 13 November 2015

"A motor-car

is a third testicle for the modern man."
- 'Rimdelaire' (=anonymous)

                                                    And for the modern woman...?

"If I want to attract a man
I wear a special perfume called
Brand-New Porsche Interior."
- Rita Rudner

Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917)


Thursday 12 November 2015

Sex

is rarely a lasting glue.
Nor should it be.
It's just a keeper at a zoo.

Wednesday 11 November 2015

In 'The Land of the Free'

a girl called Fire
must rise every morning at five o'clock
in order to catch the 6.15 bus to school.
She has no choice.
She has no voice.
She is subject to the iron rule
of spirit-dousing mass conformism
which is the opposite of liberty.

Tuesday 10 November 2015

Diogenes was much too playful

- and much too serious
- to have mere friends.

An Immortal Truth.

Pour vivre heureux vivons cachés.
Happiness depends on invisibility.

- Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian (1755-1794)

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34574818
click for another aspect
















Pour vivre malheureux, vivons  à découvert.

Monday 9 November 2015

The latest American non-word

that I have come across is
                                        ENDEAVORMENT.
 Just take out the VO and you get a more comfortable word.
Add a couple of letters and you get ENDEAVORMENTIA
to expand your mind.
 

Square peg in round hole.

We live in a world of curves, spirals, fractals
- and make a hell of a lot of rectilinear things.

Sunday 8 November 2015

My saffron crop

from just two crocuses (click to enlarge)

Feelings are first.

Language comes later
to pervert them.
Life then becomes
a wordy epitaph.

Food for Thought

70% of American same-sex couples have met through the internet.
In the 1950s they hardly met at all.
95% of Danish Jews escaped deportation to death-camps in 1943,
thanks to a German Naval Attaché in Copenhagen.

Saturday 7 November 2015

If I had a 'smart' phone

- such as people [i.e. zombies] now spend every other
waking moment consulting -
a fully-waterproof one to read while
I took my annual (soon to be biennial
like the pretentious Venice festival)
shower - yesterday - I would have learned that
'a study' concludes that the religious
are meaner than the non- or ir-religious.
[yawn - pass me the LSZ...]

The New Infant Islamic Empire

(or Khalifat) is merely doing what the British and the French did
when they seized large chunks of the world by force of arms,
assassination and 'gunboat diplomacy'.  It isa pity
but no surprise that the Western Powers
are so marvellous at crude hypocrisy
and so blind to history.

The most horrible disease

afflicting humankind is
Acute Self-importance Syndrome.

Our Politicians

love Hard-working People
- such as slaves ?
or just wage-slaves ?

Friday 6 November 2015

Going out of the front door today,

I saw a Praying Mantis sitting on the gate.

(click to enlarge)

Just Bad Apples.

If you go to a psychiatrist
don't forget Radovan Karadžić.

If you go to an eye-specialist
don't forget Bashar al-Assad.

And if you just visit your nearest physician
remember Josef Mengele.

Thursday 5 November 2015

My English friend asked me about burning peat in his stove.

There is no peat now generally sold for burning in England.  Here is my reply.

Don’t – if it is in the form of compressed briquettes from Ireland (or Scotland ?).  In any case, peat isn't suitable for an enclosed stove as it will either burn away too quickly or not produce any heat.

As with commercial plant compost, peat briquettes are the result of scraping peat by heavy machinery off low-lying flat moorland (i.e. the Great Bog of Allen in central Ireland) and are the result of ecological and archaeological destruction.

Because of Ireland's lack of coal, the Irish pioneered peat-fired power stations after independence in 1922. During the later ‘economic war’ with Britain and, subsequently, World War II, coal could not be imported from Wales.   Three peat-fired power-stations are still in operation in county Offaly.

Malcolm and I both occasionally (and separately) burn hand-dug peat - from county Monaghan and offered door-to-door from a man in a van. 





It has to be dug with great effort with very special spades  (about which whole learned books have been published), then thrown up onto the moorland, stacked in little piles,

then collected and put into a big turf-stack [turf is Irish-English for peat - compare with French tourbe] to dry, then covered with a tarpaulin or corrugated iron - or whatever is available.  It is not cheap now (obviously) and doesn’t give off great heat – but does give off a lovely smell, and burns slowly, so it is possible to keep an open fire in overnight.  It was the main source of fuel in rural Ireland until the 1980s. 

The Irish had very wide chimneys in their traditional cottages, so most of the heat went straight up, but if you had a cooking-pot over the fire making Irish Stew (which was made over 7 days), and crouched near the fire (with your warm dog), it was fine if you were wearing several layers of clothing.  I have been in such cottages, where the half-door was also open a good deal of the day, thus encouraging the smoke, with the heat, to go up the chimney.  Rather dense griddle-bread (made with baking soda, not yeast) was also baked over turf fires.  I have eaten that, too.

Maggie Land Blanck Collection

For open-hearth cooking-recipes and more information on the harvesting and use of peat in Scotland and mainland Europe, as well as Ireland, click here.

http://www.oldandinteresting.com/peat-fire.aspx

Tuesday 3 November 2015

Some things do get better for some poor, unrepresented people.

Roma were bought and sold as slaves to the state, grandees (Boyars)
rich merchants and monasteries in Romania
from when they arrived there in the late 14th century
until the 1860s - the same time that slavery was technically abolished in the USA.

The formal Romanian word for Roma, ţigani, comes from the Greek for heretic,
and passed into German (Zigeuner) and French (Tzigane).
The English word Gypsy came from a silly idea that Roma
were descendants of the slaves who built the pyramids in Egypt -
rather than nomads fleeing famine in Rajasthan.

The informal Romanian word for Roma was 'crows' (cioroi) - from the time when
were forced to climb trees so that Hunting Gentlemen aka Sportsmen
could take pot-shots at them.
Cioroi is also an abusive term for any dark-skinned person.

Monday 2 November 2015

On artificial and human 'intelligence'.

Ryan Calo, Professor of law at Washington university, points out the difference between the thought processes of advanced robots with artificial intelligence, and those of humans.

A robot would view the image of a clown offering free hugs 
as positive and friendly
(Hugs = good; Free = good; Clown = good),
whereas people would almost certainly not be enthusiastic about hugging the clown,
because of all sorts of (especially modern) negative
and quite subtle cultural associations.

Sunday 1 November 2015

"Global Warming"

Soon there will be more
than just this one bananier
in Caylus, and my balcony
may, after my delectable decease,
overhang a grove of coffee-trees!


Caylus, SW-France, November 2015. photo by Anthony Weir

I love Marsupials !