My Guiding Thought

since I left school in 1959 :
Why should people who have no control over their own lives
have control of mine ?

Some things I learned in 2015 :

1. Clive of India's pet tortoise
died 232 years after he did.

2. St Nicholas was the patron saint
of repentant thieves.

3. American president Andrew Garfield
could write Latin with one hand
and Greek with the other, at the same time.

4. There is an online dictionary for
kidspeak acronyms and internet slang.

5. Younbg whisky (and presumably whiskey)
sent out into space to mature
becomes more complex in taste
than the terrestrial stuff.

6. Higher Beings don't snore -
apart from dogs.

7. God has no feet -
not even of clay.
This is why he/it is so insanely
ethereal-imperial.

Mountains

Before the European Common Market became the European Union
there were lakes and mountains of surplus produce:
wine-lakes, butter-mountains.
Now, the world over,
as people work longer and longer hours,
there is an entertainment mountain.

Overnight

a splendid bronze dog the size of a Molossian Hound from Albania
appeared on the decking of the café-bar on the market square.

The neck, however, is uncaninely long...

Married people with kids

are wont to tell us how rewarding children are,
but do not mention that conversations
within the offsprings' hearing
are self-censored for many years,
thus demonstrating that the family
is an inherently dishonest entity.

Mozart also knew

that many Monos are much worse than Minos :
monotheism, compulsory monogamy,
monoglossia, monomania, monoculture,
carbon monoxide, global monoXmas,
monolithic, monocracy,
monads (which are nomads),
monarchs, monotony...
...Monostatos.

One of the unintended consequences

of Women's Liberation (fragmentary and minimal though it is)
has been that marriage as a union of two complementary,
mutually-supporting and uncompeting  partners
has given way to a contract between two apparently-autonomous,
and competing individuals who get together for 'love'
which is usually 75% need+lust in variable proportions.
Monogamous sex usually fades fairly quickly
(thus creating the prostitution-industry), and so there is no glue
other than offspring to hold a marriage together.
Children are poorly equipped to be glue.

Keeping us content.

My death will arrive like a highly-polished hearse

whether I'm expecting it or not.
My pallor will be transported with no wreath
to the unmarked grave I have reserved
and I hope that the only mourner will be
mourning life undeserved
rather than death.

You wouldn't think, from what I have just written,
that I am a very happy person, playful as a kitten !

Not little red spermatozoa

but my saffron crop of 2015 :
6 stamens from 2 flowers !

click to enlarge

The lake below my house, December 2015.

click to enlarge

and click here to see a short slide-show
of more photos from, of and around my house in December 2015.

My recent photos of the little mediæval French village can be seen here.

Other religions' celebrations

can and could be merry and festive,
even Saturnalian, outrageous -
but rarely moronic-dumb-
greedy-infantile and curiously de-ritualised,
shamingly-competitive,
as the minor mediæval Christian
holy day and feast-day has become.

Note:  The USA (a very large country) consumes 6.3 billion kilowatts of electricity on Christmas lights alone - nearly half as much again as Ethiopia (a medium-sized country with about a third of the population of the US) uses in a year.

Stupid Logic

"If economic growth generates more money,
and poverty is a lack of money,
then economic growth diminishes poverty."

This is no more than a sick joke of the "trickling down of wealth" variety.
Consider the river Jordan (Hallelujah!) 
which is no more than a trickle, and often just an ooze,
by the time it enters the poor and desiccated
country of the same name from the land grabbed by the Jews.

If only...

The truth is not a cave or cavern

but a tree.

Film criticism.

Last night we watched a Bulgarian movie - with English subtitles - which we thought excellent :
both funny and tragic,
which was about :
1. Backgammon.
2. Being an ordinary dissident in a totalitarian country.
3. Escaping from that country.
4. Being a refugee in a horrible Italian refugee camp.
5. Suffering from amnesia after a bad motorway crash in which one's parents have died.
6. Male bonding and Backgammon.

Today I read two American comments on Rotten Tomatoes,
neither of which seemed intelligent to me :

1. Neither the sweeping European vistas nor the masterful Serbian actor Miki Manojlović can save this Bulgarian road movie from its treacly sentimentality.

2.  It's lovable in a way that's sometimes goofy, sometimes sad, always optimistic.

If you download movies via a torrent p2p client such as Vuze, you can type the name of the movie in the search-box, or type into your browser's address-strip this magnet link:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:b36abf3d7c0e0e40074823f6d77ae88f24e1c3fc&dn=The.World.Is.Big.And.Salvation.Lurks.Around.The.Corner.2008.DVDR&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A80&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopen.demonii.com%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969

Or I can send you the torrent file by e-mail for suitable thinking-person's-festive viewing.

A Thrillion

is an amount to make you gasp.
A killion is the number of people
eliminated every year by a government.
A stillion is the number of items
which go missing every day in the post.

Just as 'Arse'

in England
got bowdlerised
to Bum (via bottom)
Piss
has become Pee
and Shit
is now called Poo*
(not Pooh)
- but baboons
are not Babies
nor even Boonies
within the crazy human zoo.

*Poop in the USA.

A Solsticial Thought

The female first name Holly is now not so rare, I think,
as the male first name Guy.
The latter is the old spelling of gui = mistletoe*,
whose berries look like drops of sperm
just as those of the holly look like drops of blood.

Guy, as in 'good guy, bad
guy' has, however, nothing to do with mistletoe,
but is a corruption of the French 'gars' = lad.

*Latin viscum, from which we get the word viscous.

V in Latin and W in Germanic often became GU or hard G in French,
Thus Vespa (wasp) became Guêpe, and the Ward- words in Germanic
became Gard- in French (Garder, Gardien, etc).

A brilliant new word :

Sapiosexual.
(Well, it's from 2004, so not really

really new  – and strictly speaking, it should be
sapiesexual.)

According to the Urban Dictionary,

Someone who finds intelligence 
the most sexually-attractive feature in others.

The beautiful hands

click photo to enlarge

of a man who has never washed during the whole of his life,
smokes goat-droppings from a sturdy piece of plumbing
and is something of an Iranian national treasure.
The modern Diogenes in the "axis of evil"
- of course !

photo by Iranian News Agency

When I was a little boy

in the nineteen-forties
I learned to read quite quickly,
and fell in love with
Epaminondas
(not the Grecian general
but a close relative of
Little Black Sambo).
Nobody noticed,
not even I.

(click to enlarge)

London 2015.

click to enlarge

My two favourite movie-quotations

come from a fine parody called
Lost and Found in Armenia :

- "Who doesn't like sheep ?"

- "One should never underestimate Canadians"

What if...

our much-vaunted Consciousness
were merely an over-developed - mutant -
defence-system ?

Relentless.

As games were corrupted into sports
fun was transmuted into stress -
as in all the many other enjoyable areas of life
except (so far) the smoking of marijuana.

I wonder...

...if the very recent ruins in Syria
will be as beautiful as these ?
The best of Man is his ruins.

The church of St Simeon Stylites, near Aleppo, Syria.          (click to enlarge)

Taking up a new interest when you get older

is a good way (we are told)
of preventing dementia -
and it seems reasonable
to create new synaptic paths within the brain.
Easier and more useful than taking up ballroom dancing,
or the history of the Moors in Spain,
or learning Portuguese or to ride and groom a horse,
however, would be to take up shoplifting
- on a simple, modest scale of course.

Throughout the ages,

paternalistic censors infantilised the reading public
by insisting that literature constituted a serious risk to its health.
Now (mainly in the USA) young (student) readers are infantilising themselves
by insisting that they and their peers should be shielded from the harm caused by distressing texts -
such as Ovid's Metamorphoses.

read more >>>

There is a "rare mental illness

which makes people think they are dead..."
(don't call for a hearse!)

But those who don't think they are zombies
are vampires - or worse.

In ancient Greece

the only philosopher not to rely on slaves and a slave economy
was Diogenes. To this day, academic philosophy is a luxury
jealously guarded by intellectual élites,
who, like all élites (Diogenes would have agreed)
are both contemptuous and contemptibly dependent
on an underclass or underclasses somewhere in the world.

click to enlarge

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He did not, however, live in a barrel
but in a very large ceramic container
as seen in the right-hand picture.

'Eurosceptic'

is a word much bandied about
on the 'British' island of England plus
two contiguous colonies. 
I am not just anthroposceptic
but anglophobic as well.

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Compared with death,

life is a kind of concentration-camp
wherein the most important thing
is to have and to hold on to
a sense of humour.

Changing climate ?

In Northern Ireland
I ate December blackberries
as in 1972 and 1994.

If it's Christians against Muslims

it is important to remember
that the most revolutionary
and least-observed
tenet of Christianity is
'turn the other cheek'.

We are not allowed to forget

about the concentration camps
in Europe
which lasted 10 years at most.
We are not encouraged to remember
those many, many, and equally unspeakable
which lasted 200 years
in the United States of America.

Proper and Improper Names

The Czech word for 'German' - němec comes from

němci - "mumbling, murmuring people"
(from Slavic *němъ – "mumbling, mute, incomprehensible, or stupid").
The same word (német) passed into Hungarian.

The alternative English word for  'ass' - donkey
- comes from Duncan, a popular Scottish forename
which means dark-skinned important person or warrior
of the Mesolithic (dark-skinned, not-tall) genetic type
 which is to this day to be found in Ireland.
The Scotti were people from Ireland who colonised Alba
(Scotland); the ancient alb-element, meaning snow, white,
or a high place which attracted snow, gives us Alp,
Albany, Albion, Albania. 

Ireland (Latin Hibernia - Winterland) is named after
an obscure early earth-goddess Éire.

The Rus element of 'Russia' (Rossiya) comes from Ruotsi,
the Finnish word for Sweden, because of the Swedish Vikings
who lightly colonised the gold/amber corridor through Western Russia
and Ukraine to Constantinople or Byzantium
(which they called Miklagard = Great City).
The Finnish word for 'Russia', however, is Venäjä - I don't know why -
and for 'Germany' is (unsurprisingly when you think of the geography) Saksa.

The English word Slav, like the French word slave
seems to have been borrowed from Medieval Latin sclavus or slavus,
itself a borrowing - and from Byzantine Greek σκλάβος (sklábos) 'slave'
into which the Emperors of the East turned some Bulgarians
(who, amazingly, gave the words bugger and buggery to English
and Bougre to French. Modern Bulgaria was a place of many Bogomils
or Cathar-Albigensians.)  The Nazis must have liked this consonance.
Not all Nazis were German-speakers. There are no more
'Hellenic' Greeks than there are ancient Roman Romanians.

The Slavic word for Slav comes from slovo = 'word'
- indicating those who spoke an understandable (Slavonic) language
and not Hungarian, Finnish, Romanian, Vlach, Albanian, Greek
or babbling barbarian German. 

My mother used to complain

that I had no ambition.
But I wanted only to be happy and wise.
I have been at least half-successful.

Miracles

are the delusions of the mindless.
Life is no miracle.

The problem with democracy

is that the ordinary or average voter
is venal as well as shallow.

Desertion

turns a mere soldier
into a real s|hero.

Bombing Syria

When life is already intolerable
a few more bombs make no difference.

Wisdom

is incommunicable, communication-free
- if not, it would become mere data, mere chatter,
like philosophy.

Unfortunately, even fewer people are interested in wisdom
(even less in its acquisition) than in philosophy.

A Nice Neologism

which I learned today :

upcycling

which is the re-use of something old
and inexpensive as a fashion statement.

Minced Words

in English
come mostly from the 18th century:
zounds! (God's Wounds)
drat! (God Rot)
bloody (By Our Lady) -
but more recently, in America,
where Motherfucker! is nor uncommon
shoot! has bizarrely replaced shit! in certain circles.
Other languages, especially Italian,
have not been tempted into
such childishness - e.g.
Santo Cazzo Madre di Cristo!
Culo di Dio!
But even in Italy, in our time,
Political Correctness' slimy unction
performs the same sad and silly function.

Civilisation

is the unremitting war on awareness,
whose 'reality' is chains
around brains.