'Identity Politics'

= Tribalism.

Winter Haiku

In the naked silver birch
I see my own old age.

Not Clytemnestra, not Medea, nor Helen, mother of Constantine

The worst woman in history
said one of the best things ever:
There is no such thing as society.

Nor is there any such thing as identity.

"Poetry in Motion".

Whoever described football (soccer)
as poetry in motion
had not studied much of either.

A happy Lizardfish.

The Meaning of Life

is the unimportance
of being important.

Down with the word

Terrorist !
Except as a synonym for
Human being.
 

Food for Alarm

The "Security" Industry

The world is safer (for humans only) than it has ever been,
but not because of the industry with the rosiest future.

Down with 'Genealogy' !

Study of mitochondrial DNA
shows that most people in Western Europe
are not only distantly related to each other,
but to, for example, Charlemagne, Francis of Assisi
and everyone who lived in Europe in mediæval times.
The false tracing of ancestry through male lines only
should be seen as both sexist and racist,
and should become an offence. 

Words, words, words

As y'all know, I'm Awfully Interested in words,
especially words with a bizarre history,
such as Dunce from Duns Scotus the Hiberno-Scottish theologian
and Donkey from Duncan, another slur on Celts (whoever they are).
Today I discovered that Fanny is a direct borrowing
from the Rhône-Alpes region of France.
A Fanny [sic] was a board painted with the crude or refined
likeness of female buttocks
which a non-scorer in a game of Boules or Pétanque had to kiss
(such cruel and unusual punishment!).

There are more and more-directly derived
French expressions in American
(from New France and Louisiane)
than in BritIrish English,
so Fanny = buttocks in the US, whereas in the British Isles
whither it came from the US, it means vulva.
Fanny is a diminutive form of Frances,
just as Willy and Dick are diminutive forms of William and Richard.

A Fanny from 1920

The different British naval-slang sense came from Fanny Adams,
a woman who had been brutally murdered and dismembered,
and had the further indignity of giving her name to
tins of mutton disliked by sailors.
The cans were re-used for eating from and cooking with. ^[1]

Old is beautiful.

click for link

When was the moon not beautiful ?

If dirt is earth

then dirty
is earthy.

Vindicated again!

Each of us contains three times more microbial cells
than human ones - thirty trillion, in fact. Most microbes
are beneficial, some are essential.  The modern insanity
of applying anti-microbial gels and sprays, not to mention
deodorants, bleach and soap,
is turning rich, self-pampering humans into bundles of allergies
rare conditions and cancers.
Some people won't eat what has been on the floor
thinking it foul and profane!
I think it's because I was brought up in a culture of "good clean dirt",
and almost never take baths or showers (or anti-'flu vaccines)
and wear the same socks for weeks
that I'm so healthy and sane.

Alternative History

There may have been one,
male or female,
or very many more than one
male or female
who called Attila the Hun
not just 'conqueror', but also
'sweetie-pie' and 'honey-bun'.

Another reason for the UK leaving the E.U. ?

But not the Irish Republic ?

Not Belfast, alas! but Brussels.

Trondheim (Norway) cathedral :

outside

and inside

Style and Taste

belong or come only to those
who never think of style or taste.

Poppycock

has nothing to do with poppies or cocks,
but with Dutch crap;
and balderdash has nothing to do with
a handsome Nordic hero;
and the facile After the first death there is no other
(from Dylan Thomas) is tosh and poppycock and balderdash
of the First Order.

(I expand on this subject in July 2024...)

 

Back in the 1980s

an English journalist declared
that the two most deadening words
in the English language were
Northern Ireland.
Now we have advanced
to a single - and more dreadful - word:
Brexit.

One of the many delights of being old

is being "vulnerable".
I am looking forward to being "fragile",
even as I am, as ever, agile.

A wonderful phrase I read today :

"The inanity of perfection."

The absurd notion of perfection
obsesses our imperfectly
inane species.

One of the most faithful followers of my blog

wrote to say that she liked this little poem of mine.
So I shall give it another 'airing'.

Because I sometimes talk to Death
and not to God
the latter says I am a Fraud.
The Former kisses me
on bended knee -
I hold my breath.

What we generally call 'culture'

is the ethos of property
for which the earth
has been divided and destroyed.
Language makes us irrational,
agriculture makes us soulless,
and property makes us paranoid.
.

Why I gave up Philosophy at University.

When the great ethologist Frans de Waal
demonstrated that non-humans had a sense of fairness
and 'fair play', an unnamed philosopher wrote to him
to say that his thesis was ridiculous,
since the concept of fairness was invented
in the 18th century.

The narcissism of humans

is more than a bottomless well -
it is the deepest pit of Hell.

"Things"

don't "happen for a reason",
but for an easy rationalisation.

"Doing wrong"

is caused more by the wish to fit in and be accepted -
the conformism that smothers
moral consciousness -
than by disregard for others.

"Discreet Sheep" >>>

The hardest thing

(though my no means the most painful)
for a human to do is
nothing
("constructive" or destructive)
- which is why the Garden of Eden
was intolerable
and filled up with weed-puffing bonobos.

"Americanisms"

What the British think of as Americanisms
(and usually resent) are mostly importations
from French via Louisiana
(Have a nice day! is the most obvious and recent, but few know
that dime is from French disme);
from German (the loathsome hamburger
which was made of beef and came from Hamburg);
Swedish (rutabaga, layer-cake); Italian
(cilantro, arugula - Let's do lunch);
but not, so far as I know, from Irish...
...unless the term to dig something
is related to the Irish an dtuigeann tú ?
(do you get it, do you understand ?)
rather than (or as well as) from Wolof
degg, to comprehend ...

There is a vast catalog
of translated or transliterated linguistic borrowings in the USA:
I did not know until today
that Boondocks comes from Tagalog...