What I had for dinner tonight,

(by Astérix, the blogger's dog,
with just a little help from his Editor and slave)

I had:

Sautéed leeks with farce (forcemeat, raw of course)
moistened by a local free-range egg,
a Brussels sprout or two
(Que Dieu bénisse les Bruxellois!),
a few roast chestnuts,
a couple of stewed plums.
and what was left on plates
and serving dishes.
It wasn't enough.
But it was delicious.

Museums

are only décor.

My Cheap Solution

to the Irish Border/Brexit problem:
give every anti-Irish Ulster family
a million pounds
to go and colonise the Sinai.

Five hundred years

since irate Martin Luther
let loose a century of havoc
with his 95 Theses,
still we have heard nothing
about his delightful dog
and his 95 feces.

The turbulent doctor had a dog named Tölpel
(which was apparently a synonym for “Dummkopf”),
and wrote:

“The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be much esteemed were it not so common. Our Lord God has made His greatest gifts the commonest.”

As old as Adam - and language.

There was always "fake news".
The Old Testament,
The New Testament,
The Blood Crime of the Jews.

There is only one person

whom I respect and like
more than even any dog.
Here are both of them:

And here is the dog.

An unusually high-quality

Facebook Page:

Postcard to Silicon Valley.

An infinite amount of data
(even if accurate)
will not be greater
than one tear-drop of wisdom
(whatever that is).

A comment on civilisation.

A society governed arbitrarily perfectly resembles a herd of cows

placed under a yoke for the service of a master.

He feeds them just enough to put them in condition to serve.

He treats their illnesses only enough to keep them useful.

He fattens them only in order to feed off of them,

and he uses the hides of some to harness others to the plough.

Une société d'hommes gouvernée arbitrairement ressemble parfaitement à une troupe de

bœufs mis au joug pour le service du maître.
Il ne les nourrit qu'afin qu'ils soient en état de le servir;
il ne les panse dans leurs maladies qu'afin qu'ils lui soient utiles en santé;
il les engraisse pour se nourrir de leur substance;
et il se sert de la peau des uns pour atteler les autres à la charrue.

Voltaire (1694-1778), Republican Ideas by a Member of the Corps, II

Dylan Thomas was an arrant wordsmith.

Darkness is sweet.
Why rage against the dying of the light ?
Why burn and rave at close of day ?
Those who fight their end are mad.
Why should old men not be glad
they're slipping creakily away ?

Assuming that time is not an illusion,

all life is a waste of it.

As the time-dependent Schrödinger wrote :

${\displaystyle i\hbar {\frac {\partial }{\partial t}}\Psi (\mathbf {r} ,t)={\hat {H}}\Psi (\mathbf {r} ,t)}$

Religion

from water- and willy-worship to esoteric Buddhism
is just a means to justify our self-importance as a species
if not as individuals.

Fear of death

is experienced only by those
who know they haven't lived.

There is of course only one way to live:
as we did for 99% of our existence as a species.
This is now - and only recently become - impossible.

The Earth is not afraid of death
even though, strictly speaking,
she is not immortal.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09dz25d
                          (second half)

My country, too, is the world...

...but I'll have no monument.

18 April 1999

Sunday.

I made a rubbing:
"The Pope gives a computer-expert a pedicure."
Eva finished painting her series of "Holy pictures."

from An Alchemist's Nightmares,
extracts from Jan Švankmajer's diary.

On the removal from power of Robert Mugabe,

President of Zimbabwe for the last 37 years,
let us not forget Francisco Macias Nguema,
first president of Equatorial Guinea (formerly Rio Muni
plus Fernando Pó and other islands),
who had a huge collection of human skulls in his mansion,
and replaced crucifixes in churches with his own image.
He abolished all education in 1974, executed and maimed civil servants,
and on his overthrow tried to flee with the entire paper currency of the country in a suitcase...

The insanity of categorisation.

"The dandelion is not a small plant,
but ‘a large tree with no investment in trunk,
major branches, or perennial roots’."

Aren't there more important things to reflect on -

such as how silly (as well as destructive) it is to be human ?

Today's Ear-worm

surprised me.  Usually fragments of Brahms
or Chopin repeat in my brain all day and all night,
drowning out the occasional tinnitus -
but today, out of nowhere, came a creepy song
from a 1954 film I never saw :

...Many men have tried to split us up, but no one can.
Lord help the mister
who comes between me and my sister -
And lord help the sister
who comes between me and my man.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKgLJLNyLyY

One of the many reasons I chose to immigrate from Northern Ireland to south-west France

is that I have always disliked - even been ashamed of - my surname:
Weir pronounced wɪər
(which has nothing to do with water,
but is an Anglicisation of the county Donegal surname Maguire
[Irish: Mac Uídhir],
for many of that name fled starvation in North-Western Ireland
to wage-slavery in Lowland [Lalland] Scotland.

In French, however, this mean-sounding, Lallands name
sings sweet and sexy:
vɛjʁ - to rhyme roughly with layer as pronounced in Louisiana.

(I'm sure y'all are grateful for this information.)

English as a Foreign Language.

Examination question in Colloquial English :

"It is less unpleasant to be goosed by a dog
than to be dogged by a goose."  

Discuss this statement, mentioning any ambiguity that you may notice or intuit.

Next time you fail to steal something

from a corner-shop, "convenience store", supermarket, or food-hypermarket,
remember that they and their employees are part of a web
of the most organised and legally-protected drug-pushers in the world.
The slave trade was founded on sugar, not cotton.
The sugarless and scrawny poor had to sell their teeth to the tooth-rotten
(hence 'stinking') rich
in order to survive in terrible, gum-infected misery.
I was made aware over 70 years ago that sugar was a dangerous substance,
but was not discouraged from ladling it on to my porridge, nor from eating sweets.
It is perhaps the most instantly-addictive of all substances.
Saccharin (invented in the late 19th century) became a popular substitute for sugar
during World War Two, and in the 1960s was perceived as 'less fattening'.
But saccharin has consistently been trashed by the 'sugar lobby'
seizing on bad science which suggested it was carcinogenous.



Sugar is not needed even in jam, which requires only pectin
to make it set, not the caramelisation of sugar,
which should be taxed and labelled like tobacco products.

(Then there's salt, and doubly-refined carbohydrate, and "food"
consisting of doubly-refined carbohydrate, salt and sugar
sold quite legally by some of the most powerful conglomerates in the world...)

https://aeon.co/essays/sugar-is-a-toxic-agent-that-creates-conditions-for-disease

To the ever-expanding acronym

LGBTQIA

I wish to add another letter :

N - for Necrophiliac,
the most harmless of sexualities
apart from committed self-induced orgasm.

Since the latest

Windows 10 compulsory "update"
I can't access the internet;
I can receive Outlook messages, but not send any...
so I have decided to go Back to Basics.

 ("The Free World" ? Kiss my furry arse!)

Cars of my dreams.

There are two.
I can't decide between
the pre-war Scripps-Booth Tricycle
with wooden rear wheels,

and the  Peel Trident bubble-car

made on the Isle of Man

(which I used to be able to see quite often
from my home in the County Down).

"A completely new design from the earlier side-engined Peel P50 microcar,
the Trident was manufactured in 1965 and 1966."

ALL CONTRIBUTIONS GRATEFULLY RECEIVED

Two great talkers of the last 75 years

are richly represented on YouTube:

Orson Welles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMh7pbYr8DQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaRfCBY2EdA

and John le Carré

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89FHIGL3N54
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoSdtgTWPK8

Both have beautiful bass-baritone voices
quite apart from their flowing and gently self-mocking intelligence.

Ballyhaunis

is a very small town in the remote west of Ireland
which has a road called Mosque Road
leading to Ireland's first custom-built Islamic place of worship.

                                                                                                                     https://aeon.co/

videos/how-gaelic-sports-became-a-cultural-binding-force-in-irelands-most-diverse-town

Message to Busy People.

Death may well turn out to be
the luxurious cessation
of a whole lifetime of
sleep-deprivation.

Any kind of authority

de-personalises the person who grabs
(or is awarded) it.  And that person
de-personalises all those who are subject
to his or her authority.

In England, a black or bearded Muslim-looking person is 17 times more likely
to be Stopped-And-Searched quite legally by de-personalised policemen,
no matter how well-dressed or even how well-known s|he is.

Why, in that shameful country, has there arisen no Buddy-service,
where bleached, Caucasian people accompany those with beautifully-coloured skins
and insist that the harassing policemen search them as well as their Buddy ?

The prohibition was the serpent.

Prohibitions always are serpents.

from Rules of Conduct for Men in High and Low Places & Positions of Power.

'When a lady is bearded
she should be treated as a lady
and not as a beard.'

- Poets Ranked by Beard Weight, Commemorative Edition.
ISBN 978-1-61608-245-1

Surely two of the greatest lines in English literature :

"On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young."
                                 - Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister.

"What would we want with dung at our time of life ?"

                                             - Samuel Beckett, All That Fall.

Úlf Nilsen on interpreting Beethoven:

"I find it slightly curious - as a blind performer - to play music by a deaf composer."

The attitudes of the 'normal'

are more problematic
than the beahviour of the
'abnormal'.

Simply put :

if capitalism were for 'the general good'
care-workers, cleaners and nurses
would not be near the bottom
of the economic heap.

Just yesterday

I was thinking that I understand dogs and how they think (more or less),

while almost all human beings I have met* have been a puzzle, mystery, opaque to me. 

Maybe I’m aspergeric, maybe I’m allergic - certainly too aesthetic...

Maybe it’s just that other people find me too full-on, up-front or embarrassingly open

(interpreted as 'confrontational') – when really I’m just enthusiastic.

* Apart from my mother (whose birthday it is: she'd be 110 today), my aunt, and Malcolm.

It has been a good year for cork in Eastern Portugal and Western Spain.

the-once-in-a-decade-harvest-of-cork-requires-blunt-force
-and-tender-care-in-equal-measure

A dog can be just as beautiful

from behind
as from the front.

Did he really 'get a boob-job'

while harrowing Hell ?

And what happened to his willy ?
Did he give it to the King of Evil ?
And if so, voluntarily or not ?