A.H. - the disease

unrecognised
and most prevalent
in the USA :
Aggressive Hedonism.
Now let us pray.

If only more commercial premises

advertised themselves so subtly!

 

Bathroom furniture.

A famous person is doubly so
for having a urinal in his house
because of the inconvenient height
of water-closets which are too tall 
for the health of our bowels
(bidets – good also for feet – are just about right),
and  too low for standing-up men
& 'the handicapped'.

Perhaps it is utilitarian like this:

or verging on the obscene like al-Fayed's:

But what's wrong with a washbasin, which
(too low for washing the face)
is just the right height for most men
to piss, and easy to rinse
with hot or with cold
before (in an act of extreme hygiene)
washing the willy and hands afterwards ?

Emotional ambiguity.

Petty pleasurable guilt I had,
and guilty pleasure on learning

that the domineering neighbour
I had come to dislike
had had a massive stroke. It will be fine
to see no more the weekly row
of six black underpants upon his washing-line.

Peculiarly,
instead of resentment that he had
succeeded in expiring before me
and (painlessly, swiftly as I hope
to exit) had 'pipped me at the post' –  I felt
a horrible triumph at outliving him.

I am as muddledly
mean-minded as anybody else.

One of his contemptuous autumn paintings.

Barbara Kingsolver

succinctly on Trump:

He's not even interested in the Presidency.
He's only interested in Winning.

Word of the Day:

Degrowth

 ? ? ? 

Another (unrelated) word:

(to) present (as in a film or other spectacle) 
seems to be much the same in all European languages
and comes from mediæval Latin præsentare, presumably from the presentation of the Host at Mass.  The modern French for a knick-knack or objets-d'art shelf or cabinet is présentoir. 

As for the noun: it came into English around 1200, from  Latin, 

The difference between present and gift is felt in the fact that one may be willing to accept as a present that which he would not be willing to accept as a gift : a gift is to help the one receiving it; a present does him honour, or expresses friendly feeling toward him. A present is therefore ordinarily to an individual; but in law gift is used, to the exclusion of present, as including all transfers of property without consideration and for the benefit of the receiver. [Century Dictionary]

Let us consider a new word and what it might mean: Depresent.
(After all, we have Degenerate.)

* * *

I recently bought a Stainless steel casserole with lid.

This description appeared on the packing in every official E.U.  language (plus Russian and Turkish) except Icelandic, Irish, Albanian, Catalan, Luxembourgeois, Nynorsk, Swedish and Danish.  

The following puzzled me: Dengta keptuvė su Dangčiu
(which I identified as Lithuanian because of the ė),  
Kastrolis ar Vāku (Latvian because of the ā) ... 
but Skirts Troškinimui and Karstumizturigs....might one of them be Maltese ?

It could be...as I read somewhere...

"The Bigger the Brains
The Tighter the Chains."

So much stuff, just stuff.

The over-washed people

in the museum :

are they there to gaze,

to worship or fill in time ?

The Individual (left)

and 'Social Media' (right)

Hymn of the American Republic

(to a familiar tune)

Amazing,
Gross

(indecency)

The breaking down

of gender barriers & stereotypes
would be a lovely and beneficial thing
if men became more womanly
and women stopped becoming
more and more like scary men.

Save the Soup : Just Stop Monocultures

of Sunflowers

and Rapeseed and Wheat and Maize...

The pipsqueak who sentenced the soup-throwers to many months in prison would not have acknowledged Van Gogh as a human being, much less bought one of his paintings. 
The sunflower series is the most popular and least interesting of his amazing output.  This action should make us think again about these paintings.

A writer in the Guardian points out that the great Vincent would not have wanted his paintings (other people thought of them as 'daubs') to be venerated, much less entombed in the terrifying concrete mausoleum of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

'During his lifetime, Van Gogh was a pariah. No one would buy his paintings, and he suffered from numerous untreated mental illnesses. He also lived in desperate poverty.'  

He wanted his pictures to hang on domestic walls, he wanted to share his uplifting and inspiring vision of landscape and people.
I think that he would have been appalled to learn where they have ended up.

Sad to relate,

where I live
in sterile Europe
there are no street-dogs.

Just passing...

Last here 5,000 years ago.

The comet C-023 A3
above a bank of cloud just before dawn.

 

Survivors.

Jews,
who have been persecuted only throughout
recorded history,
should spare a thought for wolves,
persecuted for at least ten thousand years.

Unfortunately, they spare few thoughts
for their nearest fellow-humans
who live their whole lives beset by howling fears.

Today's photo.

 Kathmandu, Nepal.

The Myth of Cerberus

Whereas we (mostly) can't 
tune into each other, dogs
can tune into shepherds,
sheep and other dogs
almost simultaneously.

Destruction before Discovery.

More than 100,000 plant species are thought to be undiscovered,
the majority of which are believed to be at risk of extinction...

Lying on the beach

on Easter Island.

The Moon and Dinosaurs.

Following my interest in little girls' groins,
long before Jurassic Park was dreamed up
and satellites were launched,
my earliest passions as a child

were Dinosaurs (1949, after seeing Brontosaurus
and, I think, Diplodocus
at London's National History Museum)

and Astronomy (1950, triggered by
an old book in the attic with a leather spine
about the solar system, written before
the discovery of non-planet Pluto).

So it was with some glee today
that I listened to a wonderfully insane
broadcast on the BBC World Service about 
Dinosaurs and the Moon.

A phone-stand:

something that you'll definitely
not be able to do without.

Write to Santa!

 

Muslims are taught

that the idea of Perfection
this side of Paradise
is blasphemy.

They would do well
to avoid 'Western' and Eastern
ethics and æsthetics,

and to respect young women
much more than old men
with prosthetics.

Word of the Day:

retro-futurist,

as in a description of FF Coppola's Megalopolis as
A strident retro-futurist folly. 

Dear 'Health-care Professionals',

Lives are not saved
merely prolonged.

(Length versus quality,
mumbles Robert's ghost.

Why bother ?)

Some people say that
only Jesus saves.

And no other.

At work or school,

it's not so much the bullying
that does the damage,

as the perpetual, even life-long
anxiety that it engenders.

It often happens

to most of us
when we look up something in Google.

I started by typing Baltrušaitis...
                                                 and ended with

1. The Weighing of a Soul (where ?) to find out
if its weight of sin is great enough
to send it to Hell;

2. The soul in eternal hellish torment.

And lastly, another capital
from the 12th century church at Saint-Révérien, Nièvre.

Seriously, though.

 

Doggerel.

I have been to Norway and Albania
To Central Africa and Canada
and the middle of the Baltic Sea.
Like most people, I've never been to Paradise*
– I've been too much, too long, in me.

*But where I live is pretty close.

Early War Baby.

When I was growing up in royalist east Belfast,
to talk about The South of Ireland
(at the time, officially entitled The Irish Free State)
in polite society was like
mentioning a 'French Letter'
or Cancer, the Duke of Windsor or syphilis:

The less said (in polite society) the better.

Of the Civil War, and the Free State's
handy neutrality in World War Two,
my friends and I were decent in our ignorance.

Climate Change in leafy Suburbia.

From calm to calamity
From here to eternity

Small vocal difference, big result.

Ein fester Berg;
Ein' feste Burg.

Luther suggested that
Jehovah (a.k.a unser Gott,
the Lord of few pities)

moved from Mosaic mountain-top
to impregnable town.

People are always leaving
the countryside for overcrowded cities.

Near Toulouse, France.

Protesters at a house in the path
of a motorway/toll-road
considered by many to be unnecessary.

Almost all you need to know

about the cultural level
of the 'Free World'
in the medium of cinema.

Not in Japan.

Underlying the strong disapproval of suicide
in Abrahamic cultures
is (I suspect) the sense that it is desertion
from the human army.

A Sea-angel.

 

Clione limacina, by Alex. Semenov on FlickR

"A thing of beauty,"

declared John Keats,
"is a joy forever" (to some)
but not in the constipated
bowels of a museum.

Empty vessels, mobile phones.

The more that people talk
the less they have to say.

The Midas Phenomenon.

        In America
    everything is gold,
everything is worthless.

Poor Old Joe.

I hear the choir
of angels singing...

No,

I hear their angel voices calling*...

Oh, no

it's just my tinnitus
both serendipitous and duplicitous.

Ol' Black Joe, retitled Poor Old Joe is one of (white sentimentalist) Stephen Foster's very popular, badly-written, and nauseating songs about black people. This one is probably the worst because it is a pseudo-Spiritual. They all, however, have great tunes, and include Way down upon the Suwanee River (Southern Georgia) and Old Folks at Home ..... I seem to remember also from my childhood Camptown Races, Old Dog Tray (which I wept over), My Old Kentucky Home...  

Paul Robeson sang it rather creepily. 

Listen here to a rendering from the 1920s. 

One of Mr Foster's black servants was called Joe.

*I was sure that my childhood version in the Stephen Foster Songbook had in the chorus:
"I hear their angel voices calling"

but most sung versions have "I hear their gentle voices calling" because, of course, there can't be black angels!

The most famous angelic tinnitus was that of an Alsatian teenager who became known as Joan of Arc.

The devilish genius of Christianity is the promise,
at the very least, the hope of a gorgeous afterlife

(Jesus Saves)

which helps greatly to keep people 
'in their place', especially as slaves.

I would not have imagined

back when I was amongst
the 'pioneers' of investigation
into Irish sweathouses,
that forty years later
I would still be contacted
by people interested in them.

All gone.

Norwegian gannetry 1970
- and last year.

The 'World Happiness Report'

seems (to me) a pretty dodgy fake statistic.
No French person would freely admit to being happy.
That's just the contrary and suspicious French attitude.

Our culture wants to measure/quantify everything.
Perhaps another way of vaguely measuring 'happiness'
(which is a fluid abstract in the same class as 'wisdom')
would be to poll people on their feelings of gratitude.

Or maybe not.

 

Roman Values.

Why can't two men
love each other and a woman ?
two women love each other
and a man ? or two men ?

'Love' that is restrictive and restricting
is not affection but desire for ownership.

Restrictive love is meanly Abrahamic.
Open love is generous,
welcoming, shamanic.

Rocket in the Room.

not by Oksana Maksymchuk

what the rocket has in common
with the room full people with
Down's Syndrome
is its current location

somebody thought the rocket
belonged to the room with the handicapped
and now it’s here

in time
someone else will come
and collect the pieces

of the rocket and of the handicapped
weeping and shouting insults
at the sky

but for now
this rocket and these retards
are an unsorted matter

a puzzle
awaiting a solution

• 

for 'Universal Human Values'

read
Totalitarian thinking/morality.

'Western Values'
are two in number:
Conquest (of the 'self', 'problems', the 'world')
and Hypocrisy

for which Merriam-Webster's Rhyming Dictionary
offers no rhyme,
nor for Theocracy.

SHAME

Into Europe came the religions
which made their solipsistic gods unearthly

Out of greedy Europe came the persecuted refugees

The unforgiving everlasting light of Hollywood
chosen by diasporic Jews
and the false god of profit
captured the new-born art of cinema
(and all art, all authenticity, all immanence)

and Hollywood hijacked the world
turned the planet into scenery
behind which wars raged
its inhabitants to extras
and wonder into artificial intelligence

Shame, Shema Yisrael ! שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל

AND SO IT WILL
by a strange providence
COME TO PASS
in a manner of speaking
THAT

Every place your feet will tread will be yours: 

The Desert and the Lebanon,
the Euphrates River [Iraq]
and the Western Sea [Morocco],
will form your boundaries.

and way beyond, even to the Moon.

כָּל־הַמָּק֗וֹם אֲשֶׁ֨ר תִּדְרֹ֧ךְ כַּף־רַגְלְכֶ֛ם בּ֖וֹ לָכֶ֣ם יִֽהְיֶ֑ה מִן־הַמִּדְבָּ֨ר וְהַלְּבָנ֜וֹן מִן־הַנָּהָ֣ר נְהַר־פְּרָ֗ת וְעַד֙ הַיָּ֣ם הָאַֽחֲר֔וֹן יִֽהְיֶ֖ה גְּבֻֽלְכֶֽם:

No man will stand up before you; the Lord your God will cast the fear of you and the dread of you on all the land you tread on, as He [already] said to you.

לֹֽא־יִתְיַצֵּ֥ב אִ֖ישׁ בִּפְנֵיכֶ֑ם פַּחְדְּכֶ֨ם וּמוֹרַֽאֲכֶ֜ם יִתֵּ֣ן | יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹֽהֵיכֶ֗ם עַל־פְּנֵ֤י כָל־הָאָ֨רֶץ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר תִּדְרְכוּ־בָ֔הּ כַּֽאֲשֶׁ֖ר דִּבֶּ֥ר לָכֶֽם:

DEUTERONOMY, CHAPTER 11

90% of men,

and over 95% of women
suffer from O.N.D.
(Obsessive Normality Disorder)
a recent study* shows.

*by yours truly

My Anti-gangsta Rap.

From the least abrasive
of North America's soft-power
broadcasters*  I learned that rap
is the (inevitably) sad and sleazy revenge
of the children of children of children
of slaves, whose transport and labour
was the bone-crushed, bloody, flesh-soft, very
foundation of capitalism.

Rap 'artists' were financed by 'drug-money'
and profits from transport of immigrant
labour to the USA
from central and southern America,
and is now a multi-billion dollar industry
supporting the system which has enslaved
and devastated the whole world
as it did the African continent.

*The BBC World Service, too self-promoting for me.

That's Life - Celebrated Failed Experiment of Earth.

The world is not, as MacNeice declared,
'incorrigibly plural' 

but the unimaginably complicated
single tortured victim
of irredeemably Totalitarian Man.

Billions of components
Trillions of connections in the head of every one
of 8 billion specimens of astonishingly
cunning stupidity...cupidity.

Now, Neo-Proustian Collective Intelligence
(Euro-American Inform)
combined with Climate Breakdown/
Restructuring/Interference

pushes little planet into Perfect Storm.

The Wandering 'With'.

When I was younger people met each other.
They only met with an accident.
Now they meet with each other
as well as accidents.

When I was younger, people debated with each other
or others.  Now they debate each other or others.

Today I heard an American say that
she taught with her pupils, which seems to me
impossible.

There are other examples. This is not a grump.
Language-change and evolution are inevitable,
but I think the 'freedom of prepositions'
peculiar to the USA is due to immigration –
a dastardly consequence not yet called out
(or up) by Donald Trump.

Untermenschen

The English used to view the Irish
and the Scots as sub-human,
and treated them accordingly.
Duns Scotus was a theologian from Duns
in the Scottish Border county of Berwick. Hence Dunce.
He has been claimed by the Gaels and once
appeared on a beautiful Irish five-pound note.
Duncan is a common Scottish name
which, mixed up with monkey
replaced ass with donkey.

Jews have also been labelled sub-human,
but consider themselves Chosen People
who have (long before Germans existed)
seen themselves as more blest than all
other people in the world,
especially Palestinians
whom they once called Philistines
and who still try to live in الفلسطينيون 
al-Filasṭīniyyūn.

God is such a dispiriting name for a god.

Ashtaroth is a lovely name for a Syrian city.
It's included in an American website
of suitable names for a girl.
It is also the Hebrew name for Phœnician
and Philistine, after the Mesopotamian Ishtar/Astarte
goddess of sexuality and war. 

The Lord Ba'al was, on the other hand, Cloud-rider,
like Yahweh, fierce god of storms, Cumulus-fucker.  
Presumably worshipped in Baalbek
as well as great Babylon,
he was brought into Europe much later
as Beelzebub, one of three Lords of Hell;

another was Astaroth...

Báʿal (בַּעַל) and Baʿl (بعل) are words for 'husband'
in present-day Palestine, once called Pelesheth.

The Jews gave the Philistines a Bad Name
which still persists one way or other
in various quarters.  
They (the people of Pelesheth)
now worship the same moody, invisible god, 
but he lives far away in another container.

Hebrews, Jews and Israelis,
despised as dirt poor ... or as rich moneylenders,
may soon gain another name :
Nekamites – Zion's Avengers.

Temple of Bacchus/Ba'al, Baalbek.

My Inner Animal.

I never looked for meaning
in my life, nor purpose. I have no
idea why people might or do so.
There seems to me no 'point'
in anything, except appreciation
and enjoyment of what I like,
and gratitude for kindness.

Keen Christians often talk
unhumbly about humility.
Perhaps not wanting meaning
or purpose in life
is its free, irreligious form ?

For me there is no need of faith,
no god nor soul nor immortality,
no blessedness, no art, no meaning,
no progress but the flux and the slipping
or the crashing into death.

I sought a simile for Money

unsuccessfully.
It is not at all like shit
which all of us, except the hungriest,
produce.
Nor like polluted air
that everyone must breathe.

As Latin-speakers testified
it is more like testosterone
produced by little nuts
inside a little wrinkly purse.
All men need some
and those who have too much
produce yet more

and become Lords of our Scrotal Universe.

Daylight Robbery.

This stolen satellite-dish
embellished by Banksy
has not been seen again.

A word I learned today

which rhymes with barricade :

reality-laundering,

the oldest trade.

Speaking honestly rather than 'properly' :

'The rain
in Spain
goes mainly
down the drain.'

Social formulæ

for living, whether religious
or secular,
are usually devastating
in one way or another.

There are always anomalies, just as we
as a species are anomalous.

Algorithms have proved to be
the latest kind of
social formulæ.

Today's poem:

an eight-
syllable
senryū

The only way

to 'live in the moment'

is to abandon human society

     and lying, denying.

If you abandon it

for more than a bit

you'll find Enlightenment

by dying.

No bat

in fifteen years
has ever flown
into my bat-box.
I should have known.

Kweir Lear

would have given Cordelia
the whole kingdom
had she told me that
she loved me as much
as bananas love fennel,
aniseed or absinthe.

Anti-semitic is a racist term

much used (if not invented)
by those (many) Jews
who refuse to admit
that the Biblical Semites
('sons of Shem') included
all those who spoke a 'semitic', afro-asiatic
language such as Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic. Amharic...
and used similar right to left, phonetic scripts.

Thus an 'anti-semite' is simply
a non-Jewish racist seen from
a racist Jewish perspective.
We are all, Chief Rabbi, racists.

People who find Israeli policies unpleasant
are not necessarily anti-Jewish,
and certainly not anti-semitic,
since Palestinians (formerly known as Philistines)
are (unequally) semitic.

We don't say 'anti-hamite'
for those pale pigment-deprived racists
(including some Jews)
who identify 'the other' by pigmentation.

If people

Hadn't been so pathologically secretive

Especially about everything to do with sex

It and human life might have turned out to be

Less devastatingly penetrative.

Around 1812,

when Beethoven was going deaf,
top doctors prescribed
the insertion of radishes
in his ears.

 

 

 

The presence of olive oil in the picture,
however, suggests to me
that radishes were used as stoppers
before the invention of cotton wool.
Infection might have been impeded
by the addition of sage.

When I was a child, the only known use
for olive oil was for pouring into the ear
after warming,
to soften wax before syringing
by the unfriendly family doctor.

Thus I had ear-orgasms at an early age.

Now - you've guessed it - I have tinnitus.

The Ites : Not a History of Humanity

According to Isidore of Seville
and (long before him) Moses,

the Peoples of the World
were three: out of the wives
of the three sons of the nameless spouse
of bibulous navigator Noah:

sharp Semites in Asia,
Hamites with lovely hair in Africa,
and wan Japhetites in Europe,
some of them with frightening blue eyes. 

The descendants of Shem
included Arabs, Persians, Jews
and inhabitants of India, Afghanistan, Ceylon.

(No mention of the Berbers or the Basques.)

Arabs, incited by Islam, moved into Africa,
displacing many northern Hamites
and some of the Japhetites of Spain.

Jews were expelled (some having hurled
themselves from the battlements of Masada)

from Judæa, Galilee...
and (in due course) everywhere in Europe
except (it's said) Albania...

The Japhetites eventually took over
and destroyed the world.

Tissot:
Shem, Japheth and Ham making merry
while Noah 'sleeps it off'.

Worm-sperm in the Water.

Alittta virens by Alexander Semenov

 

Talking about Tavener, Tchaikovsky

or anyone, or anything, Patricia Hughes
was more than a mere
'continuity announcer'
on the BBC;
her voice was like a softly-squeezing
posh hand between the legs of my ears
even when she was reading
weather-reports or The News.

Listen to her here.

A certain kind of laughter

comes from the peals

of falling piles

of false smiles.

Morality and sexuality.

For prudes and patriarchs
(and their wives) every sexual
unconventionality is an abomination.

Thus: to rape a daughter,
son, sister or sister-in-law;

to force servants, employees
and au pairs to suck your cock,
and similarly hideous domination,

is not really worse than consensual
same-sex mutual celebration.

The most heroic are the quietest.

Mohamed Qomssan
grows vegetables in the Jabalia refugee camp, Gaza.

'Hope, like gambling',

wrote Jonathan Freedland,
'is a hard habit to break'.

Worse – it is intravenous.

The Blind Eye of History.

No nice Bums*
No nice Dogs
Few nice Women
in the Bible
All is Trivia
saith the Preacher
Never follow
any teacher.

*in both the British and American senses

Positioning the Filters.

Upbringings of different
qualities and calibres,
aspects and intensities
place veils of different densities
in front of eager eyes.

The crocodile's eye.

 

Enchantment and Bewilding.

A modern, lesser poet
has written that the great Rumi wrote
that the two
(why two ? why so few ?
why not five or eight ?)
important things in life are
beauty and bewilderment – though
(the not-good poet thought)
the seven syllables in English might
not be altogether apposite.

Bacon and Eggs.

 Enjoy!

 

Parasites.

Successful people

don't quite exist.

They just suck dry,

subvert

existence.

Evening in Kyiv.

 

Park Güell in Barcelona.

 

Us.

Many are measuring

No-one's preventing

Many are hastening

Most are ignoring

Some are trying to deal with participation in

Climate subversion

Bertolt Brecht's dramatic intention

to show audiences the absurdities,
blatant unfairness and crying
contradictions in our (and any) culture 

was inevitably dulled
by the essential absurdity of theatre.

One of the 'Arseholes of Nowhere'.

 

Tempus fugit, Monsieur Beckett.

It is impossible
to be avant-garde
for long.

In 1950s Belfast

we had quite a few visitors to our house.
Those who entered were friends of my aunt,
my mother, grandmother, and me.
The milkman came in once a week to be paid.
He had a leather satchel and a little electric van.
Others didn't come in:
the buttermilk man with pony and trap,
the pig-swill man with donkey and cart –

no, I'm wrong : he often (or always ? I can't
quite remember people I took little notice of)
went through to the kitchen to pick up
our bucket of peelings and leavings -
and then brought it back to be washed;

an old beggar-woman in black woollen shawl
who came every week and received a penny or tuppence; 

the knife-sharpening man, the Betterwear
brush-man came once a year, and sometimes
thin Witnesses, and smart well-fed Mormons...

the Electoral Roll officers, and, every ten years,
the people who gave out and collected
the census-forms.  Needless to say,
none of these now go to that house, or any.
Where I live now, apart from the firemen
selling their Christmas calendars
(whatever you want to pay), 
just one friend comes to visit
and only moths and shield-bugs come to stay.

Quite soon, a stranger
will come to carry my body away.

So who is surprised ?

 

Dish of the Day.

 

Lucernaria sainthilarei expressing themselves.

 

underwater photo by Aleksandr Semenov

New Tree Lore.

Trees as timber, trees as newsprint,
trees as kin:

'Net transfer of carbon between ectomycorrhizal tree species in the field' 

Wood-wide Web or New New-Age Fantasy ?

Baobab trees, Madagascar.

On eBay,

extremely variable postage rates!

It's 'all very well'

for privileged people like me
to sneer at and condemn
aspirations and ambitions –
but millions of people quite reasonably
want to improve their wretched
lives and living conditions.

Could they not have done better than this ?

My own private conspiracy theory:

what They call Tinnitus
is really my tuning-in
to Bad People
plotting Catastrophe.

The Hermit's Question.

'What have I lost
by losing my friends ?'

Coming soon

on Netflix
My Mind.

 

Fraudulent Free Travel on the Dole.

In the Good Old Days (long ago)
the BBC could afford to pay travel expenses
for competitors in different UK regions
to take part in 'Brain of Britain'
on the radio.

I travelled free 3 times from Belfast
across the sea to London by aeroplane
(where I stayed with friends for at least a week)
to compete, each time under a different name.

Misplaced ire.

I considered it an outrage that France,
alleged bastion of State Secularity,
sustains a Public Holiday
of the Christian Feast of the Assumption
of the Virgin Mary...

UNTIL, on further investigation I found that
a Roman Imperial festival, now called
Ferragosto in Italy, which celebrated
the assumption of Roman Emperor by Augustus
on the first of August, was moved to the fifteenth
by the Vatican for politico-religious reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferragosto

I had to tell

my new language-learning friend
cowering in Wildman's Bend

that Beat it! meant Bugger off!, not Masturbate!

and Bugger off! meant Scarper, Split, Vamoose, Get Lost,
Please Depart and close the gate.

Hitler may have been partly-sort-of-right.

Soft and hard (power) together :
the so-far-unbeatable combination.

Before the 20th century our Northern culture/ways of life were largely controlled by male white cruelly-heterosexual Christian leaders, especially kings, princes and popes.
But that has changed. 

Now the ways we eat speak play work think are directed by the USA, not least through cinema, tv and the world-wide web.

Lenin called cinema the most important of all the arts.
He meant, of course, that it is the supreme propaganda-tool. 

The Americans realised also that it was a wonderful medium for appeasement of the masses: creamy mind-sauce
in a thousand cinemas. It then morphed into television.

The USA owes most of this considerable Soft Power to a small number of Jews* who gathered in Los Angeles
because of the sunshine and less unfavourable social climate.

[rant follows] Images on screens reduce human attention to a fascinating rectangle from which it is difficult to escape : the little cultural box containing thousands of American 'movies'  which, through monopoly of distribution, have imposed ugly, sickly self-righteous/smug Anglo-American-French values (cultural and moral) across the world.  They have encouraged
and greatly helped to impose upon the world an empire
(accidental champion of Israëlity)
obsessed with competition for competition's sake,
obvious achievement, team-sport and sex/sexuality. 

*Jesse Lasky, Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) and Cecil Blount de Mille, whose mother was Jewish.

See also:

https://www.historytoday.com/archive/hollywoods-first-major-film-company-created

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/jan/23/cinema-peace-and-war-dw-griffith-charlie-chaplin

Now I'll go off and watch my movie by Tarkovsky.

"We must catch up [sometime]"

A certain swathe, kind or class of people
actually do say "We must catch up",
as if they're trailing in a marathon
or a tour of the Pinakothek...

Perhaps they meet and compare
children, jobs, houses holidays –
but if they add "sometime",
it means much the mendacious same as

"We must have lunch sometime".

Nobody has said either phrase to me,
though in the old days
I was frequently invited to lunch in people's homes,
even that of the Countess of Caledon,
in whose vast kitchen I made
a perfect green soufflé in 1969; 

and the elfin Marquess of Dufferin and Ava,
whose butler served us lunch as we sat
in chintzy armchairs.
I didn't know that he was queer,
and certainly didn't think that I was,
six years after my terminator friend
(the first person to bid me to take care)
'took care of' my doomed but glorious infatuation
with a gamine and eye-opening Dane.

It still pervades.

So, rare reader, why don't you
invite me for a delightful lunch ?
I love mange-tout peas and passion-fruit,
globe artichokes and custard apples,
gooseberry fool, caviare d'aubergines
and many other non-meaty foods. 
I don't like sweetmeats, cake or fudge.
You could catch up
on my slowly declining health and on
the fragmentary memories of my past
which are rising from the sludge

Remind me to wear my hearing-aids.

Without mentioning tourism.

We may not be quite
the most invasive species,
but we are the only one which introduces
other invasive species (including molds,
bacteria and viruses) everywhere.
"It's in our DNA" - or at least
in our seminal and œstral juices.

 

From the Handy Hints and Useful Tips Website.

Handy Hint and Useful Tip 768

following naturally on Tip 767:

How to piss in a washing-machine
during its (and your) operation:

Alexander Norman Pirie 1915-1996

I would have boiled his sperm in a twisted spoon
no matter
how many billions of synapses are in my brain,
no matter
that life itself is in love with pain
no matter
I'll be decaying matter soon
then
almost no matter

 

Today's photo,

a fallen ivy leaf.

 

Is it only my imagination,

or is the world being choked by

the deadly evanescence

of insatiable googletsy instafaboo-

tikish temuescents ?

Having lived most of my life in or near

Belfast, a new angle on the damned
Titanic is worth more than a single cheer.

Dark Prophecy: I Sing Of Shine

Etheridge Knight (1931-1991)

And, yeah brothers
while white America sings about the unsinkable molly brown
(who was hustling the titanic
when it went down)
I sing to thee of Shine
the stoker who was hip enough to flee the **** ship
and let the white folks drown
with screams on their lips
(jumped his black **** into the dark sea, Shine did,
broke free from the straining steel).
Yeah, I sing to thee of Shine
and how the millionaire banker stood on the deck
and pulled from his pockets a million dollar check
saying Shine Shine save poor me
and I'll give you all the money a black boy needs—
how Shine looked at the money and then at the sea
and said jump in mutha****a and swim like me—
and Shine swam on—Shine swam on—
and how the banker's daughter ran naked on the deck
with her pink tits trembling and her pants roun her neck
screaming Shine Shine save poor me
and I'll give you all the **** a black boy needs—
how Shine said now **** is good and that's no jive
but you got to swim not **** to stay alive—
And Shine swam on Shine Swam on—

How Shine swam past a preacher a-floating on a board
crying save me **** Shine in the name of the Lord—
and how the preacher grabbed Shine's arm and broke his stroke—
how Shine pulled his shank and cut the preacher's throat—
And Shine swam on—Shine swam on—
And when news hit shore that the titanic had sunk
Shine was up in Harlem damn near drunk—

Kursk.

Commentators have not remarked on the symbolism of the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast (Province). 
The Battle of Kursk in summer 1943 was one of the turning-points of the Second World War, and the biggest single battle ever fought.

A huge, nuclear-powered submarine named after the battle and the Oblast got into difficulties in the Barents Sea and sank with its crew of 118 in the year 2000. 
Putin was criticised for a failure in leadership in dealing with the emergency.  In the end, divers from Norway and Britain were brought in to access the submarine, but found no survivors.

The capture of territory in Kursk Oblast thus strikes a chill to the hearts of Russians, especially Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. 

MEANWHILE, IN ANOTHER PART OF THE WOOD,

The Russian anti-war activist and gifted classical pianist Pavel Kushnir died in prison after a hunger strike which was his final protest against the invasion of Ukraine.

He was seized and put in prison for releasing four anti-war videos on YouTube.

He had four followers.