Diogenes said

(and Schopenhauer agreed)
that any immortality would be hell.

Diogenes in Dijon.

 

A waking thought.

There have been

in Russo-Greek Christian 'Orthodoxy'

self-styled, often uncouth

Fools for Christ.

But none like Diogenes

who have been described as

Fools for Truth.

Virtual Connections.

I see
another one
has "ghosted" me
which happens
quite regularly
when I encounter
members of the
actual bourgeoisie.

Dressing up

in England.

"Jack-in-the-Green"

The Putin of the World Wide Web

Worth more than a Himalaya of sugar.

Mark Zuckerberg

The missing comma.

 A country that presents itself falsely is not to be trusted.
(Well, no country, except perhaps San Marino can be trusted)

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
is a masquerade, a false representation
because the Kingdom of Ireland
(of which the present Northern Ireland
is a fragment) ceased to exist in 1800.

In 1922 most of Ireland bloodily seceded from the United Kingdom, leaving an entity, curiously named Northern Ireland
and not North Ireland (like, say, North Korea, North Macedonia,
or South Sudan) officially, practically, legislatively
closer to the UK than the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands
(which are a lordship and dependencies respectively)
but a separate entity which will eventually secede.  

So the UK's proper title should contain a comma,
or, better, a dash:
the United Kingdom of Great Britain - and Northern Ireland
trailing in its abominable, royal footsteps.

The Oddity of [my] Memory

I have been re-reading Peter Carey's
splendid satire Oscar and Lucinda
which I first read in 1989 or 1990. 
I remembered the cover, the title
and my enjoyment, but forgot
every ferocious iota of the plot.

If, however, the book had been called
The Glass Church
I'm pretty sure my memory would not
have left me in the lurch.

Kargah e hasti.

The poet-philosopher
Jalaludin Rumi
suggested that
I should think of Being
as Workshop.

But, having been
a fatherless technophobe,
workshops frightened me

and I am not a fan of work
or indeed employment
that is not enjoyment.

For most people
life is (at least) a tussle, 
but for me it's more
of an astrophysical puzzle.

On my 84th birthday.

Time out of mind
Time out of mud
Mind out of blood
Yet mud is so kind

Mount Olympos.

 

Up there in the pure white snow
the gods played sordid, vicious games;

and now below,
corruption rules, as
any hard-won democracy
is bought by any
festering autocracy.

The name of my edgy homeland.

Why NorthERN Ireland,
when Northern denotes the vage north of a country
as in Northern France or The North of England,
Northern Australia,

and North denotes a separate country
such as North Korea, North Macedonia,
likewise South Sudan and, indeed South Africa 
and North and South America ?

Seoul is in northern South Korea...

'Being Yourself'

is not easy
in the totalitarian
moralistic state
of liberal democracy, 

and almost impossible
in an autocracy.

Justice for Everyone.

Banksy 2025

 

Today's weather :

 coming straight at me.

Monthly check-up.

Hello, doctor.
I'm fine, thank you : some slight
dizziness when standing upright
after sitting down,
sometimes while walking in the town,
sometimes resulting in a faint.

Problems with hearing and with sight.
"Post-it" psoriasis on my thigh:
I could write a note on it and peel it off .

Permanent bloat .
(Another ventral hernia before I die ?
or just gastritis or intolerance of food,
like any ageing saint ?)

Otherwise, I have no complaint,

for, on the other hand, I seem to have
a highly-advanced Übermensch prostate
which has enabled me simultaneously
to piss and ejaculate.

If I'm still alive next month
I'll post another cheerful Old Age Update. 

Jawsome!

 

Migration.

Eighty years ago
Stalin removed to Central Asia
the entire population of Chechenya
in one of his sadistic population games. 

A third of them perished. 
The rest were deprived of their Chechen names.

Up to (and maybe beyond)
two hundred thousand Chechens died
in the two Russo-Chechen wars of the 1990s.

Since then, over a third
of the remaining Chechen population have fled.

Let us now talk of "illegal immigrants".

The Jews want to move the Philistines,
now called Palestinians,
but really they would prefer them dead.

Garlic and snails.

The food of the enemy
can also become the enemy.

The last time I cried

was in 2002 when my dog died.

Cancer diagnosis.

 

Social costs.

The Nation State doesn't care
a tinker's fart for your welfare
even if you live in a shanty-town.

Costs and statistics are what.
The poor are expenses to be kept down.

Frankly,

many of the Bordeaux
and Côtes du Rhône wines
sold in French supermarkets
under €12 aren't worth
much more than this.

The corruption of queerness.

When I was young 'homosexuals' were
special people. Either they were
literary intellectuals like Wilde and Joe Ackerley
(who, like me, was in love with a dog)

or they were 'working class', like Joe's
ill-treated lover, stocky and strong
and smelling of sweat or carbolic or both.

'Homosexuality' was forbidden, therefore exciting,
hence its attraction.  Now anyone
with neither brain nor brawn
nor criminality can be 'gay'. 
Homo-mediocrity is here to stay.

Today's photo

is by an Amazon courier.

I got it!

 

'The People', Fellow Republicans

or self-hating populace
bond desperately with populists
who so despise them.

POPVLVS MVLTVM OTIVM HABET
ATQVE MVLTI SVNT AVARI.

Rome became a republic, Athens a very limited democracy.

Eternal plastics.

Molecules
from my horrible, scorched
Terylene trousers from the 1950s
may be in your bloodstream.

 

Armageddon.

A wasp's nest
pillaged by a badger.

photo by Mark Cocker

A brilliant term

to describe many 'liberals' :
COMMISSARS OF LANGUAGE.

But behind the language-commissars
are the Thought-controllers
of the Deep State of unmitigated morality.

 

TRUMP SET TO ABOLISH WWW

Not (yet) true.
But this is certain:

Concerning which, it is no surprise
that the world's chief supplier
and consumer of pornography
is the world's chief supplier and consumer
of cadavers (corpses) and body-parts...

[more on this on October 3rd]

British society is currently

getting its knickers in a twist again
about petty (not organised) shoplifting.
Retailers claim that it puts prices up
for those who pay.  But surely 
shoplifting by the poor consists of
minute and miserable attempts to remedy
grotesque inequalities in society ?

A painter I'd never heard of until today,

underclass,
queer pride
from Ayrshire :
Bobby MacBryde.

In theory, you cannot

in a Liberal Democracy
be coerced to be free.
Except in the USA.

Multiple

is a loathsome recent introduction
which means More than three.

It has replaced 'several' (more than 5),
'many' and 'a lot' (more than 10)
and 'a large number'.

Which is the original Vermeer

and which the copy
- which some think might also be by Vermeer ?

In Philadelphia

In London

The problem with language

is that so many experiences
from boredom to tragedy
are beyond words.
Language often trivialises,
or there's something missing.

And, anyway, the problem with talking
is that people do not listen.

Gaza, 2025.

She will become plunder for the nations,
and her settlements will be ravaged by the sword.

Trump plan for holiday resort for non-Palestinians.

read details

see more of today's photos

Most Heroes

are 'Poster Heroes'
and all are heavily unbalanced,
even more flawed than ordinary folk.

« Religious ecstasy

made people callous
(so did causes)... » 

- Virginia Woolf : Mrs Dalloway.

'Loneliest Continent' ?

Not Antarctica.

Epidemic of social isolation hits Africa.

Anti-sticker Sticker.

Geopolitics.

Trading and Financial sanctions rarely work.

They make regimes more resilient.

South Africa did not collapse because of sanctions
but, as with the USSR, the system became
politically, morally and socially unsustainable.

The only thing that will stop Putin's war
of destruction, war-crimes and terror
in Ukraine will be a geo-political or hubristic error.

Unbelievably revered,

(mainly in Catholic France)
the spongy spiritualism of Simone Weil
includes:

"The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter."

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

"There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction."

"Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity."

and reams of similar tosh, possibly as bad as my own,
which almost makes me Groucho-glad that I'm not revered.

HOWEVER, she did write some excellent epigrams, such as:

It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God
the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.

 – Christians do it religiously.

* * *

A less sententious philosopher >

She was one of the most odious types of poster-hero :
a preacher, a career-martyr and a
dishonest suicide who was not even a cat-lover
- let alone a resister (even by stealth)
against the Catholic patriarchy of Pius XII.

I get the impression that she would rather have died in Auschwitz, had she known of its existence.

Just as Facebook is not the web,

and as the web is not the internet,
so intimacy is not love.

 

Penultimately,

the only justification of power
is power.

Grasshopper

hitch-hopping.

'Artificial Intelligence'

White men's
Dreaming.

Interesting account...

 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle

 “Gay marriage is a contradiction in terms,” he said.
“If it’s a marriage, it’s not gay.”

also:

Note: I have been 'sexually inactive' since I was 80 !
Quite a relief ! - as musician and bon-vivant George Melly
remarked when he reached the same blessed state.

Arbor vitæ

My latest painting
with its title in Farsi.

Tree of Life

My 'studio'

Keeping our heads down.

I used to assume
that the reason why old people walked
with heads bent down was their arthritic
necks or shoulders.  Now I know that
at least some, like me, keep their heads down
to help them not to faint on the sidewalk or the street.

 

Susophily.

I love pigs.
So, when I read a Guardian recommendation
for an Aussie series on youTube
called Cooking for Seamus
(a very happy and highly-socialised bull),
and found this amazing hippy, happy video
of his almost-friend, an arthritic boar
called Danny Boy, I became a happy hippy
for eleven minutes - without grass or E
or psilocybe tea.

NB
There is a Pig-lovers group on Facebook.

What is he going to do with (or to) them ?

 

Meanwhile, in America,

I feel (even) older already.

 

'The Establishment'

is whoever calls the shots –
political or internet despots.

Brut

can be the best champagne
or almost-unacceptable art –

at any rate, remains apart.

Keeping Kool in Korea, and a Doorway in Sudan.

 (from 'The Guardian')

Couldn't get the people to move.

My nineteen-sixties.

I never turned on,
never tuned in,
because I was already
a drop-out who
listened to Sibelius. 

Death

(sui-cyanide)
The Deputy-Burgomeister's daughter (and parents) Leipzig 1945.

photo by the great Lee Miller

JAWS

 

Democracy

photo by Dean Lewins

"The stifling intrusiveness of Liberal Democracy
should not surprise us." – Ryszard Legutko,

The Demon in Democracy : Totalitarian Temptations

in Free Societies, New York & London 2006

"I have found from many observations
that liberals are incapable of allowing people
to have their own convictions, and immediately
answer their opponents with abuse or something worse."

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot.

Netanyahu's Blasphemy

On the same day that Ghislaine Maxwell
declared that the unstable president Trump
"always behaved like a Perfect Gentleman",

Israel's mad prime minister denounced
the UN's and other agencies' reports
of true famine and genocide in Gaza
as a New Blood Libel.

(With allies like these, Europe has,
Dear Mr Putin, no need of enemies.)

Books banned in many American schools

include Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five,
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale & Oryx and Crake

Picoult's Nineteen Minutes
Khaled's The Kite Runner (made into a good film)
Morrison's The Bluest Eye & Beloved...

(I have read all these books
and found them superb.)

Jodi Picoult has said that her book was banned
(in a state awash with pornography) because
the word erection was printed on one page.
What a Spirit of the Age !

Common Sense

 
it seems to me pretty likely that it is due to
the Alimentary Industrial Complex, aka
Food Manufacturers replacing real ingredients
with plastic-packaged microwavable concoctions.

The limits, like the habits, are in your head.

 Not really practical.

Oh dear, I'll have no career

as a postie.
So it's back on the dole for me...

In Chains.

The legendary Australian 'bushranger' or bandit
made even more famous by Sydney Nolan,
here shown in (an improved) police photograph.

There is nowhere

without a McDonald's.
Not even delightful suburban Dudley,
Warwickshire, England. 

Music in the car.

Bach on the piano
can be as banal as a beach.

'Beefsteak Nazi' :

Brown on the outside,
Pink in the middle.

Times change.

Now we have Colonic Liberals
and Social-democrats:
transparent-pink on the outside
and shit-brown in the middle. 

If Zelenskyy and Putin meet in Budapest

(which is unlikely), here, for the Press Pack,
is a brief guide to Hungarian politeness.

 

and for my many Magyar readers, here
are my Maxims translated into Hungarian.

Another new word.

Rami Kaminski thinks everyone is born an otrovert,
but some resist the barrage of cultural conditioning
that makes kids 'social' and fit in with
various groups and identities,

thus retaining intellectual and emotional independence. 
He has written a book about it
(very nice cover).

Believe it or not,

Toads don't have jewels in their heads,
nor, ensorcelled, will they go back
to being princes if you kiss them, but

one species of toad secretes
a defensive poison which contains
the 'powerful' 5-MEO DMT,

an illegal substance taken for Astral Journeys.

.

Not a recording studio.

Execution Chamber, 
Nashville, Tennessee.

Hmm.

I must order up a few hundred thousand
heavy 'for-life' shopping bags-for life
to throw around the countryside
and do my little bit for the planet.

Well, of course,

since microplastics are everywhere,
they are in mammalian testicles.

Today's cartoon

by Nicola Jennings.

 

Today's beautiful - and threatened - animal.

Tajikistan used to be home to wolves,
leopards, tigers, bears and the almost-eliminated
gorgeous-eared striped hyena.

Hyæna hyæna

 

Even at the 'height' of the 'civilising'

Roman Empire, around 90% of its population
lived outside towns and cities,
thus leaving few traces in the archæological record.

Today, most of the human species is crammed
into cities.

 

Jostled but proud

holding their own in Liège.

photo by Martin on FlickR

Gutenberg invented

the printing-press, and about a month later
pamphlets such as A true and most horrifying account
of how a woman cruelly murdered her four children
and then killed herself at Weidenhausen
near Eschwege in Hesse were circulated.

About a week after the World Wide Web got going
pornography appeared.

(Perhaps I exaggerate a little bit.)

Theatre of the Bizarre.

Rummu, Estonia

Mechanical diggers perform a scene
during an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet
where heavy goods vehicles and cars
take on the roles of the characters.

Photograph by Janis Laizans