Why I love The Web.

Fun statistical fact: Cows are about 300 times more likely to kill you than coyotes.

Minor side-note to statistical fact: If it was common for people to keep several hundred coyotes on their property and routinely chase them into a corral and handle them, this statistic would be different.

- This is a great summary of ‘conditional probability’, a statistical property which many people grapple with unsuccessfully.
.
- This post just made me realize that both coconut trees and vending machines, items often quoted in wacky death statistics, are both things that people often shake vigorously.

(from my favourite tumblr site)

"Knowing oneself"

depends a lot on how you define or think of "self". 
And as for "knowing" - how can we know anything ?
except that we are trapped in "selves" 
which can be turned inside out and liberated
to become molecules of accident-prone freedom.

Osamu Dazai -

an int'resting guy...

"I am convinced that human life is filled with many pure, happy, serene examples of insincerity,
truly splendid of their kind-of people deceiving one another without (strangely enough)
any wounds being inflicted, of people who seem unaware even that they are deceiving one another.”

― Osamu Dazai, No Longer Human

Evening sky, from my balcony.

"The intellect of man

is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work,"
wrote William Butler Yeats -
who made some perfect poems
(Byzantium, Sailing to Byzantium,
The Circus Animals' Desertion...)
but certainly did not live life perfectly -
unlike Akhmatova, whose poetry
I (who did not live in Russia under
the sociopathic Stalin Monster)
cannot relate to. Maybe it's the translations
since poetry is so rarely well-translated.

For me, Anna Akhmatova's
life was one of the most impressive poems ever lived.

The rare banana-fish

makes a delicious dish
when baked with snails
and rusty nails,
or boiled with slugs
and Persian rugs
or fried with love and jellied dove,
or dipped in silage
with extra mileage
and eaten with oodles of squish.

Next week I will present exciting recipes

for the extremely rare

                                          fish-foot.

Pornography

is not the cradle of misogyny
but its starter home.

The crudeness of How

creates the illusion of Now.

Like the great Marshall McLuhan

I'm neither optimistic
or pessimistic  -
but cheerfully apocalyptic.

Photo...

of a mural sgraffito
under a by-pass at Caussade
in south-west France.

(taken today)

(click the picture to enlarge)

One of the silliest of sayings

is An Englishman's Home is his Castle.
If that were the case,
A Frenchman's home is Fort Knox.

from today's "Times" of London.

"I have grown old waiting for the Third World War,"
says Roger Boyes.
Now he is sure something is on its way...

Tweet to Prokofiev,

Pope Francis
and a billion others :
castrate Peter,
save the Wolf.

The Sex Habit

is worse than heroin or glue
addiction
because it not only propagates
infections and affliction,
but people, too.

Saviours and Gurus

are demented.

But you can teach an old dog
new tricks.

On prehistoric (?) hut-ruins on Dartmoor (England).

on Facebook:

"Grimspound is such a cool site. I love the fact that you can literally step into a 3,000 year old house... Marvellous. Really gets you back in touch with the ancestors."

Why does anyone want to get in touch with 'the ancestors' ?
Mine would chop me up into little bits, castrate me, burn me alive or throw me to the English.

Whatever happened to Afternoon Tea ?

Women's Work Ethic killed it off.
I so enjoyed it in the 1950s
when my mother came home from teaching infants.
Now I have Afternoon Absinthe
and a small cigar.
I am the Emperor of Au Revoir.

Information does not necessarily have meaning,

and the "information value" of a message
depends in part on the range of alternatives
that were killed off in its choosing.
As in the making of a sausage.

for Raúl in Asunción.

I have just read that Guaraní
is (after Latin)
the second most-used language of taxonomy ?

To have no (or very few) friends

is no big deal.
But to have enemies can be fatal. 
Poor old Joe
(failed-poet and lapsed-seminarian)
Vissarionovich Djugashvili had thousands.

I guess that only human beings

have the bizarre and subtle concept of absurdity,
because we are the only absurd beings.

All languages are difficult

because people are difficult…
and difficulty with people
is unbelievably easy to encounter.

It is probable

that there were more Résistants in Germany
than in France  - but they had been incarcerated
with the communists and Jehovah's Witnesses
well before the start of World War Two.
And they have no ugly monuments
as residue.

Anti-Haiku

Watching my dog shit
I learn that content is more
essential than form.

Up to now

the world has been controlled
(or at least, seriously affected)
by psychopaths, narcissists, fools
and incompetents.  But soon
it will be run by Algo-Oligarchs,
electronic idiots-savants.

Perhaps the greatest

of our several evolutionary errors
is our soul-destroying trick of
compartmentalisation.

I was born a niĞah

but my hair was fair (with a kiss-curl at the front)

my skin was pale bluish-pink

(called 'white' ha! ha!)

and I resisted what I was taught to think,

and my beard’s now dirty silver 

and my house is home to much dog-hair. 

(Or fur, if you prefer.)

And I smell delightful

and am disabusingly blunt.

It 'springs eternal',

Ah, hope!

alias Satan, The Serpent, Lilith...and the Antichrist

- and dope.

I am not a fan of words

nor thought
nor language
nor humanity
(I'm a failed recluse)
nor life
but one of my favourite words is
DISABUSE.

An Image for Easter.

Intelligence

+ Testosterone
= Apocalypse

This is my five-thousandth blog-bleat

in the World-Wide War.

1984 has been and gone

and The Blessèd George O.
would be horrified at the
(albeit superficial and crass)
powers of the Unsubtle Algo.

In "Aspects of the Novel"

E.M. Forster wrote:

In daily life we never really understand each other,
neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.
We know each other approximately, by external signs,
and these serve well enough as a basis for society
and even for intimacy.

Well...no, Maurice.  It is obvious to any reader

or writer of novels that they do not serve well enough.

Who dunnit ?

To: Anthony Weir
Subject: Holy Hair

https://nalanda-monastery.eu/index.php/en/

A while ago I found a small plastic zipper-bag on the floor of the car I am driving.
When I picked it up I read Lama Yeshe Hair.
There are a few hairs in it.
Nobody could tell me who put them there.
He was one of the founders of the Monastery.
"Sponsor a Puja !"

In my Monstery of One I sport a wholly-holy beard
- and a highly-holy tongue..

Why is Israel considered to be in Europe, while Albania and Turkey aren't ?

This is the European Meteorological Warning map
with text in Basque. The brief text can also appear
in most national languages, but not in Turkish,
Albanian, Maltese - or Catalan.
You will see that Albania is grey, like Turkey and Lebanon,
yet Israel is featured, as is a Hebrew text.
As an Albanophile I am vexed.

What is it about Korea ?

The cruelly-competitive turbo-capitalist South
where children don't get time to sleep, much less play,
and the truly terrible totalitarian North
where children don't get enough to eat,
especially in the Correction Camps.

Note that North Korea has a border with Russia not far from Vladivostok.

The Apostrophe Problem - in Kazakhstan.

We Anglophones are lucky that we have to deal only
with little matters, such as theirs vs there's,
its vs it's, dog's vs dogs, man's vs mans and Trump's vs trumps
(not to mention CDs vs CD's)
but the poor old Kazakhs are facing the fourth change in their alphabet,
which will use Latin letters (as in Uzbek) plus
apostrophes to represent sounds not accounted for
in the lame 26-letter Latin alphabet.
O' is thus pronounced differently from O,
and G' pronounced differently from G.
So a four-letter word could have two or three apostrophes.

Kazakhstan has about 15 different ethnic groups
and several languages, not all of them Turkic.
In the east of the country, as in the neighouring part of China
an adapted Arabic script is still employed
(as it was from around 1200 to 1929).
Kazakh was first written in runes.

Wikipedia's Kazakh entries are in Cyrillic:
Қазақ әліпбиі
which came into effect in 1940
after 11 years of a Turko-Latin alphabet
with which Stalin replaced the 'unwieldy' Arabic in 1929.

I can find no text on Google in the new script,
except for the national anthem here.

Not so long ago in the USA...

...but they weren't smiling.

Swiss landscape:

Crows near Berne,
photographed by Andreas Gerber.

I think I know how

Jehovah/Yahwe/God felt
when he had Those Two in His Over-controlled Garden.
My rescue-dog knows he's in Paradise
and (short of shouting and violence)
there's no way I could stop him
eating the apple-core
on the floor
(if I actually wanted to).

Street Art

There is a Frenchman called
Pierre-Benoît Dumont
who stencils images on building all over Europe
and signs himself Artiste-Ouvrier .
This is one of his finest pieces,
after a painting by the great Gustave Caillebotte.

Kremlin Statement

“Our government is working hard
so that the People of Russia will be healthy and happy.
List of the People attached.”

I love this kind of humour.  

It is starting to appear in the USA

...where ‘news’ is pronounced ‘noose’…

Cocaine

is a very stable substance.
It is present not only on banknotes
and on menswear in Mayfair,
but also in rivers passing big cities
- and even in Milanese air.

Becoming a smelly old man

is an excellent way
of keeping people at a distance
- but not other smelly old men,
nor dogs.

The English

have been in Ireland
since the end of the 12th century
and still they cannot spell
an Irish name or word pronounced to them,
nor pronounce one written down.

Go figure!

Who, or why, or which, or what, is the Akond of SWAT ?

asked Edward Lear (here).
Well, delightful old man,
it is a remote and rocky part of Pakistan,
home to many Taliban,
who are not and never will be the acme of calm.

The Wāli of Swat (Urdu: والی سوات) was the official title of the leader (wāli) of the erstwhile princely state of Swat and also the nomenclature of the dynasty that ruled there from 1926 to 1969. The earlier titles of rulers in this area were 'Akhund', 'Khan', etc.
.

'The banality of Evil'

is the banality of civilisation
which renews itself
through slaughter.

The terrible problem

for us all, well-fed or starving,
is that there is no frontier
between good and evil.
One bleeds into the other
like dyes in a washed rug.

The 'true outsider',

a little wild,
not a little bewildered,
is only the only conscience
(beyond, beyond, beyond all consolation)
in the wilderness of the Group.
But are there any true Outsiders
of conscience ?