Why you should never turn on an overhead air-duct on an aeroplane.

Aer Lingus* gave me the 'flu
- and this was mid-June, mind you!
Ten days in bed...
I wished I was dead
or at least was able to sue.

* [Aer Lingus is Ireland's snooty and deposed national airline,
now lowish-cost - if you book early.]

Western Values

exterminated these fine specimens, too.
(WVs always eliminate the toughest,
always want to bring down the alpha-males
whether lions, tigers or superior people.)

If it is warm enough (in summer, anyway) to live without clothes
on Tierra del Fuego,
not so far from Antarctica,
why are we forced and brainwashed to do so ?
For two reasons:
1. The nasty genital-obsessed Abrahamic religions which have taken over the world.
2. Without the huge areas of land devoted to growing cotton
     and the huge factories devoted to processing it
     and the huge factories devoted to fashioning it
     and the millions of underpaid workers involved in all this
     our nasty and criminally-wasteful capitalist system would collapse.

go to website =>

A dog's nose...

...can see in the dark.

And what is more...

children spread children.

Considering the Abrahamic religions,

I conclude than God is
misery.

Then - and Now.

click to enlarge

Adam Zagajewski, a celebrated poet, wrote:

"Only in marriage do love and time,
eternal enemies, join forces."

Well, he's not Rilke, not Miłosz,
but a middle-class
triumphalist Polish Catholic,
living in the USA,
so he would write
such populist, trite,
sub-militarist tripe.

Welcome to the Astérix Hotel *

Just one star.
*

* Himself, your * canine * trip advisor *

Buying a second-hand violin ?

Check that it doesn't look like this inside:
PVA and possibly sniffing-glue, missing linings and corner-blocks...

photo by violin-restorer Almina Kaselis

The benefit of Literature.

I have read perhaps 500 novels
and, although I understand people
(especially males)
better than I otherwise would have,
I am no better at coping with them
(and my own shortcomings)
than if I had not read a single one.

Until AI* saves the planet,

the more technology we rely on,
the stupider we will get.

* by this I mean the unlikely perfection of Artificial Intelligence,
not the god-playing practice of Artificial Insemination.

The basic problem with socialism

is that it is obsessed with labour
(hence The British Labour Party),
production, and consumption.
Thus it inevitably supports
the exploitation of 'resources',
whether human or non-human
in as crass a way as capitalism.

When the Lakota Sioux were asked

by the stupid, murderous
white Greedies if they would sell
"their" land, they gravely wondered if
"their" sky was included in the
(dishonoured) deal.

Not to mention the millions of buffalo slaughtered and left to rot.

Darrel Whitaker,

from Glenwood Springs in Colorado,
claims a sasquatch attacked him
and attempted to rape him
while he was walking in the woods...

   http://worldnewsdailyreport.com/

Hi there, Darrel (poor guy, what a name!) -
it happens to us all, sooner or later.
But the rest of us keep quiet about it.

I'm sure -

because I so love going to bed -
that I will be wonderfully happy when I'm dead,
enjoying the eternal bliss
of not having to arise and piss.

My four hints towards self-improvement.

Examine the intention.
Engage the attention.
Enter the unknown -
informed by the inknown.

How long will it be

before there are more dead
than living people on Facebook ?

Probably,

because I so love going to bed,
I will be wonderfully happy when I'm dead,
luxuriating in the eternal bliss
of not having to get up and piss.

"Only in America" ?

Economic growth:

the cancer of the world.

Unfortunately, 'Westerners'

are too brainwashed to understand
that what 'Islamists' object to
is less our sham democracy
and aggressively-consumerist 'way-of-life'
and more our multi-level
hypocrisy, which universal curse
of civilisation they want to replace
with their own - apparently even worse.

Possibly the most successful advertisement of all time:

A diamond is forever.

(Like ignorance and death.)

We are very bad at

imagining other people's imaginations.

A dog is hoping...

...that someone will come
and re-charge her bone.

Good to Know.

"If you choose to Reset Edge by deleting the whole Edge User environment
and run the PowerShell reregister commandlet to recreate a clean user environment,
Windows will automagically restore/repopulate the RoamingState folder for you
with data from the cloud."

Reflections on Flannery O'Connor.

Very many millions
are poorer than the dead,
for the dead owe nothing
to anyone, and they know
that life is no gift,
just indebtedness,
misunderstanding.

What dies with our bodies
is the construction of consciousness,
and beyond fragile awareness
nothing can be known,
nothing experienced.

Something we now forget

is that almost all people
(crown princes, viziers,
royal stewards, generals,
as well as tenant farmers,
slaves and servants)
were expendable
and easily replaceable.

She had a degree in biochemistry

- which meant that she changed the sheets,
cleaned out the fridge,
and emptied the pedal-bin in the kitchen.

How much has changed
since The Women's Room
was published in 1977 ?

Funeral Advice.

Would The Deceased
actually care
whether you're there
or not ?
If the answer's No -
don't go
(unless you want to
sing the silly hymns and see the coffin,
the other Mourners, or the Graveyard Plot).
If the answer's Yes -
don't go under the dead's duress.

Black-and-Yellow Dog Blues..

If I look Noble and Eager
 perhaps he'll take me out.
If I look Sad and Pathetic
 perhaps he'll take me out.
If I growl and bite him
 perhaps he'll throw me out.
       Oh no!
       Where will I go ?
       What will I eat ?
        I love him so...

We congratulate ourselves as a species

for our ever-more-refined
ability to bind
effect to cause.
Unfortunately
(and according to not just this poet)
we often get the linkage wrong
and never know it.

Of course, it wasn't only the handsome Nuba...

click for more 

...who challenged Western (and Abrahamic) Values.

To be,

or to behave
is always the question.
To see,
or to blindly seem;
to express,
or to repress,
suppress,
regress...

Blue eyes

seem to fascinate many
(if not most) folk.
I have no idea why,
because I have always found
blue-eyed people
to be untrustworthy,
unreliable, "unsound".

Not-so-merry-go-round.

"Terrorist Outrages" are,
in a typically human, perverted way,
quite intelligent, 'strategically-sound' -
because they re-foment the mindless humbug
which gave rise to the terrorism in the first place,
thus re-inforcing the vicious circle of alpha-male activity
which makes our nasty little human world 'go round'.

On democracy and the commercial media.

"The people's" "right to know"
is, remarkably, no greater than "the media's"
desire and ability to profit from scandal.

"The real struggle,"

wrote the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber,
"is not between East and West,
or Capitalism and Communism,
but between Education and Propaganda."
Unfortunately, there is no firm dividing-line
between any of these alleged opposites,
least of all between Education and Propaganda.

This is a photo of

the plants seen today in flower
during a brief walk with Astérix on a limestone plateau.
They include Viper's Bugloss (Vipérine)
Milkwort
Broomrape
Convolvulus
Scabious
Helianthemum
Rock Spurge
Birdsfoot Trefoil
Not-quite-Meadowsweet (which smells like Meadowsweet)
Rock Pink (carnation_
Rock Geranium
Spanish Broom
a kind of Privet
and a couple which I could not even guess...

And here is His Holy Sniffiness
in a riverside meadow a week earlier.

"Human desire,"

wrote Hegel,
"always begins with desire
for another's desire."

This is a picture of our world...

...seen from Saturn !

"I laughed till I tweeted." - D.Trump.

The greater the civilisation,

the greater the stress.
If only we could
make do with less.

Ideas.

Men care most about
what is least real -
and thus keep altering reality.

"The banality of evil" :

human beings reproducing.

Slavery never ends.

On the one hand
competitive and compulsive consumption,
requiring employment;
on the other
unregistered domestic labour.

Popular poets

depress me !
Example: Robert Frost,
a Grand Old White Man
(but not fit to slather Whitman's arse)
whose smugness was unequalled.
No wonder that the puerile Allen Ginsberg
usurped him briefly in the 1960s!
"The road not taken" is so crass,
"The Gift Outright" so nauseatingly
offensive that I think that Robert Frost
kiboshed American poetry - as TS Eliot
garotted poetry in England with his
profoundly superficial Four Quartets.

Available in 12 colors,

http://cfa.org/Breeds/BreedsKthruR/Ocicat.aspx

the ideal Ocicat is a large, active animal with an athletic appearance.

All religion, all science and all madness

come from the question
Why ?

Tidiness is next to Godliness.

(The tune is by Handel
which may be why the hymn still sung.)

Thine be the glory, risen, conquering Son;
endless is the victory, thou o'er death hast won;
angels in bright raiment rolled the stone away,
kept the folded grave clothes where thy body lay.