Anyone, anywhere,

can take time to contemplate
the Question of Schrödinger's Cat.

The best thing that can happen to this planet

is that humans make it uninhabitable
for humans.

Illustrated Haiku

This is the place where

I may slowly decompose

when I'm freed from life.

Politics

is like religion :
somewhere between sex
and terror.

Haiku after Issa

Behind the hemlock :
a luscious stream of water
can be heard, not seen.

It is a great pity

that humans are too stupid
to use their intelligence
intelligently.

My dognified companion is working on a new project -

THE BOOK OF DOG-EARS
by Asterix

In this most unreal of worlds

Other People's "spirit-guides" are boring,
predictable, phony and fake.
I imagine mine to be
an Ebola virus, a cockroach, a lake,
an archaeopteryx,
a fungus, a flea,
a dog or a hog or a fog
or a tree.

The plural of haiku is haikai.

Haikai can have teeth.
The best ones may be rotten.
My dog licks a turd.

On e-bay

I got (very cheap) a super-duper Sony tuner-amplifer
with Surround Sound capability, and lots of inputs and outputs
and throughputs.  It works well for my modest requirements
which include, importantly, Surround Silence.

“The Düsseldorf Vampire”,

Peter Kürten, asked the Cologne prison psychiatrist in 1931 if –
after his head was sliced off by the guillotine –
he would be able to hear, just for a moment,
the gush of his blood from his neck. 
He was told that, most likely, it would be the last
and perhaps most exciting sound to reach his ears.

When I am unwell,

my caring, sharing, tiring, demanding and devoted dog lies
on top of me and bestows
a laying-on of paws.

My second most-disappointing discovery in life

has been that almost all gays/queers/homosexuals
are just sexually-choosey Normals.

Profound Socio-Political Observation.

Subtexting Michelangelo.

click to enlarge

Sigmund Freud wrote that

the satisfaction of a 'savage desire'
is incomparably more pleasurable
than the satisfaction of a civilised one.
But it is civilisation that produces
ever wilder and more destructive desires.

Kustodiev: Portrait of Kardovsky.

Dmitry Kardovsky looks just a bit like me.

Alas! even though he admired Mikhail Vrubel

he was not a very inspired or original painter -

which may be why he kept out of trouble

and survived as a professor until 1943.

Testosterone ?

Men seem to find it more difficult to be male
than women (oppressed by men, each other,family, marriage
and their own fertility) do to be female.

Another haiku.

Pond in a dustbin.
My pink water-lily is
pure pornography.

Haiku (on anticipation of death) by Issa.

The old snake turning
towards the western paradise
enters his burrow.

(Irish version)
The old snake turning
towards Tír na n'Óg goes
into his burrow.

Long live sharks!

These Ridiculously Long-Lived Sharks Are Older Than the United States, and Still Living It Up

In an evolutionary sense, sharks are among Earth’s oldest survivors; they’ve been roaming the oceans for more than 400 million years. But some individual sharks boast lifespans that are equally jaw-dropping. Incredibly, deepwater sharks off the coast of Greenland appear to have been alive and swimming back in Shakespeare’s day 400-plus years ago—making them the longest-lived of all known vertebrates.

Bristlecone pines can live to be 5,000 years old. Sea sponges can live for thousands of years. One quahog, a hard-shelled ocean clam, died in 2006 at the age of 507. But among vertebrates, the long-lived skew much younger. Bowhead whales and rougheye rockfish can live for up to 200 years, and a few giant tortoises may also approach the two century mark.

Now it seems that Greenland sharks more than double even these remarkable lifespans, scientists report today in Science.

The reason for the sharks’ unfathomably long lives has to do with their lifestyles. Cold-blooded animals that live in cold environments often have slow metabolic rates, which are correlated with longevity. “The general rule is that deep and cold equals old, so I think a lot of people expected species like Greenland sharks to be long-lived,” says Chris Lowe, a shark biologist at the California State University at Long Beach. “But holy cow, this takes it to an entirely different level…”

(read more: Smithsonian Magazine)
photograph via: NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program

Maybe, after all, I'll learn to dance.

I don't think I would even steal this item from its peg.

(click to enlarge)

This armpit...

And maybe also after 9 years -
but I don't expect to live that long.

Now 76,

I can cheerfully announce
that there are two things I do not know:
1. Everything
2. Nothing.

Genealogy (a birthday poem).

Like almost everyone,
'I come from a long line of nobodies'.
My last Famous Forebear
was Abel.

Only in America ?

"Tampering with or disabling toilet cameras is a Federal Crime
punishable by a fine of up to $3,000."

"Dating" - a peculiar mid-twentieth-century American expression and practice.

When I was twenty, I met the only woman in my sex-life
on a live-in summer job in Copenhagen.
So I never "dated" anyone,
not even men I found sexy
when I "came out" vingt ans après.
I brought them home, or they brought me to their homes
immediately.  Or else we parted courteously.
I never understood the "dating concept" -
was it to do with calendars or palm-trees ?
Immediate invitation to dinner, bed and breakfast -
is, I rather think, very different from "dating".

'Human Dignity'

is as nothing
compared with
Canine Dognity.

The Educated Poor

(a regrettably rare demographic)
know both the price
and the value
of most things.

My friend Jindra

had this on his Facebook timeline
way back in July:

I have just come back from a short vacation up North [Ontario, Canada].
This woodcarving fascinated me.

"We are explorers from England. We mean well."
"We are not amused, neither are we stupid. Get the fuck out of here !"
"Big Bear, I am sick to my stomach about them coming here."
"Let me write this down. I find his attitude deeply offensive, Captain."

© Jindřich & Dína Hrdliča & Anthony Weir (with Asterix) MMXVII

No tree shall be felled

to publish anything I write
(poetical, tendentious, sententious or trite)
which shall stay insubstantial
in the margin of the virtual.

Doctors are

like "gateway drugs".
The more you visit them
the more you need them.

Democracy is

representative narcolepsy.

Haiku after Kobayashi Issa.

Writing trash about
moonlight for the bourgeoisie
is no kind of art.

[Issa wrote 54 haikai on snails, 15 on toads, nearly 200 on frogs, about 230 on fireflies, more than 150 on mosquitoes, 90 on other kinds of  fly, over 100 on fleas, and nearly 90 on cicadas, making a total of about one thousand verses on such creatures.]

Haiku after Bashō.

Rather than the leaves,
we admire gaudy flowers
on our planet of pain.

In the Age of Internet Artificiality

a real person or personality
is worthless.

Graham Greene

wrote in his autobiography:
'All life long my instinct has been
to abandon anything for which I had no talent.'

If only a few million more people would be so wise !

Life on Earth

exists only for its own sake,
not for any purpose or process
that we might dream up.
It exists only to exist,
to distinguish itself
from solids, gases and liquids.

But does it have to be aggressive ?

The reason why there has never been a "Just War"

is that there has never been a Just Peace.

Women

rarely
swing
around
lamp-posts.

NO DOGS ALLOWED

"...the entire civilisation is sick,

otherwise
appalling ideologies
such as fascism and Stalinism
could never have flourished."

- Jan  Švankmajer

from Little Otik

Pessimism Is A Sin.

The first thing we buy

destroys us
like a terrible internal worm.

Gardeners

are megalomaniacs
posing as nurturers.
But of course we are
The Megalomaniac Species.

Language and Time.

Guaraní - still spoken by 80% of the population of landlocked and impoverished Paraguay, not many of whom speak Spanish - interprets time differently from Indo-European, Semitic and other settled-people's languages. Time future is permanently in doubt: the word for tomorrow means if the sun rises again. The concept of time past is dual - divided between what happened (or what is alleged to have or accepted as having happened), and what was supposed to happen but did not.  This may, of course, be due to the appalling War of the Triple Alliance...

read more >

I'm not sold

on the idea of time
as other than an illusion.
One of the (not so many) wise things
that Bertrand Russell said was that
the Universe started only five minutes ago.

Why Joseph Conrad wrote so well.

MFK Fisher recounts that
he learned English as a sailor on night-watch
by reading a page of the King James translation of the Bible,
tearing it out and lighting his pipe with it,
and then reflecting on it (probably in Polish)
for the rest of the watch.

Gloss on lines by R.W.Emerson.

Don't follow paths,
don't ride the crowded monorail,
but make your own
and leave no trail.