Dead (you’re as good as)

 

Just as your deathbed is the best place from which to start discussing morality, your death is the best place from which to start doing philosophy. Imagine then (unless you don’t have to) you’re dead and let’s see where to, or who to, your philosophy takes us from there.

 

 

The bottom photo came with a text: 'The 10 Best Products Designed to Make a Geek Jump with Joy' (or 'turn in his grave with joy' in this case, or in this casket.)

The Creative Discovery Theory

 

 

… and then it struck me con brio: “He has discovered more about God!”

 

PS What is creativity? Can we add to the Universe? Or are we sometimes just sensitive, clever, talented and hard-working enough to be able to pick up what the Creator keeps sending our way? If we add, does it mean that the Universe (I mean both realms) can be improved in a uniquely human, uniquely individual way that may even be beyond the Creator himself?  

Can the Creative Discovery Theory reconcile the former two, seemingly irreconcilable, explanatins when it proposes that through creative effort we add to the Universe and improve it at our end by realising more fully what is already there, at God's end? And that if you, or Beethoven, shed light - or notes - in a specific way (and that is the creative moment) you notice that at 17.95 Eternal Time, on the thrid morning of the 56th double day of forever spring of the lasting year, a small section of the Lord's cloak (on the left, just where He had been tapping his finger to a solo by some Angelic trumpet) looks, sounds and feels quite like Symphony No. 5...

A barber (and surgeon)

 

"His* father was a barber and surgeon" [wikipedia] - an interesting order...

[*of Murillo, son of Gaspar Esteban and María Pérez Murillo. He may have been born in Seville or in Pilas, a smaller Andalusian town; baptized in Seville in 1618, the youngest son in a family of fourteen.** ]



**FOURTEEN! Makes you think: how keen are we to procreate?
(actually, it sounds like a useful line for the sort of no-nonsense banter that I'm promoting these days: Do you come here often?.... How keen are we to procreate?.... Oh, no - nothing personal, I was just thinking of Murillo's family.)

Cut it out; or off

The Universe is doomed. Bank on it.

 

You know that I love the Universe (wine...), but if I hear from my 'fellow'-Christians any more heretical rubbish urging me to convert to the New Age religion and bow before the planet, the ice caps, hippos, daisies, butterflies and gorrillas, I’ll blow the whole thing up myself!

I expect pagans to be world-confused, but Christians? Seeing them put the Earth goddess before the Lord makes me start piling up dead wood into an only briefly sustainable stake. Because, let me tell you, if the Universe causes you to think of God as its appendix rather than the other way round, cut the Universe off and throw it away! It is better for you to enter the Kingdom of Heaven* without the Universe, than go Hell with it.

(The funny - so to speak - thing is this Universe is doomed anyway. Why on earth would anyone want to link their fate to a doomed thing?? It just beggars Christian belief...)

 

Just drop it, will you?

 

 

*"enter life", in the original. Amazing. Each word counts there. Amazing.

 

 

Top illustration: I can't remember where from (funny - a complete blackout)

Bottom: BBC Radio 4 (just drop it!)

 

 

 

 

Cui bono

News reached me* that Viagra is going to be cheaper now. It might be good news. I wonder who for.

*over a month ago, but – yes, I’m getting on in case you wondered (or is it just a… never mind) – it took me a while to get excited by it; or show any signs...

 



just wondering...

Maureen? It's cheap...

Burp the whole of 'My Way'? No way!

 

I deplore the low esteem in which the advertising industry holds truth.  And I’m seriously considering contacting the Advertising Standards Authority to make a complaint about a certain Maureen.

Not only do I have a suspicion it’s a lie that she can burp the whole of ‘My Way’, but I also blame her for wasting half an hour of my precious time in which I tried to verify whether it may be at all possible (inconclusive; but perhaps through lack of practice).


 

Ding an Gott

Makes no sense

(unless there is a person at the other end of the pen)

 

(Coming back to )

Kant was right when he announced that we can never answer the question ‘What is a Ding an sich?’, but he was wrong as to the reasons. He went only half way towards an explanation. The full one is that we cannot know it, because there is no such thing. If the Universe is, among others, a message (and it is), it follows that it can be understood only in the context of its sender. To try to grasp the Universe an sich without its creator is like trying to understand a mini skirt without the girl, a Jaguar without the boy or a post without the blogger. Thus, not only can't the Universe exist without its creator and sustainer, but it can't make any sense without him, either.  Forget then about a Ding an sich, think about a Ding an Gott.

 

My bakery letting me down

 

 

I realised that the indecently cheap doughnuts rolling out of my bakery* at Tesco would be made of plastic, but could they not be made of a better kind of plastic?

(As it happened, it was the worst – and cheapest - plastic I’ve ever eaten…)



PS At least the packaging wasn't cruel.

That is beautiful, yes

Yes, it is beautiful; but forget about nature. (And it's not 'it', it's 'He')

 

I've just received a text message saying: 'That is beautiul, yes.' I think it worth promoting.

What if she'd decided to abort it?

What if it said: "Aborted"? (Can't you see? Can't you fucking see??)

 

 

What if the Duchess of Cambridge had thought that the pregnancy and the foetus would upset her life too much and decided to abort it?

 

 

Can’t you see? Can’t you see now how our inconsistency at the very, very beginning of us makes this a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde civilisation?  Can’t you see how you can’t be over the moon when new human life appears on the horizon and at the same time be on standby, the way that death clinic in St Mary Street in Cardiff and hundreds of other places in the West are, to gratuitously kill the very same new human life? Can’t you see how it blows our world apart intellectually, emotionally and physically – even as we speak?

Where is the nearest wine?

Où est le vin?

Speaking of no-nonsense conversations: an idea came to me the other day of a series of foreign-language conversation books for no-nonsense tourists. The French one might start comme ça:

How come your women are so pretty and your politics so ugly?

Does the Grand Orient rule France well?

Honestly, is the TGV a good enough reason to adopt socialism?

How much?? I didn’t want to buy the whole vineyard, just one bottle of Pétrus!


If Waterloo in London were to be renamed, would you prefer Crécy or Saint Helena as a new name?

What did your grandfather do during the Revolution?

Funny, I could swear my baguette was longer before I looked away.

I hope the length of your lunch break won't be affected when the country goes bust...

Remind me please who was Dreyfus?

What’s the most adequate French adjective for the feeling of having lost a sophisticated lead in the universal culture to the unimaginative shop-keepers from across La Manche?

In the next revolution will you be executing people in a different way?

Is everyone funny or it’s just the way you speak?

I didn't catch that: did you say it was one year or one month France held out against Hitler?

Excuse me, my baguette it's running out (funny, I'd swear it was longer, before ... or - never mind...) -  how do I get my local shop-keeper to put in longer hours?

When are you going to learn English?

O! I didn’t realise Depardieu was Russian.

Who has won this year's Tour de France? And last year? (And Wimbledon, and who -rather than France - got to stage the 2012 Olympics and - the last one, I promise - who  took away from you the control of the universal culture?)

[with a map in your hand, as part of the ploy, to an attractive passer-by] Excusez-moi, is this the right way to French kiss?

And most importantly, and before anything else:

Where is the nearest wine?

PS I just dread to think what the German version will sound like...

So how do you feel about your upcoming death?

I’ve never had much time for small-talk, but now, as I’m getting on*, I simply can’t do it at all and I explicitly refuse to do it - as part of my manifesto. I strongly – and slightly madly I must admit, being a sensible person - believe in genuine, no-nonsense ice-breakers that feature tension, anxiety, clash or even shock. Form now on my official policy is to put them to good, constructive use within the first few minutes of a conversation.

When I meet new people I’ll say (well, as I’ve been saying for a long while now, but without any written commitment): ‘So how do you feel about your upcoming death?’ or ‘You realise you’re going to – if statistics are anything to go by – fall out big way with your bestest friend. Regardless of what it’ll really be about - what do you think it should be about?’ or even ‘What’s the main reason your right to vote should be taken away**?’

*yes, I am – in case you haven’t heard. Actually, how do you feel about my upcoming death? (Or is it just a … never mind…)

 **apart from the general one: the wholesale senslessness of democracy

PS Speaking of the last one, how about you? (Besides, Cardiff feels now like Palma, Mallorca, doesn’t it? At least so tell me my pupils.)

Healthy Bastards

It’s 8.30 a.m. (and counting) Cardiff time. On the broad path along the River Taff there are as many pedestrians as joggers and cyclists. A little lower, on the surface of the water, there glides a rowing boat with a crew of students sweating their way to what used to be the Tiger Bay and now is a teddy bear kind of bay. The people I pass are wearing track suits and intensive looks saying ‘I’ve done a lot of thinking, I’ve understood what’s important and I’m doing what needs to be done with my life’. Some even look happy, or content, in a short term kind of way. But there is something unhealthy about this way of starting a day, I feel. Just as I’m beginning to see what, a young cyclist  in a flowery-summery dress and high heels overtakes and overwhelms me for a second or two. After she disappears ahead (I’m *older than her; and on foot), I know - enlightened by her body and the lust for eternal youth it aroused in me - what's wrong with this morning and the people. ‘Bastards!’ I think to them, ‘Do you want to live forever?**’

*much; maybe even too much.

**to quote a concise pep-talk given by one of Napoleon’s generals to his men, when they weren't showing enough enthusiasm after being told to charge an overwhelming enemy.

(looking for an illustration, I found - after I'd chosen the title - this, but I jogged for this.)

Message from the King

Are you picking it up, the message from the King, the Daddy, the Number One**?

Analytic Philosophy, which is concerned with ground-level work on the significance of simple messages, may find its saving grace in the fact that the Universe*, apart from being our home,  is a message, too. A message from the builder, the Great Architect*, to us. And a message needs to be analysed, contemplated on, interpreted  – and Analytic Philosophy can be of, some, use here.

(Obviously, it’s not only with our intelligence that we read the message, but with our hearts too; at that stage A.F. is useless).

*where freemasons are not against us, they’re with us, the Grand Orient excepted.

**among single performers; otherwise it's the Fab Four, of course.

Go on, sing along...

(Unless they get cut to pieces or poisoned in the womb, in which case you'll only hear them cry...)

 

 

Never take the Universe* for granted.

Always take it for granted by someone.

 

 

 

PS Apologies for a cheesy choice of illustration, but Armstrong was on the radio more or less when I was thinking the thought (again).

 

 

*or yourself, its pinnacle

Bug, tax, control - totally

 

Malevich? (brings back the feel of the old* totalitarian days, doesn't it?)

 

Ministers of ever more totalitarian governments famous for bugging us and each other silly meet in Moscow, with a former KGB spy famous for putting businessmen behind bars slyly playing a generous host, to discuss how to better control citizens of their 'freedom-loving' states and squeeze ever more money out of them for the sake of their ever greater welfare? 

I smell an ever scarier, ever more cross-bugged rat.  

(And begin to miss the Cold War and the Iron Curtain** that did quite a good job of separating good from evil, at least intellectually.)

 

 Robber barons of the world unite!

*?
**not to mention the Iron Lady.

 

PS George Osborne, who joined other robber barons to plot further oppression of widows, orphans and taxpayers said they (i.e. the state robber barons, not w., o. or t.) had made ‘good progress’.

What a change from the days of the Conservative Party conference in 2005, when he waxed lyrical about Estonia’s low, flat and simple corporate tax in that small hotel on the seafront in Blackpool at a fringe meeting, to which I went and was impressed.

 

PS2 This is all so wrong, so fundamentally and obvioulsy wrong and so stubbornly wrong that I feel more like despairing - or shooting - than educating.

Cruelty to the poor

Supermarkets’ own-brand lines of cheap food products are a cruel idea sold in a cruel way. Not only do the retail giants make poor (or stingy) people eat uneatable stuff, but they also subject them to aesthetic cruelty by forcing them to suffer inhumane packaging. The depression-inducing designs seen on the lower shelves at  Tescos, Sainsburys, Asdas or other Lidls are simply rubbing it in: “Yes, you are poor and your life, just like this packet, is drab.”

Actually, one wonders why they haven't put some ‘interesting facts’ on the packaging the way they sometimes do for slightly more upper-shelf products, e.g: “Did you know that children from poor families are *three times more likely to develop alcohol addiction and *five times less likely to go to university than those from well-to-do middle class homes?” or attached a leaflet and asked: “Have you checked yet whether your benefits haven’t been cancelled? (Enjoy your breakfast!)”

 

 

*say; because I haven't checked the stats - I'm quite poor now and can't afford a researcher (but really: I don't care what the figure is; I'm not interested how poor the poor are; I'm interested how to make tchem richer).

Winter - The Faggot Gatherers by J.F Millet (in Cardiff; bought and then bequeathed to the National Museum of Wales by extremely rich Davies sisters)

 

PS I bought some of this ostentatiously cheap**, poor man’s stuff the other day (easy, easy - I’ve survived, somehow) and I don’t know what depressed me more: the product, the design or the fact that I'd managed to puncture that bag for life form Asda (or Walmart, if you’re in the U.S.).

 

**obviously I don’t mind cheap, but discreetly or secretly cheap.

 

Photo (now, this is really funny)

 

The Lord of Plus

Shade upon shade, layer upon layer, angle upon angle, level upon level, dimension upon dimension, mood upon mood, thrill upon thrill – the Lord keeps adding to our Universe.

Because he is the Lord of Addition, not of Subtraction; the Lord of Multiplication, not of Division.

 

 

The Universal plus sign?

 

PS Intrestingly, zero was once regarded by some philosophers as the Devil's number, because whatever you mix it into in multiplication, gets annihilated.



Bottom illustration

 

 

 

 

A Monarch, an outlaw

Signing herself outside the law* (not at the moment shown here).

The Queen (5), having her arm twisted by a bunch of intellectually messed-up politicians, has put her signature to an act that is against the nation she’s supposed to protect. The unlawful law gravely offends quite a few persons, including the three most important ones and confirms that the Queen, her government and the parliament are illegitimate.

They must change, get changed or be abolished.

 

*or she would have done if she hadn’t achieved it before by signing, in 1967, the ultimate self-indictment: the Murder of Innocent Human Life Act.

 

Another monarch coming to his senses, at Canossa.

 

 

 

PS God save the Queen (from Hell)!

 

Doing good stuff

If this is not good stuff, I don't know what is.

(Pay attention, Chris Martin and Tom Odell!)

 

 

"We're gonna take that smile off his face..."

 to let her quote me.

A Headmaster (gone wrong)

 

A good headmaster gone astray (into government)

I’m listening* to Michael Gove and am impressed with his hyper-activity (he might be a difficult pupil, mind you): all those ideas, changes, reforms, experiments, all the pressure he keeps applying, all the telling off. And it strikes me: he’d make a good, or at least interesting, headmaster. What a shame that he – along with his government, his society and his system – has mistaken the role of a headmaster with that of a government…

 

*to be precise, I keep listening: he doesn’t seem to shut up, just like Pau, my Mallorcan pet pupil; and just like me.

 

PS The more I think about it, the more it strikes me: the mad idea to have a Ministry of Education (the mere name sounds Nazi/Stalinist/Orwellian ) may be the most devilishly totalitarian one of them leftist all*.

 

 

Pictures: top - telegraph.co.uk; bottom - geoffreid.com

 

 

*pardon my English (again), but I’ve decided to try to experiment with English even more freely, regard-free whether my experiments make sense or not, in line with my motto: if it ain’t fix, broke it. And I don't care what marks you give me: I run this school.

Jesus, help Jolene's friend*

 

 

After a few days of continuous obsessing about him and incessant bothering him about one thing after another, I wanted to leave Jesus in peace for a moment and went to the** library to get distracted from him. There, I ran into a little acoustic gig.  As luck, or Jesus, would have it, the first song that reached my ears told of a situation that required his involvement, and urgently. So I bothered him again***.  (Sorry, Jesus).






*if she's still one.
**local
***well, not necessarily about that particular situation, which could be fictional, but generically, so to speak.

 

(Local) Socialism: bowled out

Why bother having a socialist state, which the U.K. is, if the national broadcaster can't be bothered to use the heaps of taxpayers money that it gets to buy and broadcast the most important event of one of the most imprtant national sports*?

1979 or 1980 (not that I watched cricket then; well, not that I watch it now, for that matter)

*and the broadcaster that can be bothered charges for it as if this were a free-market state.

A Soft Upper Lip

The good old stiff days.

(I wouldn't mind him going bananas*. But the country?)

 

That the first item in a news bulletin broadcast the following day  was Andy Murray's win is understandable. However, the fact that the otherwise serious BBC Radio 4devoted to the overdue breakthrough half of the total time or so at the expense of revolutions, economic downturns, spies, etc. - and interviewing his granny to boot - shook** my understanding of the British character and made me realise to what frightening degree the local upper lip has become soft.

 

 

** Or would have shaken if I hadn’t been exposed to some of the coverage of the local Olympic Games or seen various food packaging with ridiculous ‘lovingly hand-made’ on it, or some such über-lyrical rubbish.

 

 *a good job he isn't; he's cool and keeps a stiff one.

Abu Q.

Re: Abu Qatada

Has someone missed something or are the media focusing (again) on what's not crucial?

Shouldn't Abu Q. and his lawyers be less concerned whether evidence obtained through torture could be used in his trial and slightly more whether he himself wouldn't be tourtured?

And a little earlier, by the same genius:

Mini reviews

Coldplay - the biggest bores (generally)

Muse - the biggest bores of rock (currently)

Tom Odell - the biggest new talent of a bore

Regrets

I haven't done any angling (worth mentioning), either

As I approach my death, I think of things I didn't do as a young man, as a half-man, as a piece of shit, as a superman or as a boy. I wish I had done many of them. I’m happy not to have done many of them. And I’m simply curious what it would have been like to have done some of them. 

(Fidgeting with an AAA battery, reading - with some interest - that it "may explode if disposed of in fire" and thinking: but then again - I'm not dying tomorrow; I hope.)



Photo by Dennis Hallinan

Why bother voting?****

"Yes, we voted him in, but we tend to change our minds (and have no bloody idea what we do)."

Voters are cheering up the army which is – rather undemocratically, I’d say – trying to coerce a democratically elected head of state into accommodating chaotic demands of largely the same people who a short while ago voted the politician into power in the first place.

Rings a bell?

That's right - democracy.

Democratic pundits getting things right. Again...

 

PS Of course Egypt’s President Mohammed Morsi was extremely likely to turn out to be an inept, inefficient* and incoherent politician.** He was elected democratically.  

  

Democracy: to go

*which in his case, if the rest of the description is appropriate, is a significant advantage.

**if he is one, as the masses claim; but then again, masses are usually wrong, so he might be an outstanding chap after all.

 *** or let people vote?  wonders Sphinx.

But we keep calm (and think of Dualism).