We’re beginning every month this year with a haiku (or a longer poem made of haiku) relevant to the month.
hot June eventide…
sweltering clouds perspire – drip …
rain to sate the earth
[Geregory R Barden]
All the poems can be found online at http://www.haikupoemsandpoets.com.
In the spirit of … oh, I don’t know … having nothing to do, possibly? … I’m going to do this 30 day word challenge. That’ll be a word, as specified in the chart below, each day in June. So we start tomorrow.
With luck I’ll manage to post the requisite word each day here on Facebook. I’m also planning a catch-up post on my blog every 5 days – ie. as we reach the end of each row in the chart.
I’m not nominating anyone, but of course you’re welcome to play along should you wish. I hope you find it interesting.
And so at the end of another month we come to our regular collection of links to items you may have missed …
Science, Technology, Natural World
Extraterrestrials. What is believable, and how would we know? [£££££]
Meanwhile on this earth we have Vespa mandarinia, the Asian Giant Hornet, aka. the “Murder Hornet”. But just how dangerous is it? TL;DR: Very if you’re a honeybee.
I never cease to like the (small) variety of wasps in this country and what they get up to.
Still with the hymenoptera, the humble bumblebee has a clever trick to get plants to flower.
Health, Medicine
When is a llama not a llama? When it’s a unicorn!
So why is it that clinical trials of (new) drugs are so complicated and expensive? [LONG READ]
For a long, long time sunshine has been seen as having healing powers.
Researchers, almost accidentally, have found a microbe which completely stops the malaria parasite.
[TRIGGER WARNING] Having had four miscarriages, journalist Jennie Agg wanted to understand why it happened and why it is never talked about. [LONG READ]
Sexuality
Dr Eleanor Janega has some sexual fun over on Going Medieval. Here she is on:
• No Nut November [LONG READ]
• Dildos and Penance
• “Alpha Men” and poorly disguised misogyny
Social Sciences, Business, Law
Have you ever wondered how the heights on Low Bridge signs are calculated? Diamond Geezer investigates.
Art, Literature, Language
Dutch researchers have been trying to extract the secrets from Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”
History, Archaeology, Anthropology
Mexico has too many mammoths – or at least bits of mammoths.
OK, so here’s another series from Going Medieval:
• On chronicles versus journalism, and ruling versus governing.
• On the King’s two bodies and modern myth making.
• On the Lusty Month of May.
London
Diamond Geezer (again) discovers the interesting history of his local Tesco supermarket. What’s the history of your local supermarket’s site? Three near me: the iconic Hoover building, an old cinema and the site of a former gasworks!
And one more from Diamond Geezer … this time he’s been finding out the correct names for the different parts of a London bus stop.
Food, Drink
Apparently coconut oil isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Colour me surprised! [£££££]
Lifestyle, Personal Development, Beliefs
And finally … Pity the poor curators who are having to spend lockdown in places like Hampton Court Palace!
Today is Day 80 of my house arrest. And nothing much has changed since my last report on day 60. It’s all still rather tedious, although most things seem to be trotting along and not as fraught as even three weeks ago.
The great British public are being ever more stupid. Talking to a friend in south London (New Cross) the other day, he says taht everyone there things it’s all over and life will resume next week. And the idiots think that because the roads are empty the speed limits don’t apply; so the police are seeing a significant number of stops for traffic offences (mostly speeding). I really don’t know how we get some common sense into the heads of these people.
Anyway, I thought I’d document a few things (good and not so good) that have happened over the last three weeks or so …
| Good | Not So Good |
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I intend to provide another progress report on Day 100, Friday 19 June. Meanwhile be good, stay safe, and remember those burnt offerings to the gods.
The more I see, the angrier and more despairing I become – despite the fact that I know it isn’t good for my blood pressure.
Just what do these self-important, selfish, stuffed shirted twats think they’re on?
Almost every major sport is trying to (re)start their season. Football, rugby, cricket, tennis, Formula 1 … and on and on. Top flight football in the UK is intending to restart in mid-June. They aren’t alone.
Why? Selfish vested interests and money.
All they are going to do is to add fuel to the flames of a second spike of Covid-19. Why can these guys not understand this? Why are they (and their sport) so much more important than people’s health? How do we restructure their brains?
Sport is a recreation. Unfortunately it has become big business made up of prima donnas and stuffed shirts. (In fairness the stuffed shirts were always there, at every level.) Sport is not essential; it is recreation, fun. At the end of the day it is dispensable and one of the last things which should be (re)starting once all else is running and things are stable again.
The politicians are not helping. In England from next week up to six people may meet, in the open air (public or private) as long as they observe 2 metre social distancing. They can even have make burnt offerings, aka. barbecues.
Just like the government did too little, too late at the start of this, they’re now doing too much, too soon and risking the gains we’ve managed to salvage from their incompetence. Do they seriously think that Joe “Dumbo” Public is going to manage to observe (or care about) 2 metre social distancing in his garden, with his and his mates kids running around killing each other, while the adults swig larger and smoke “substances”? And how is this going to be policed? An unenforceable law is worse than no law.
It was my friend Katy, over on Facebook, who pointed out:
Juvenal [in The Satires] coined the phrase “Bread and Circuses”. It was about the fact that the Roman senators created a grain dole for the poor in order to buy their votes and keep the peace in a time of increasing unrest and hardship.
And the fact that the Emperor Domitian who was a right bugger, used to create big celebrations to take people’s mind off whatever the Roman version of Stalinist purges and gulags were. Massacred three thousand peasants? Chuck them a circus and some balloons on a stick and we’re laughing.
I’m not sure what the bread in our current case is – maybe Brexit? But the return of non-essential sport, and allowing people to effectively have parties at this time, certainly look a lot like a circus to me.
Just watch the upturn in Covid-19 cases by the end of June.
Gawdelpus with this set of clowns in charge.
A while ago I stole an idea from our friends Jean and Helen who had discovered Letterbox Flowers: regular delivery of a bouquet packed in a box which will fit through most letterboxes.
So every month we get a bouquet, sent on overnight delivery, beautifully packed and just waiting to spring into full bloom. The packaging is impressive with the flowers picked while still in bud and with the larger, more easily damaged blooms protected with little socks – what a fantastic idea that is! (See right for how the flowers are packed.)
This is our second monthly delivery. To be honest I wasn’t very impressed with our first delivery as the flowers didn’t seem to hold up well (but that may be the way we handled them). But this month’s is just fabulous …
This is 2-3 days after we received them. They look wonderful! Even Noreen is impressed, and that’s from someone who’s parents were florists and who grew up with floristry.
Letterbox Flowers have a variety of options from a selection of one-off bouquets to a year-long weekly subscription. For my money they aren’t out of the way expensive: a decent bouquet from a good florist would cost around the same (at least in London).
Whichever party it was Boy Cat was at, it was clearly a good night and there was a hangover to be slept off.
More Maytime flowers from our garden …
And finally a different sort of flower …
Welcome to this month’s selection of quotes, recently encountered and which amused or interested me.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
[Leonard Cohen]
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
[Viktor Frankl]
When you get up in the morning, stretch your limbs, so that the natural heat is stimulated. Then comb your hair because this removes dirt and comforts the brain. Wash your face with cold water to give your skin a good colour and to stimulate the natural heat. Clear your nose and your chest by coughing, and clean your teeth and gums with the bark of some scented tree.
[Taddeo Alderotti, On the Preservation of Health, 13th century]
We are not meant to be ruled by our Prime Minister, we are meant to be governed.
[From Going Medieval blog]
The topic of compassion is not at all religious business; it is important to know that it is human business.
[Dalai Lama]
Even if the whole world is nothing but a bunch of jerks all doing jerk-type things, there is still liberation in simply not being a jerk.
[Eihei Dogen, 13th-century Japanese Soto Zen Master]
The risk for young people is minimal and very high for old people. Every seven or eight years, your risk of dying if infected doubles … statistician David Spiegelhalter explained all this clearly on The Andrew Marr Show, saying that we need to be proportionate about the risk we face. He called the [UK government] press briefings “number theatre” – underlining the need to communicate data properly and treating people with respect.
This is the opposite of what the government has done, and people are right to feel angry. Johnson, the great risk-taker, has diced with death himself. His administration is still delaying practices such as quarantining new arrivals to the UK. He is risking the union, with other parts of the UK in open derision of his sloganeering.
If we are to be run by a second-rate ad agency, with graphics from the 80s, it is no wonder we feel vulnerable. We may, therefore, take matters into our own hands. The lockdown will break from the bottom up as people need an income. The middle classes need their gardeners, cleaners, dog-walkers and nannies. Roots need doing.
[Suzanne Moore; Guardian; 11/05/2020]
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
[Julius Caesar]
All that is required to deal with this crisis is ‘common sense’, or ‘British determination’, or any other phrase that uses inverted commas as protection from critical scrutiny. Weak leaders, of all political persuasions and managerial levels, like phrases like this because they allow them to appear to offer a solution whilst failing actually to do so.
[John Bull at London Reconnections]
Women could practice pubic depilation (“we pluck and trim our doorways like good spiders; the flies come strolling in”, Aristophanes …). One way was to singe the hair with an oil lamp … Not all women did this … however, nor did all men like it (cf. Lucilius, in bulgam penetrare pilosam, “to penetrate a hairy bag” …): “a hairy cunt is fucked much better than one which is smooth; it holds in the steam and wants cock” (futuitur cunnus pilossus multo melliur quam glaber; eadem continet vaporem et eadem vellit mentulam, Pompeii graffito …). A young female specialist, picatrix, arranged pubic hair.
[John G Younger; Sex in the Ancient World from A to Z]
Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, “Listen mate, life has surface noise”.
[John Peel]
More next month …
A few more photos of flowers in our garden this afternoon.
