Farfallin2. Meet the promised peripheral Italian saint: Santa Farfallina di Sestri Levante. She hops and hovers atop the mountains of Liguria preaching permanent dissent, infinite patience, stubborn endurance and selective schadenfreude. “Hear ye, hear ye!. she cries. “Do not tolerate the intolerable! Take comfort in the modest fact that you are not Dominic Cummings. Live your lives as if the R-Evolution was possible. Resist and bite.. And so on. So far she hasn’t converted many people, but the Floaters and the mountain Trotters absolutely love her. She subsists on offerings from the local Shoggoths and the odd contribution from the Shub-Niggurath, who has a secret hidey-hole under the Lanterna in Genoa. The santina herself has a pintsized pied-a-terre in Piazza Campetto, where she throws occasional small parties for a selected crown of mad poets, avant-garde dancers and notorious cat chroniclers. Her feast day is a movable feast, naturally.  NB. This is mostly for don Attilio “El Caffarenito., who will get all the in-jokes.

ClipArt Monsters’ Dirge. Here’s a small token of my contempt for that ghastliest of all our ex-prime ministers, Tony “Liar-Liar-Pants-On-Fire. Blair, who keeps on resurfacing, like a particularly malicious revenant.
Also, a special, tailor-made ad hominem attack and a curse upon his obnoxious head: May the Harpies foul your table and rot the very food in your mendacious mouth. And may the Undying Worm eat your eyeballs from the inside. And may the Night Mare send her brood to plague your unpleasant dreams -and the dreams of the MSM indentured pundits that still maintain that you were a “pretty regular guy.- to the ends of the viable universe and beyond. There
Coming soon: Peripheral Italian saints.
PS. There are many good reasons for my obsession with this kind of GM (Graphically Modified) clipart creatures wot come free with some apps. One is that some are too cute not to do things to and with -we seem to be made for each other. Another is that I feel very sorry for them. Why, most of them will end up decorating someone’s god-awful selfie, or the snaps of him getting pissed and puking in Magaluf, or, Bumba forfend!, the pics of her latest breast implants. Frankly, the poor wee things are better off working for me, dontyouthinkso?

Persist.
Joke: A guy walks into a bar, left foot forward, and offers to buy everybody a drink. He gets shot. A rosary-clenching, Bible-wielding lunatic walks into the same bar and says that from now on everybody’s gonna have to pay for the very air they breathe. He gets feted sky high and proclaimed Saviour of Mankind. Meanwhile, back outside, the planet is going to pot. The end.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/bolivia-color-revolution-new-surge-latin-american-independence/5695175

I ask for the Nth time -and for the Nth time I expect no rational answer: why is it that this kind of pre-fab, CIA-backed ghastly self-appointed “Good Guys. can just walk in, clenching rosaries and wielding bibles, behave like Yahoos and proclaim themselves Saviours of the Nation and nobody says boo? A socialist-leaning government sweeps into power, carried by a tide of popular pissedofness with the Usual Crapitalist Suspects, and the first mistake he makes the world and his CIA-brainwashed missus screams “Fraud! Fraud!.

Hypocrisy, cruelty, idiocy, bad faith, moral cowardice, intellectual laziness, greed and wilful ignorance remain as endless as ever.

Oy, are we fucked!

ClipArt Master Plan. The one drawback I can see of not being religious at all is that you can’t believe in an afterlife and therefore a heaven or a hell, or even in a post corporeal reckoning of some description, not even reincarnation as a tapeworm. Which is a shame when it comes to fantasizing about the many possible unpleasant hereafter fates of Ms Patel, our gruesome current Home Secretary. I mean she makes Michael Howard look like a boy scout, she does.  Oh well, there you have it. We keep on allowing clowns and psychos into 10 Downing St. and that’s what happens. I daresay than come December 12^th we will even vote them in. Again. This time with a proper “mandate. (whatever that is when it’s at home!)
And this is for the travellers she so hates. Today it’s them. Tomorrow!it could be you.
Let’s hear it with Ojos de Brujo:
La mochila que llevamos
Va cargaita de piedras
Del abismo ya nos viene
Esta mala condición
Sólo nos queda la rumba
Y una buena bulerí­a
Un bailecito por tangos
Y el cante del Camarón
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRVwG-X1S_g

Poppycock 2019. I’ve had a spiffing idea: this year you do the Memorial Rant. I’m tired of banging on about a subject on which practically everything has already been said and fat good it does, too. Not that I haven’t got anything to say that I haven’t said before but I simply can’t be arsed. There. The small monster’s text is from Leonard Cohen Story of Isaac.

Cat & Bull. aka Funereal Jollities. It’s done! Alegrí­a, alegrí­a, alegrí­a!
Here’s a little jubilation for something I never thought it’d happen in my lifetime. Or anybody else’s for that matter. Not that I’m too impressed, really. It’s a purely symbolic act and as such of little practical value. But sometimes a symbol may, just about, mark a transition in consciousness. People might start to believe that other seemingly impossible things are actually possible. Who knows?
So, off they go -out of the obscene mausoleum he had slave labour build to the poxy glory of his own gruesome ego- the pestilent leftovers of a man that almost single-handedly stopped Spain from joining the 20th century and damaged the national psyche to a degree from which it still hasn’t recovered; not really, as demonstrated by the jack-in-the-box emergence of foul parties like Vox.
Now the old bastard’s grubby scraps will rest in a fairly conventional burial ground, if in similarly unfortunate company: Fulgencio Batista, Ante Pavelic, Rafael Trujillo and Marcos Pérez Jiménez. How lovely, they can all be dead tyrants together.
I know what I say ad nauseam about good news: few, far between, small, etc. Still, let us celebrate this one, puny though it is.
Next stop: pension the monarchy? 🙂
As for the ghastly shrine itself, I’m all for razing the whole grisly thing to the ground and turning it into a sanctuary for orphaned badgers, lynxes, wolves, tigers, lions and bears, oh my!  The Shoggies have kindly offered to rip to shreds the little horror themselves, gratis, for free, por la cara, as they say. Alternatively, they suggest that we temporarily wake up Great Cthulhu and remind him that he might want to take a leak and have a quick snack. Either will do, I think. Salud camaradas!
And here’s a couple of jokes, kindly translated from the Spanish by the Shub-Niggurath. 1) is for the old goat himself and 2) for his chum and heir-apparent, who fortunately never was, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco.
1)
Franco, Hitler and Mussolini are boasting of their respective operatic achievements. Hitler says: “In Bayreuth, we’ve just had a performance of The Ring with one thousand German extras!.
“Bah!. says Mussolini. “In Naples we have performed Aí­da, ten times, with ten thousand Italian extras..
“That’s peanuts. says Franco. “In Spain we do Les Misérables, every day of the year, with thirty million Spanish extras..
2)
Of all his ascents, the last one was the fastest.
Sic semper tyrannis, my friends. Have a spiffing weekend.

Pensive Puss. Here’s another handy APGI (All-Purpose Gripe Indicator) for your use and convenience. Brexshit? The Assange kangaroo court? The Catalan Silly Question? Thriving totalitarianisms on the up-&-up? Climate catastrophe? Take your pick. The choices are nearly infinite, unfortunately. Unlike good news, which persists in being few, far between and often ever so small. Still, here’s a wee bit: Netanyahu’s practically out. Nobody likes him anymore. He may as well go eat worms. 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRzhflMkGLg
And here’s a link to the kind of thing that gets me in stitches. It might amuse you, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOmdkN6MOwU&feature=youtu.be

Pisces. The Fishes. Water. Mutable. Instructed (and sadly occasionally drowned) by Neptune. Like Aquarius, very creative and imaginative, Pisces swims in the waters of Chaos with supreme ease and so it can make connections between seemingly totally disparate ideas. The ultimate lateral thinker, it can think off the beaten track like the clappers without even breaking a sweat. But whilst Aquarius reaches his insights by intellectual pathways, Pisces operates on such a subtle intuitive, emotional plane that often it’s unable to articulate how it reached its startlingly accurate conclusions; sometimes its visions verge on the prophetic. Dreamy and prone to mysticism, loving to the point of motherliness, like Cancer, Pisces is caring, compassionate and gifted with great empathy. It is also endowed with a keen sense of sacrifice that unchecked can be its downfall, leading it to martyrdom -real or perceived, uncalled-for renunciation and sometimes paranoia. Pisces is contradictory, conflicted. Or at the very least ambivalent. The two fish swim in different directions. So the wisest, most compassionate of friends at its best, when lacking a clear sense of identity and thus self-assertion, it can overcompensate by being a manipulative, mind-games playing git, even a brutal authoritarian. Like Scorpios, Pisceans can be great fun to be with, for their imagination knows no bounds and it has always an extra, almost extra-terrestrial quality that makes them marvellously stimulating companions. On the down side, it can beat Scorpio hands down at moaning, whingeing, carping, masochistic bouts of self-pity and blaming others for its often self-inflicted misfortunes, one of which is a tendency to misuse drugs and alcohol. Two beloved Pisceans in my life drank themselves to death, so I know what I’m saying.
A Closing Disclosure.
So that’s it, folks. End of the first draft of this small project.
Having had my fun with the graphic part of the Zodiac and having pontificated to my heart’s content about the meanings and characteristics of the signs, I must hereby confess that I don’t actually believe in Astrology. Mostly I don’t believe in anything. You could say I don’t believe in believing. But after a lifetime of asking people that ultimately silly question “So, what’s your sign?” and having observed a great deal, and read a bit, and talked a lot about the subject with folks that do believe in it, it has always amused me immensely to notice that indeed most Taureans are stubborn bon vivants and most Aries impulsive pussycats and nearly all Scorpios fascinating covert explosive devices and 90% of Virgoans fun-loving vivisectionists and so on. Still, I maintain that to believe that the positions of the stars at birth can influence our psyches and our behaviour, let alone allowing this belief to determine our actions, is pure lunacy. Then again, ever since I came across quantum theory, I’m prepared to leave this door open a crack or two. If there be such bizarre things as neutrinos, why shouldn’t Mars endow a person with a degree of belligerence or good old Venus doom us poor old bulls to an inordinate love of teddy bears, pure cotton, the colour blue and the vines of Valdepeñas? After all, in the merry month of May the neutrinos also go through blossoming flowers and lively birdies in the mood for love and blue skies; and in winter, when Capricorn holds sway, they cross days short and full of gloom so that one may be apt to be stern and brooding; and by the time Pisces gives way to jolly Aries one is quite ready to take to the bottle, if one hasn’t done so already. And so forth.
Answers, suggestions, theories and further insights on the customary e-postcard, please
And A Wee Request.
As I said at the beginning of this series, these are all old-ish experimental sketches. The blurbs that go with them are impromptu frivolous chit-chat (see previous paragraph). Any blunders, mistakes, inaccuracies, outrageous untruths, plain piffle and fatuous clap-trap you may detect, please do tell me and I shall endeavour to correct them in the final version. Or not. I do not aspire to perfection for only Allah is perfect. 🙂

Aquarius. The Water-Bearer.  Air. Fixed. Under the tutelage of Uranus and, some astrologers say, Saturn as well, the celestial water boy is highly intellectual, imaginative, creative, idealistic, ferociously independent and latently explosive. Loyal to his friends, able to inspire loyalty and a talented leader to boot, he is nevertheless particularly antagonistic to cults, gurus and other varieties of group-thought, herd mentality and “expert. authorities. Egalitarian and forward-looking, he is the archetype of the revolutionary reformer but not for his own advantage or the benefit of his ego but for the gain of all mankind. Original and often eccentric, Aquarius is emotional but seldom shows it. He can appear detached and even cold but inside he’s a stockpot of passion and high principles. Don’t trample on his ethics, don’t piss him off, and don’t betray his trust if you don’t want to get scorched by the full radioactive heat of his ire. His vase has been identified by some with the cauldron of Cerridwen, the vessel of Knowledge carried by the Celtic poet-friendly enchantress. Gone South Aquarius can be listless to the point of inertia and abandon himself to static, barren concepts devoid of any practical use or any realistic chance of implementation. At times he can slither into irrational subversive ideas for their own sake or aesthetic value. But find an upright, healthy Aquarius, get on his good books, gain his trust and he’ll have you in stitches with his witty, frequently wickedly sarcastic sense of humour on regular basis.

Grinning Twins.  This is for anyone who still has doubts about what kind of country Britain is becoming.
You know the old saying on how to boil a frog, don’t you? Well, the water just went up a few degrees. Not that we didn’t have loads of warning signs. My heart is with the twins all the way and back.
https://twitter.com/afshinrattansi