Idle Chitchat. The disintegration of the social fabric via condemnation of dissent continues apace. You can hardly open your mouth to express the mildest of objections to the official party line without getting the spontaneous irregular armies of the self-appointed reps of law, order and orthodoxy jump on you like the wrath of God. You get insulted, publically humiliated, demonized, ostracized and if at all possible battered to a pulp. So if what you want is a quiet life at all & any cost, just keep shtum, nod politely to any dribble that the sheep gibber at you and, if things get too unbearable, get yourself some ear plugs. It takes guts to be a goat! Have a maaaaarvelous week.

Evolution 8. Some more silly shenanigans for the weekend. Have a lovely one.

PS. And now you can see why Orcas sometimes curl their dorsal fin in such a funny manner. In memoriam of a remote ancestral whim.

Alegrí­as. If this is for anyone is for Conchita Piquer, who sang a song -about a lad with green eyes- so risqué, for that time and place, that it was either banned outright or had the lyrics changed to a respectable (if not less soppy) version. I love Conchita. And lads with green eyes, if they are of the nice variety. And small monsters, that goes without saying. Have a fab week.

Evolution7 Here, just for a giggle. Behold and marvel at the frivolity, the love of frippery burbling through the veins even of exceedingly early life-as-we-know-it. No wonder we evolved into the puffed up bunch we now are. (Said she, endlessly brooding about her choice of earnings for the day.) Have a splendid weekend, look out for intermittent singularities spewing knockoff Chanels and have an apposite po’ di mu’.

Birds of Tindalos. As predicted, the Tindalos Stuff keeps on emerging spontaneously, unbidden and unruly, as it’s the Tindalos wont. Meet the Birdies of that angle-loving, curve-shunning most bizarre of dimensions/lands/habitats/locations/whatnots. Here we can see a mother bird introducing her young chick to the so-called human race, and commenting on its peculiarities in general and a few specific idiosyncrasies. Because she’s in a lazy mood she can’t bothered with any finely tuned ad hominem attacks, although she has more than a few special bíªte noires of her own. You’re quite welcome to name your own objects of contempt and save her the trouble. Have a sponditious life.

Simple Souls. That’s how the cookie crumbles: the more complex the system the more things that can go wrong with it. I ought to know, given the prodigious amount of things that are going kaput in, on, out and about my complex vile body. I think I’d gladly emulate the little chap in the doodle and become a single-cell organism. The only drawback I can see in this otherwise amiable state of being is that I wouldn’t be able to operate a mouse or a tablet and therefore no doodles. Then again, that would make some people very happy so it would sort of even things out, more or less. I love happy endings. And bad poetry.

• When I was a small amoeba
• And I didn’t have a liver
• I could get drunk every day
• Happy, merry, free and gay
• And my pods woul’n’t even quiver.

• When I was a single cell
• Life was easy, life was swell
• Now I am eukaryotic
• Drifting around quite neurotic
• And my life is one pure hell.

• If you know what’s good for you
• You’ll stay put and not be two
• Cleave to your monadic charm
• Never try to grow an arm
• Don’t become organic stew!

Smell the Flowers. By all means take it easy, chill, relax, don’t have kittens over trivial things. Activate the Mehitabel Protocols and extract as much joy as you possibly can out of this wretched social order we’re gripped by. On no account, though, resort to sad little gimmicks like this:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/21/smile-could-the-pandemic-lead-to-happier-times-laurie-santos-professor-of-happiness-yale

Or this:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/sep/05/ready-for-the-roaring-20s-its-time-to-re-learn-how-to-have-fun-says-happiness-professor

(Frankly, if one needs to resort to this sort of thing one deserves any amount of shite one, invariably, ends up getting.)

Avoid falling into the clutches of the Happyness (sic) Industrial Complex. You might start with a harmless-sounding weekend seminar on Happy Happy Clappy Cognition and you may end up on morality pills (or antidepressants, same difference) for the rest of your lives. Also, and on the other side of this ongoing existential piffle, avoid buying the third rate merchandise spewed by con men of the Jordan Peterson variety. Bliss is possible. Just don’t confuse it with “fun. and the ersatz joviality of selfies. One thing is good, genuine, unpretentious merriment and quite another this current hysterical, dogmatic worship of The Little God Fun, as my good friend professor Hinks used to inveigh against a long time ago. (Cheers, toots!)

Oh, and in for a penny! To add a note of delicious flippancy to the rather serious theme of “happiness., here’s my favourite (possibly semi-misquoted) line from one of my favourite films of all times, Richard Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Michael Crawford (on realizing how crossed his and Annette Andre’s stars truly are):

Then, my love, for us there can be no happiness…

Annette Andre: Then we’ll just have to learn to be happy without it.

Admirable attitude, girl. Way to go.

Have a spiffing weekend.

Sailors. Topic: Personal politics; internal; undefined; exasperating. That’s pretty much how I feel most of the time. Sailing, half blind or fuzzy-eyed and with the faintest of ideas as to destination (other than the grave, which is common to us all), along and around unknown and often unknowable territories, both physical and metaphysical. Still, one has one’s snakes for company and the odd true-hearted pal, so all is not total shite. Terms, conditions and the Mehitabel Paradigm apply.

Have a spiffing weekend and un po’ di silly mu’

(I know I’ve uploaded this link before but, you know, por mucho pan… and all that. Besides, the reggae beat on this Catalan popular children’s song is almost a political statement.)

Elucidating note. The two stowaway conillets (Catalan for wee rabbits) are refugees from the Monumental Catalan Catastrophe, desperately trying to hitch a ride to AnyOldWhere as long as it’s very, very, very far away from Plaça Sant Jaume and the dire dwellers of the Palau de la Generalitat.

Evolution3. There you go. It’s all abut trial & error, and recognizing you’re going about it the wrong way, and being flexible and adaptable and all that jazz. Salud!

Patchwork Entities. Behold the Mishmash Man, also known as the Bits & Pieces Man. He was made with leftovers, discarded stuff from the cast off creations of several smarty-pants bombastic demiurges, by a down&out avant-garde sorcerer with a taste for recycling. He travels the Uncertain Shifts with his spiky owlets and a couple of defrocked warrior princesses he met at a villainous tavern in the alien district of !Ting who, unable to find any kind of job in any respectable army or even any disreputable one, volunteered to tag along as his bodyguards and purveyors of silly jokes. They (the ragbag geezer and the two louche damsels) are willing to undertake some (not many) special ops of the Annoy, Harass and Torment variety for a nominal prize* and for the mere joy of it. The owlets can carry messages to & from their higher-born cousin, the owl of Pallas, if you ask them very, very nicely and your message is not total fiddle-faddle.

*They neither need nor care for money. They don’t eat and they are quite content to be like the lilies of the field; the raggedy bloke wears whatever the eccentric necromancer clad him in back when and the two misses what they were wearing at the time they had to leg it from whatever sphere they decamped. However, if you offer them a discarded teddy bear or black and white picture postcards of the Plateau of Leng, they’ll throw in a bonus ball of sending nightmares to Priti Patel, for free, por la cara.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=plateau+of+leng&iax=images&ia=images