Winter Croc. ‘ere, ‘ave a fierce winter beastie, a bunch of flores para los muertos and an incandescent graphically modified clipart monster. Follow the croc’s advice. Ignore Holy Market Orthodoxy. Refuse to buy into the flimflam peddled by the Pieties Industrial Complex. Be nice to your neighbour, even if you don’t like him all that much; even if he’s Russian, look you! Be a pest. And remember, all not is either lost or even totally hopeless. Behold! even the dire Amazon is plunging. And that pratt Elon Musk might yet succeed in imploding Twitter. Olé! With a bit of luck I might live long enough to witness the utter demise of Facebook & all… Oh, well…a girl can dream, can’t she? Love and chilled vodka.

Flames. The dark season approaches; soon the clocks will go back. Light tumbles. Darkness engulfs all. Oh woe.
We thought the political pantomime couldn’t get any more pathetic but guess what? it did. And it’s not over yet. Bumba alone knows where all this is going to end. Never mind. Tie yourselves to the mast and sail away from the rocks, the rapids and the temptations of Best-Selling Wisdom.
You’ll need to make your own light, though, for if you rely on the regular state-sanctioned channels to tell you what is really going on you’ll only get deeper into the stranglehold of the pitch-black pit of orthodoxy than you ever though possible. Moreover, never forget that once you loose your soul’s eyes for good it’s nearly impossible to retrieve them by painless means. Or even in very painful ways, sometimes…
Have a radiant week.
They who have put out the people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.
John Milton

Announcements.
They put your mind right into a bag, and they take it wherever they want.
Malcolm X
In contrast to the Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that which exists anyway as a reflex of its power and omnipresence. The power of the culture industry’s ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness.
Theodore Adorno

Sol solet,
vine’m a veure
vine’m a veure
sol solet
vine’m a veure
que tinc fred.

Si tens fred
posa’t la capa
posa’t la capa
si tens fred,
posa’t la capa
i el barret.

No tinc capa ni barret,
per abrigar-me,
per abrigar-me
no tinc capa ni barret,
per abrigar-me
quan fa fred!.

And that’s how the cookie crumbles, worse luck.

Crawlies.
As we regress from clown to clown
This one will bring us all to ground
Do no fret, Britain, do not frown
Embrace the Hell and the Hellhound.
Be happy, clappy and eat shit brown.
Really folks, don’t even bother kvetching. It’s done. And don’t imagine for a moment that young Rishi wouldn’t have been any better. It’s called Entropy, see. A cada bugada es perd un llencol, said The Poet. He was spot on; poets often are. Never mind. Go with Mehitabel and enjoy whatever life, of whatever kind, you may have left.
Have some more pop poetry:
Lizzie Borden took an axe
and gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done,
she gave her father forty-one.
And un’po’ di totally For The Hell of It mu’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7ow6ge5BBw

Boulder Girl 2. This is a kind of collective birthday card/memo (a salutary reminder, lest we forget) for, in no particular order, Pakistan, myself, India in her present form, anyone who thinks they need reminding of certain facts of life and poor old recently-stabbed Salman Rushdie, whose quotation the lapidary lady is throwing at the howling night winds.
Have a splendiferous rest of the week.
Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?
Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?
Agha Shahid Ali
And in case you’re in the mood for some totally spiffing un po’ di mu’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYxN_4i_mOA
PS. This is also, in a sort of roundabout sneaky way, for my mate “Yazz”, gone from the Iper.sphere and somewhat unintentionally neglected but by no means forgotten, no way.

Minimalist Mice. Listen to the tiny rodent’s advice. Life is too short to waste on, say, identity politics, or blaming Putin for the heat wave, or discussing the relative merits of Grossly-Richy Sunak v Lizz Trussed-In-Knots. Have a fab weekend and un po’ di tangentially relevant and endearingly frivolous mu’ from my dearly departed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzTQkd7ttIo

Gemini2. Sometimes more is more. Two chubby chappies for the price of one. Lovely. Two Snakes of Tindalos. Groovy! Two Bulky Ancestors… Well, that’s beyond spiffingness, innit. Have a grand week.

Questions, Questions. It’s as the cat says. No point. Waste of time. No matter how right your question is if it doesn’t suit Them and their servile media to answer it, or, more to the point, answer it truthfully, then They won’t. And there’s little point in seeking answers elsewhere (and there are plenty of trustworthy “wheres” out there, believe me). You’ll only end up with a lot of righteously groovy answers and … nowhere to go with them. Have a sponditious week.

G

Message. (New Series: Bottled Messages. No.1.) I have always dreamed of finding a message in a bottle. Two days ago I found one. In the rain water bucket outside my garden door. It came in a double bottle, look you. And a very good message it was, too. Unfortunately I can’t share it with you because a postscript informed me that it was creature-specific and extremely classified, very hush-hush. Too bad. So I’m posting a picture of the vessels and of Bubbles and BoomBoom in enraptured contemplation of the containers. You may say hello to Bubbles and BoomBoom. They always welcome cheery words and so on. You may also send them Smarties. They’d like that VERY much. Have a grand weekend, stay in the shade, drink lots of water and don’t waste any worrying energy on the impending Tory leadership “election”. Just assume we’ll end up with someone even worse that Bojo. Remember: A cada bugada es perd un llençol…