Monday 31 August 2015

Last song from the back of the van


Razor wire 
And border fence
Electronic installation 
No dream deals 
At immigration 
And pass control 
Where guards  patrol 
To  staunch  the  mass-ive 
Influx 


Tonight a prayer 
At 7pm 
With dignitaries 
And a cardinal
And all the bells 
Throughout the land
Will ring  
In sympathy -

Though it's too late 
For you and me 

They who'd rise 
Against the prodigy 
Or wish to live in peace
Must flee
With home advantage gone 
Oh! dear old Uncle Sam 
Play it  again 
Play it again 

What have you done? 
What have they done?

Who will drive the taxi now?
Who will bake the pizza?

Who will play the red nose clown?
And who will pay the soldier?


Who will write the poetry
And who will heed the words?



Friday 28 August 2015

Fouad Twal in Austria: The Christian Exodus, and the Cremisan Wall


Regular readers of this blog will not need reminding that I do not subscribe to any of the world's many religions. I enjoy the freedom of not belonging. 

On the other hand I do believe there is a mysterious power beyond our everyday world and that it exists here on Earth and throughout the known and unknown Universe/s, and in many other dimensions.

Professor Stephen Hawking recently suggested that no information in the Universe is ever lost or destroyed. I think I agree with him. 

One undeniable fact concerning religion is that the majority of people who profess to have a religion did not 'choose' that religion for themselves.  The choice of religion was made for them before they were born. It is a 'choice' made by circumstance.

I recently attended, in Austria, a discussion chaired by the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem Monsignor Fouad Twal. It was as far as I can remember titled The Christian Exodus? (with question mark). Two messages came across:

Patriarch Fouad Twal, himself a native of Jordan, is deeply concerned with the increasing numbers of Christian refugees fleeing the conflicts in the so-called Holy Lands. An exodus (with a question mark), he calls it. 

The second message relates to the first. The Middle East needs Christians if bridges are to be built between the Arabs and the Jews and peace is to reign.  The Christians are the only people who can hope do this, he says.

Meanwhile, back in Palestine (or is it Israel)  bulldozers uproot the olive trees in the Cremisan Valley. The Patriarch also had a few words to say on that subject. 



Other news from Austria.  
Seventy-one people, including several women and children, were discovered yesterday in the back of an abandoned truck parked on the hard shoulder of a motorway a few kilometers from Vienna International Airport. They were all dead. Documents found at the scene suggest some of the deceased will be from Syria. 


Wednesday 26 August 2015

Loose Change or Sorry We Are Open (Picture Poem)






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Tuesday 25 August 2015

Arnold Pranks Fans as the Terminator...for Charity

Synchronizing Schwarzenegger



   Austrian TV-critic Telemax is of the opinion (perhaps with tongue-in-cheek) that those who give voice to Arnold Schwarzenegger's words in Hollywood films dubbed into German ought to better imitate the tough guy accent and mountain man dialect of the Hollywood star, affectionally known to fans in his Austrian homeland as the Styrian Oak.

Naturally Telemax is aware that the German version of the Schwarzenegger drawl is aimed at an international German-speaking TV and Kino audience and it makes little or no economic sense to dub-in an appropriate Oak-cent solely for the benefit of homeland Terminator aficionados in the sparsely populated mountainous region of Styria, the so-called Green Heart of Austria.

When an English language script is translated into German the final text seen on the page will invariably be longer and should therefore take longer to read . . .  at least theoretically. You can test this for your self by comparing English and German editions of the same novel.

You will find that the German version (typeface, layout and page size being equal) will have 20-25% more pages.  Here, to illustrate the point, are some examples of sentence length. They are taken from a modern German/English text book:-

"Ich kann es machen." 
"I can make it."
  
"Sie liess mich es machen." 
"She let me do it."

"Sie fahren nach Deutschland, um die Sprache zu studieren." 
"They go to Germany to study the language."

"Das Urteil werden von Richter ausgesprochen."
"The sentence was given by the judge."


So there it is. All that remains is to assemble a selection of Hollywood character actors talking nineteen to a dozen in Deutsch. Throw a Terminator with a rushed Styrian drawl into the mix and you have the main ingredients of a  Telemax translation farce.

Might be fun!

Goad knows I've already watched too many of them. Or at least I've tried to.



Monday 24 August 2015

Terence McKenna - You Must Have A Plan



"You must have a plan. If you don't have a plan you will become part of somebody else's plan." 

An Earlier Header Picture (see Comments)


Sunday 23 August 2015

Tuesday 18 August 2015

Sakurajima Volcano - A Work in Progress


 Mysterious control!
They have restarted
A nuclear plant

The first
Online
since the Fuku/disaster.


        There is a volcano

By name
Cherry Island
        (no longer an island! such is its power)


        Lying 30 miles  distant


Today or tonight
Or maybe
tomorrow

      when the magma flows


And the cherry trees glow
   Certain eyebrows   will rise
       in feigned surprise

  local people were told
To be bold
no chance of Sakurajima eruption


  heed as we say
the current alerts
 The sequence of warnings
 
      Not the unsettling
look
of the neighbour


Cherry tree tremolos
 and
Expanding        magma
       
   What power
   controls
and Commands?



Note: Mount Sakurajima is only 50 kms from the just-restarted Sendai nuclear plant (Japan Times)

Update of           Evacuation alert lifted 2 days ago.
24 Aug 2015:



Monday 10 August 2015

Microchiroptera

Following composed after reading the 7th August haiku 'pond bats' at Magyar-Haiku(link in sidebar).


swift as swallows 

the bats - the stars 

 near and yet so far away 



Sunday 9 August 2015

Dish of the Day


Rising Sun takeaway 

two mushroom specials
and keep the change 

it's fat man and 
littl
b
o
y
  

Saturday 8 August 2015

The Clouds of Isranael




What goes on in two buildings in the Middle East might one day affect us all, and maybe not for the good.

Two days ago the world remembered the Hiroshima mushroom cloud of 1945.

The following is an extract from the Austrian Pavilion Catalogue (pub. Birkhäuser, Basel ISBN 978-3-03821-679-7) which was on sale at La Biennale di Venezia 2014. 

Israel
Unitary Parliamentary Republic
area: 21,640 km2
pop: 7,907,900
gdp: $31,868
Parliament
Jerusalem
built 1966
vol: 209,500 m3
delegates: 120 (1 representative per 65,889 citizens, and comprising 77.5% males and 22.5% females).
architect: Joseph Klarwein (Poland)
remarks: ". . . Israel's Knesset building has emerged as a classical monumental parliament building. A colonnade of full-length columns surrounds a broad cubiform structure and an inner courtyard divided by the plenary hall. Joseph Klarwein's original design was substantially modified following criticism of its alleged fascist-connotated neoclassicism."

Iran
Unitary Presidential Islamic Republic
area: 1,628,550 km2
pop: 76,424,443
gdp: $11,310
Parliament
Tehran
built 2004
vol: 369,400 m3
delegates: 290 (1 representative per 263,532 citizens, and comprising 96.9% males and 3.1% females).
architect: Polmir Consulting Architects, Engineers & Planners (Iran)
remarks: "The Islamic Consultative Assembly of Iran or Majlis is housed in a modern building, shaped like a pyramid. The unicameral parliament can draft, debate, and pass legislation, but requires the approval of the Guardian Council for its decisions to be turned into law. Candidacies for parliament are also approved or disqualified by the Guardian Council which is in turn overseen by the Supreme Leader . . . ."


Friday 7 August 2015

Edelweiss. (Sonrisas y Lágrimas)

Edelweiss (poem)




Do they look happy to meet you?



They are hard to seek out
- withdrawn in their lonely domain.


Lovestruck young men
with pluck 
clambered 

over the perilous heights 
in quest of the special 
flower.

And if one 
had the luck 
to find one

he would joyfully 
descend 
- the Edelweiss 
tucked in the band of his hat

And on bended knee 

present it 
to his desired  Fräulein
- the promise of undying love.


 I was walking along a riverside footpath in a green valley beneath some high mountains when I came to a place where the path had been closed due to a landslide. There I made my picnic. 

Scree from a rock fall originating more than 6,000 feet above my head littered the area and provided a new home for many shrubs, grasses and flowers including the rarely encountered edelweiss which must have been swept down from with the sand and stones. 

It is often said that what is at the bottom of the mountain will one day be at the top, and what is at the top will one day be at the bottom. We do well to remember this wisdom. 

Today the edelweiss is a protected flower. Suitors no longer risk life and limb for the ultimate love token. That's probably just as well. 




Thursday 6 August 2015

Off the Wall




The seven portraits in the following four blogposts are literally "off the wall".

The wall in question is to be found in an alleyway running between a pharmacy and a small theater in the town of Bad Ischl, Austria.

Each personality holds a medicinal item which may be purchased in the nearby pharmacy.

Gesundheit! 


Ancora - Ezra Pound






Good God! They say you are risque´
O canzonetti!
We who went out into the four a.m. of the world
Composing our albas,
We who shook off our dew with the rabbits,
We who have seen even Artemis a-binding her sandals, 
Have we ever heard the like?
O mountains of Hellas!!
Gather about me, O Muses!
When we sat upon the granite brink in Helicon
Clothed in the tattered sunlight,
O Muses with delicate shins,
O Muses with delectable knee-joints, 
When we splashed and were splashed with
The lucid Castalian spray,
Had we ever such an epithet cast on us!!



Blessings Vincent




Trainee priest,
He sold the silver
To help the poor.

Needless to say
It cost him 
His job.

"We don't give away 
the church's possessions!"
It was a command.







Wednesday 5 August 2015

And then someone screamed


The general wickedness of mankind cannot injure the universe. - Marcus Aurelius 



The hotel
With a pool
And a blue plastic
Dolphin

At sundown
One guest
With a laptop
Looks at his emails.

He loves
The blue dolphin
Though he doesn't
Yet know it

Dressed
In a beach robe
And sandals
Another love-arrow
Another direction

A muscular physio
Attending
To guests
With soft words
And a gentle rub down

Love is a pleasure
And an experience!

Who knows
What's going on 
In those beach-huts! 

Tell me dear
Heaven
Which of my loves 

Shall
I
Leave?

How quickly the dark clouds
Cover on the scene
  With weapons and banners


We follow the ways of wild beasts 
And know not the ways of your love

Terrible Cupid 
Attacks us with lies.

 One arrowed
The dolphin

And then someone screamed.




Monday 3 August 2015

Iconic Immigrants




Their future's in their own hands. 
  They've gotten the cow and the plough. 
The Lord stands behind them.
   
  "We shall pull through somehow!" 

The pitchfork is gripped,
  And sealed is the rum.  
They gaze at their future.

  "Gott! What have we done?"



Sunday 2 August 2015

Howard Ogden greets Sri Syadasti


Ogden: 

Symbols are just symbols; the thing's the thing. 


Syadasti: 

All affirmations are true in some sense, 
false in some sense, 
meaningless in some sense, 
   true and false in some sense, 

and true and false and meaningless in some sense. 


Saturday 1 August 2015

10,000 idiots


One idiot
is one idiot.

Two idiots
are two idiots.

10,000 idiots
is a political party.

- Franz Kafka