everything is eliminated

(via cbs 11 weather va todd buckley on facebook; the outline is the actual size of connecticutt)

Kulning.

"don't know how many of you are undecided voters but only one campaign is asking debate moderators to not say if they are lying" --@BobbyBigWheel via @SaladinAhmed

Vampira.

    "Night of the Scorpion

I remember the night my mother
was stung by a scorpion. Ten hours
of steady rain had driven him
to crawl beneath a sack of rice.

Parting with his poison - flash
of diabolic tail in the dark room -
he risked the rain again.

The peasants came like swarms of flies
and buzzed the name of God a hundred times
to paralyse the Evil One.

With candles and with lanterns
throwing giant scorpion shadows
on the mud-baked walls
they searched for him: he was not found.
They clicked their tongues.
With every movement that the scorpion made his poison moved in Mother's blood, they said.

May he sit still, they said
May the sins of your previous birth
be burned away tonight, they said.
May your suffering decrease
the misfortunes of your next birth, they said.
May the sum of all evil
balanced in this unreal world

against the sum of good
become diminished by your pain.
May the poison purify your flesh

of desire, and your spirit of ambition,
they said, and they sat around
on the floor with my mother in the centre,
the peace of understanding on each face.
More candles, more lanterns, more neighbours,
more insects, and the endless rain.
My mother twisted through and through,
groaning on a mat.
My father, sceptic, rationalist,
trying every curse and blessing,
powder, mixture, herb and hybrid.
He even poured a little paraffin
upon the bitten toe and put a match to it.
I watched the flame feeding on my mother.
I watched the holy man perform his rites to tame the poison with an incantation.
After twenty hours
it lost its sting.

My mother only said
Thank God the scorpion picked on me
And spared my children."

--Nissim Ezekiel

Boys for Pele vinyl.

"...you choose to lose reason before losing face..." --Al Stewart

New work (not really). (via saladin ahmed on twitter)

"[W]andering creates the desert." ―Edmond Jabès

A cappella "Jolene".

(via gordon hilgers on facebook)

You Want It Darker.

eigengrau

"Only in dreams do any but the great Mages realize this magic of going home." --Ursula Le Guin

Ulam's Spiral.

"The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it." --Thomas Merton, The Seven-Storey Mountain (1948)

The Gadfly and the Spider.

"The fragments of Osiris's body are not, however, all of equal value." --Brigid Brophy, Black Ship to Hell (1962)

(by Alexander Nekrashevich via bellabelarus dot com)

"This Is Not A Migrant Crisis... It's a Conflict Crisis: about all the countries ruined by all the "9/11"; was oil wars, still smouldering since 2001. Not to mention the previous generation of client wars, proxy wars and plunder wars (you know, the gold, the cobalt, the tungsten; whatever. All the stuff you need so you can have the latest phone etc), still 'smouldering' since the 1990s.... . . It's a soil depletion crisis. It's a climate change disaster crisis (I am sick of that feeble 'climate change' expression. I'm going to ban it). It's a water crisis. It's, above and beyond all its many faces, the crisis of the economic growth model freight train hitting the buffers, and the train is driverless (don't think there's a guard on board either), so it doesn't know when to stop. It doesn't know how to stop, it just keeps hammering on, SLAM SLAM SLAM . . . Crushing the bodies of thousands, of millions of helpless, struggling human beings against that immovable limit."

"...men are so poor in intellect that a few cold chills down their spine will be enough to keep them from even finding out the truth about anything." --Merton, op cit

"He tried to recall some of the bombings that he had witnessed in his 12 years working on the street. 'The last one was just there,' he said, pointing to a nearby parking lot. 'Then the huge one down there,' motioning farther down the street with hands stained yellow from the turmeric used in his pickling mix.

He loses track, then gestures to the road nearby. 'A while back there was a big one just there. I flew 20 foot through the air.'

But he brushed it off: 'That one wasn't that big.' "

"In Anglo-American legal parlance, 'Blackacre' is a standard placeholder used to denote a fictional piece of land, often a bequest, much as the term 'John Doe' is used to indicate a fictional or anonymous individual." --Monica Youn being reviewed by John Yau

(Aleppo via CNN)

porlock night

(image by j j grandville via)

Vesperian type worlds.

“Certain new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” --G K Chesterton

A Kim Jong-Il Production.

On picopop & paleowebs.

“Is it possible that existence is our exile and nothingness our home?” --Cioran

Silverberg in Asimov's.

Tiny Tim in Blood Harvest.

"I made the dogs and robots the kind of people I would like to live with. And the vital point is this: that they must be dogs or robots, because people were not that kind of folks." --Clifford Simak

All Unsound.

(by Leigh Mercer)

The Royal Order of Adjectives.

weevil in the dight city

(via @ESA_Rosetta)

About Proxima b.

"Where birds like watchful clocks the noiseless date
And intercourse of times divide." --Henry Vaughan

Nonsense, its history.

"Bilaath, or Vilayet as it has otherwise been transcribed into English, derives from the Persian and Ottoman Turkish, in which the word meant governorate or district. In Bengali, the word is used to refer to Britain." --Zia Haiden Rahman, In the Light of What We Know (2014)

The Ripley Scroll.

"Odd, one fancies it, that we walking along the pavement of civilized life, should be perpetually summoning Orcus to our aid, for the sake of getting a clear course." --Meredith

Klimt and cat.

"Troy, the dust-crowned,
understands."

--Celan

"Vegetarian Vampires" by Remedios Varo (via @liadearistegui)