Sunday 12 December 2021

December 12, 2021

We're deep into Sagittarius season now so I was delighted to find this serious and penetrating essay on centaurs today:

How Does A Centaur Eat, Anyway? 

It came from a long Twitter thread about the tallness or otherwise of centaurs and it was good to see so many people giving the matter so much thought.

From the same thread:

I love Twitter.

Went out for a long aimless walk this afternoon to stretch the old legs. I was harvesting graffiti; up a grim alley filled mostly with charmless tagging I liked that someone had doodled household appliances:

There was also this very amazing garage door:

 

Elsewhere, I found a van belonging to the fifth emergency service:

And then I wound up in Alexandra Gardens, where I sat for a while by the war memorial thinking about a thing I read recently, Being British, Being Somebody Else, and the point it makes about commemoration and the state.

That led to thinking about how this imposing, immovable, fenced-off memorial compares with Hamburg's Monument Against Fascism, which invited intimate interaction from people as it slowly sank into the ground, ultimately disappearing from view.

And that was all mixed up with thinking about covid; how the head-spinning number of daily deaths are neatly quantified to remove all trace of the individual and thus abstract the human cost.

Just like the Alexandra Gardens war memorial overlooks the actual dead and their horrible, needless deaths. Except the memorial doesn't even touch on numbers, it's pure abstraction/glorification.

That got me thinking about Wilfred Owen.

I have too many thoughts sometimes.

Today's Photo: Dulce Et Decorum Est


 

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