Forget after viewing

Life’s too short for bad photos, true. Still, it’s not always possible to avoid mediocrity.

Take mobile phone cameras, for instance.

Zooming does bad things to pixels and the end result is more of a failed attempt, bravely exhibited.

The owl above is such a good example. There it was perching on a cold metal bar, minding its own business.

I approached it, mobile at the ready. Took a pic and turned round, in search of other subjects.

All of its glorious owlish looks survived on my retina and somewhere between two brain folds.

Sorry.

Comments

A dog's life

This is going to outrage dog lovers, but I think that humans’ tyrannical nature is revealed not just when it enslaves other humans, but also when it enslaves dogs. We never say 'free as a dog", do we? Just 'free as a bird'. Dogs and humans, not all what it seems. We take a wolf at heart and spend lots of time and energy teaching it to obey and react to commands. (To be more historically accurate, the 'taking' happened a long time ago, and it succeeded, so very different from cats.) We are prepared to downsize our vocabulary to a few words in order to achieve that. We literally put up with shit. All in the name of training, while the true purpose looks more like having a totally obedient living being under our control, one emitting apparent devotion. In humans it’s called the Stockholm syndrome. Even the basic freedoms of sniffing and running are restricted anywhere near human habitat. It takes a trip back to the wild

Beauty within, beauty without

"Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite" is a wonderful book by Robert Kurzban and the site where you can read a bit about it has a great URL too: https://www.hypocrisybook.com. It is all about evolution and the mind that has different compartments, creating this apparently terrible habit of noticing inconsistencies in all but ourselves. As our mind is a kind of cabinet with many drawers and some of them are full of junk and others of exquisite art objects, things can look a bit incongruous. Our inner balance depends on ignoring the co-existence of junk and art and happily thinking of the whole cabinet as a solid piece of furniture. This is of course a bit of a simplistic review of the book and the theory behind it, but it serves the purpose of my own theory: that physical beauty is our greatest source of hypocrisy. If there is a drawer that very few people dare to open, let alone examine its contents, that is the drawer of our looks. The real physical appearan

First Knight

Holding my breath on the edge of a language precipice, what a way to plunge into writing in anything else than my mother tongue. Mr Ambrose Bierce, would you like to have written "The foreigner's dictionary?"

Life by a thousand cuts

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