42.Crunch & Crumble in Action

This sounds like a team of comedians, but it is actually my description of what I see as the global signs of  profound changes, which will affect all of us, in one way or another. The economic and financial crunch is already having a much wider, deeper and often rather unexpected effect in many other areas of life. The earthquake is suddenly acquiring a new meaning, because in the ruins of the banking system, seemingly solid bastions of the Establishment like the BBC are suddenly shaken by the after-shocks which, strangely enough, reveal the ludicrously exorbitant fees paid to mediocre performers in radio and TV. One of its “star-presenters” have been suspended for three months without pay for making inane, pathetically unfunny and offensive sexual innuendos over radio waves as a jocular birthday harassment of a 74-year old actor, best known for his role as a Manuel, a “lost in translation” waiter at John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers TV show. The arrogant and Ego-bloated presenter will lose £1.3m pounds from his three-year contract with the BBC worth…hold your breath – £18m. Yes, that’s right – he gets six million pounds a year for keeping his fans amused. Just try to imagine how much good could be done for that sum of money. British press is currently giving top coverage to this unedifying story which highlighted for the general public the crazily inflated cost of so called entertainment. With the paralysing effects of recession, high unemployment, with many people losing their homes and their livelihood, the glaringly irresponsible levels of rewards for TV and radio “stars”,sportsmen and financial gamblers should now crumble in the general crunch as people are, at long last, becoming aware of what has been going on behind their backs. The time to wake up is upon us.

41. Mystery of Our Bicameral Brain

Artists, writers, mystics and, predominantly, women use their right brain hemisphere which controls dreams, prophecies, intuition, imagination, feelings, beliefs and fantasies. The left. “male” hemisphere controls logic, detailed knowledge, facts and reality – whatever that can mean these days. Click on the link and discover for yourself which part of the bicameral brain is predominant in you. If the dancer moves clockwise, then you are mainly right brain person; if anticlockwise – you are logical, factual, no-nonsence person, but maybe also lacking imagination. See if you can control that dancer by making her turn in the opposite direction. No human being is 100% right-or-left these days, though there was a time when humanity was full of dreams and fantasies and reason slept soundly. Maybe it’s time to start moving kcab to that Dreamtime (the link comes from an Australian site, where Dreaming Time is well known) and reduce the arrogant power of the left brainers. The girl turns for me clockwise and only reluctantly changes to anticlockwise. I need my right brain for blogging. JI

40. Beware Of Nightmare Scenarios

The world is moving into winter darkness- at least, in the northern hemisphere. Very soon the Celtic Samhain, American Halloween and presidential election will descend upon us, ghosts will be marching across the land and demons of  financial chaos are busy sharpening their scythes. This is not the time to make nightmare scenarios of the future, because the future already looks spooky and unpredictableas it is. Even if you can’t feel the earth moving , it doesn’t mean that the tectonic plates are not buckling under your feet, literally and metaphorically. If the walls of capitalism are still looking strong , it is only because a vast army of spin-doctors are busy covering the cracks with their ghastly graffiti of weasel-words. What the politicians of all colours haven’t realized yet is that their patchwork of phoney remedies won’t work for one simple reason: people around the world have realized that the Emperor of the Free Market has always been only a striptease actor and is now naked. The show is over. The collapse of the financial world has its own destructive momentum which can no longer be stopped. The age of crass materialism, based on greed and social injustice is crumbling and this is a scenario of hope for millions of people around the world and a nightmare for a small number of dinosaurs who will soon become an obscene relic of the past.

39. The Iceman Cometh to London

 Late last night thick snow feel all over London. I have been living here for many years, but I cannot recall seeing snow at the end of October. It was too dark, too cold and wet to venture out at midnight to record that event on my camera, so it had to wait till today. The morning was cold (2C), the roads were icy, but the snow was still in place, even if some of it has already melted. If this is a serious promise of things to come during the approaching winter months, then we are in for what looks like another Ice Age. The crazy things is that the Arctic ice is melting rapidly in what scientists see as the approaching climatic “crunch”. Nobody is quite sure what that crunchy thing is, but this late October snow and ice crunching underfoot in the usually mild weather London may well be the first harbinger of what will inevitably come if we don’t stop destroying our habitat now. PS. According to BBC weather centre the last October snowfall in London was in 1934! No wonder I can’t remember it.

38. Chicken Coming Home to Roost

Free market economics, deregulation, privatisation, Friedmanism, Reaganism, Thatcherism and after all those years of booming house prices, outrageous rents and irresponsible speculations by gambling bankers…CRRRRASH! featherless chicken are suddenly coming home to roost. Who is to blame for all that? We are. Poor Baroness Thatcher, now an old lady of 83, is being  blamed for the enormous damage she and her advisers,backed by the ignorant, greedy, selfish electorate, had done to the world’s economy. We get leaders we want and deserve. We choose them as a focus for our desires and they simply amplify them and make them manifest in all their monstrous forms. Sometimes they go overboard in their zeal to please their supporters, but in the end the guilt is not theirs alone. It is interesting to observe the semantics of her accusers, who are making her now a scapegoat for our collective complacent acceptance of her economic beliefs. She has“unleashed property obsession and consumerist forces, mutilated ethical traditions of One Nation”; “destroyed building societies by allowing them to become banks,”; she killed the idea of public sector and the public service, privatising vital public utilities- gas, electricity,water – which are now owned by overseas energy companies, deciding how much to charge British users; she undermined Britain’s manufacturing power and based her faith in service industry based economy which will make the current crisis much worse here than anywhere else”. All this is true, but why did we let her continue to be in power for so many years? Good question.  Blair’s Labour government could  have stopped  the damage and reverse Thatcherism during the last 11 years. It hasn’t done so, because Blair was himself a Thatcherite. And now we will all suffer for letting shortsighted politicians lead us into this mess, which was avoidable.

37. Expecting the Unexpected

I like nice surprises. Does’t everybody? But as my surprises are more often of the unpleasant variety, I have acquired a rather hopeless habit of always expecting something wonderful to happen on various dates which, for one reason or another, I regard as auspicious. For example, it may be an anniversary of some lovely event from my dim past; or a magical combination of numbers, astrological conjunctions or any sign from the invisible world, even a spider waiting by my front door. Needless to say, all such piously expected surprises never happen. For some unexplainable reason, expectations seem to dismantle all probabilities and throw them into a shredder of fornlorn hopes. Wise voices tell me that I should always expect the unexpected and that means no dates, no signposts in the no man’s land of unformed possibilities, ignoring all whispers and tempting coincidences. The unexpected is anarchic, chaotic and capricious. It dislikes expectations. The only thing we are allowed to expect is death, because it is inevitable. But it still comes unexpectedly. PS. today the Sun enters the sign of Scorpio. As the ruler of the Eighth House it ends all cycles and starts new ones. It can kill with its sting but it can also rise as an Eagle to survey the wide horizons of  Unexpectedness. e

36. Friends Are Like Baloons

The text below is from another chain letter which asked me to send a baloon to each of my friends (not sure where they are, but they must be some place. Internet is sooo huge!) or to those I like. Well, there must be at least three people who read my blog and this is one reason that prompts me to send a blog-balloon.  The snag is that I must get at least four balloons back and then…” something you have been waiting for a long time will happen!!!! Believe me…… It really happens!”

Friends are like balloons; once you let them go,

you can’t get them back

Life is too short to wake up with regrets.

So love the people who treat you right.

Forget about the ones who don’t.

Believe everything happens for a reason.. If you

get a second chance, grab it with both hands. If it

changes your life, let it. Nobody said life would be easy,

they just promised it would be worth it.

I think that if you truly believe that something will happen, you don’t need even one balloon. But internet chain letters have their own logic, which may or may not have magic built into it. So…off they go!J

35. A Promise for Tomorrow

Saturday evening.  The sky over London was cloudy. But when I looked out of my backgarden window I saw a small pink’n’gold cloud throwing a shower of brilliant rays from the sunset  over the wilting leaves of a poplar tree. When I tried to capture it into my camera, I had to use the flash and the cloud used it to camouflage its presence. I ran to the other side of the house, knowing that the west wind will bring it into view again. This time there was no need to use the flash. I asked the departing sylph what name should I give that mini-event of the setting sun. “A promise for tomorrow” it whispered. Promise is a lovely word, loaded with golden hopes embroided on the rose-tinted canvas of love. f

34. Gone Fishing! Lost At Sea…

Unfortunately, this blog was  devoured by a shoal of piranha-like self-generated fantasies about its managing blogger’s future as a writer of fascinating unreal-life stories . It may reappear at some unspecified time in the future in the form of channeled messages from the ghosts of the past.  Such messages should be dismissed as astral spam unless verified by a distinct electrical zapp. The zapp should be felt like a tingling bracelet on the reader’s right hand’s wrist.  As channeling  is a very tricky and uncertain method of communicating with this world of yours, the next entry here may appear overnight, in a week’s time, a year later or never. Time in the fourth dimension is a scattering of bosons. IK“

33. The First Day of Spring

You don’t believe me? I am not kidding you, but I am, of course, talking of today’s Full Moon in Aries, which means no more and no less that  the event can be legitimately regarded as the beginning of lunar Spring. Aries is a Fire sign and fire means destroying what has served its purpose and should be turned into ashes. From those ashes the Phoenix will rise and augur a period of renewal, of building new forms and composing new melodies in our life. The Moon helps to bring new forms to life, to stimulate growth and creative dreams. The Full Moon of Aries benefits from the energies of that fiery constellation and makes everything more intensive and succesful. Adding to those positive vibrations will Mercury returning to its forward surge from tomorrow. Things are looking up. Don’t waste this wonderful chance to start anew.^J%