Category Archives: Musings

Play that fungi music white boy*

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Spanish_SlugYesterday felt like a day of strangeness and magic. First came a great deluge that threatened to wash away the parked cars and the occasional cyclist in an almost biblical-style flood. I stood under cover, caught between my local store and home after returning from work. I was listening to some sublime electronica at the time, a unique soundtrack to the cascades of water splashing and bouncing off roads and pavements. For a few minutes I just stood and watched, mesmerised by the experience. I found I was smiling broadly and felt an easing of the hangover headache that had dogged me all day. It was just a moment of subtle, indefinable magic.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the downpour ceased and I broke cover and headed the few hundred metres home, trying to avoid lake-Ontario-sized puddles. A rainbow appeared briefly above our block of flats, a fitting appearance at the end of Copenhagen’s Gay Pride week.

I will backtrack slightly to me leaving the cafe where I work, about an hour beforehand. I ran into a lady of mature years, standing outside. She wanted to know more about the place. It turned out she was a fellow Brit and after basic pleasantries were exchanged, I told her all about our lovely little non-profit cafe and the many activities we host within. The lady seemed most pleased at my invitation to come and sample our food and perhaps make some new friends. “You are my angel of the day” she announced, in a warm northern accent, and I was perfectly happy with this description. I have been called lots of things, but don’t often get called an angel.

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Invisible Vampire-Zombies are stealing our brains!

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vambie

Is the age of hyper-narcissism and social media addiction turning us all into self-obsessed, attention-challenged zombies?

Can we really call it social media if we’re ignoring our friends, partners and everyone around us to swap gossip, videos and memes with virtual strangers we’ve never met?

If an actual vampire (or zombie) invaded our homes and attempted to separate us from our blood or brains, we’d probably have one or two objections (the first probably being they don’t actually exist). But when the parasitic monsters are invisible and we welcome them in, what chance do we have to keep ourselves safe? Like a tick or a vampire bat, they numb us while they go about their dirty work. Maybe it’s us who are the real suckers?

Try this weird amazing trick for a flat stomach!”

The vampire-zombies – including massive corporations like Google and Facebook – are using knowledge gleaned from psychology and the world of gambling to hook us on this digital crack. And they combine it with clever technology to steal huge amounts of our time, attention and data and sell it for obscene profits. They are like friendly uncles who keep you amused, while secretly emptying your safe, picking your pockets and stealing all your private info.

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Capes and japes

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batmanI love odd coincidences and weird moments of synchronicity. Recently I heard / read something that reminded me of Laurie Anderson’s track (and surprise hit) ‘O Superman‘. It’s been a while (1981!), so I looked up the lyrics out of curiosity (Memory can play tricks). It seems disturbingly sinister and prescient now:

“….This is the hand, the hand that takes.

Here come the planes.

They’re American planes. Made in America.

Smoking or non-smoking?

And the voice said: Neither snow nor rain nor gloom

of night shall stay these couriers from the swift

completion of their appointed rounds.

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Star struck

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green men
As a kid I was ever so slightly geeky, and rather obsessed with space. My parents, always keen to support my quest for knowledge, bought me a telescope one birthday and I used to spend many an evening gazing up at the moon and the stars in awe. Eventually hormones kicked in, and my interest in heavenly bodies shifted somewhat closer to home.

There are approx 300 billion stars in our galaxy. And there are more than 200 billion galaxies in the known universe. So, doing a quick bit of maths, there are a shitload of stars out there. And although not all of them support intelligent life, a heck of a lot of them surely must.

Of course whether ours can be said to do so is increasingly debatable in the age of Trump, Brexit and the ongoing spectacle of a race seemingly intent on bringing about its own extinction. On the plus side, Donald Dumpf is a gift to comedy, although in the minuscule cluster of neurons that passes for his brain, he probably thinks we are laughing with him and not at him. How deluded can one person get?
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Old butterfly-brain is back

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Batman-Slapping-Robin-medAfter something of a hiatus, during which blogging time (and the muse) have been sadly lacking, I thought I’d try and get back to a weekly schedule of posting. Maybe.

In the few weeks that I’ve been absent from the blogosphere, I’ve managed to part company with a small lump – aka mystery spot – via a minor procedure. The test results identified it as a basal cell carcinoma, one that is thankfully no longer around to cause any mischief.

I now sport a fine scar, although sadly on my back, so I can’t show it off like those famous German duelling fanatics.

I’m also on the brink of a new business partnership, but more on that another time. And of course I’ve managed to miss out on all the great posts by my favourite bloggers too. Sorry guys.

I would try to catch up by speed reading everything I missed, but the last time I attempted that I simply gave myself a headache, blurry vision and an inability to say the letter Q.
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Brexit blues

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Sad-bulldog

Brexit – British exit,
Screw you EU, we can do without you,
We can shoot our foot off if we want to,
Don’t need no thought control,
No straight bananas, human rights and that rigmarole,
Gonna go it alone, screw your free-trade zone,
Rules are for suckers, innit, gonna make Britain great again,
Bring back capital punishment while we’re at it,
The golden days, fuck you johnny foreigner,
Who cares if our hospitals grind to a halt,
Theresa May, ‘cos she’s a toff, Tory twats,
Cricket bats, leather on willow, warm beer,
Lend us your ears, it’s gonna get grim up here.

Brexit – British exit,
Check your Daily Fail for alternative facts,
Refugees, swarming like rats,
Dark skies, economic ruin,
Tabloids selling porky pies,
Business moving overseas, fleeing when they see the ship sinking,
USA got Trump, we got screwed too,
Right up the channel, hardcore propaganda,
Just like in the war, only we’re the losers,
Now we’re all over, projecting stupidity onto the white cliffs of Dover,
Pissed off people tricked with lies,
Not the EU who fucked your lives, we fall for it every election,
Elites in charge, the toffs always win mate,
We just get someone new to hate,
Who is this time? Not the poles, blacks or paks,
It’s deadly refugee attacks,
Lethal hordes, kick ’em out,
Maybe we can build a sea wall.

Brexit – British exit,
Right wing getting apoplectic,
They only feel alive when they have somebody to despise,
Fear the foreigner, don’t speak our lingo,
Have their own culture, don’t play the bingo,
Funny food, weird religions,
Bombs under burkas, terrorising our tots,
Get ’em out, scream the gutter press,
Britain first, never mind the mess,
You got fooled mate, your frustration used,
They know how to bend the rules, clever fuckers,
Goodbye yellow brick road, hello dark side of the moon,
Brits abroad? Don’t care about you,
Working classes? You’re fucked too,
Same old story, when you vote Tory,
Their money is a shield, your pain they’ll never feel.

Brexit – British exit,
Game over, see ya later,
Wave your flags and enjoy your ‘freedom’,
No man is an island, and these islands will soon be a no man’s land.

 

© Copyright Jason Lennick 2016. All rights reserved.

 

Ninety-eight red balloons

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dont-look-now-smallA journey into the city recently turned into one of those Mondays of minor irritations and muse-inspiring moments that just sticks in the mind.


It didn’t start well, since my watch strap, the subject of a few recent repair attempts, finally gave up the ghost and snapped. This turned into something of a metaphor as shortly afterwards I literally ran out of time and missed my bus to the station by seconds. Oaths and dark curses were muttered as I waited in the cold for its successor.

After transferring from train to the Metro, a guy got on with luggage but neglected to hold on as the train lurched forwards. He fell against me and trod heavily on my foot. It’s fortunate that I’d neglected to pack my razor-sharp ninja sword that morning, else he’d have been completing his journey minus his head.
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Trumpageddon

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resist-banner2_lge

It is 2021 and the Earth is a smouldering ruin. What little remains of human civilization exists in small pockets, stretched across the scarred and barren wastelands of our once mighty cities. Starving, diseased and horribly disfigured, they fight giant rats and rabid wild dogs over the last of the McDonalds‘ still-fresh-looking burger patties.

The apocalypse, so often predicted, had finally come to pass on a date nobody had expected: a rather ordinary Tuesday in February. And it was all down to the chaotic results of the flapping of a butterfly’s wing in an Amazonian rain forest.

Of course that’s not true at all. It was in fact largely brought about by the actions of one man. A despicable orange goblin, with tiny hands and a massive ego. A misogynist, racist, science-denying, sociopathic TV celebrity, with the demeanour and appearance of a sleazy used-car salesman. Donny Trumpet, billionaire sex pest and reality-avoider, had concocted the ultimate con, with the help of his old chum, Vlad ‘The Impaler’ Putanski. And, it was said, it had been partly inspired by a much beloved Christmas movie starring Eddie Murphy.
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What’s in a name

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baboon-660x440_edit
I’ve always been fascinated and entertained by clever, funny or weird band names. Clearly it’s a challenge for any musician or group to find the perfect moniker, that name that sets them apart and captures a sense of what they are about. Or maybe just got chosen in a moment of drunken / stoned madness and stuck.

I grew up listening to the likes of Pink Floyd and Bowie and one of my first LP purchases was Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, so perhaps it’s no surprise I developed an ear for good music and interesting names.
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The future is here, almost

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albert_einstein_medNew year’s eve is often a time of reflection and even regret, as well as anticipation and hope for the year to come. But we can only live in the present, so as a great sage once said:

“Be not afraid for the future or regretful of the past, for the past was once the future, and the future will soon be the present, until it quickly becomes the past, again. In this way there is no past, present or future. Or something.”

Wise words indeed and ones we can all easily choose to ignore.

We lost many wonderful people in 2016, including some personal heroes like David Bowie. I suspect we also lost a bit of faith in human nature, with the UK’s Brexit debacle and the US presidential election demonstrating once again how the masses can be manipulated by ruthless sociopaths and morally bankrupt media organisations to vote against their own best interests. We now live in a post-truth world we are told, although I’m not sure if that is true or not.

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