Poppycock 2019. I’ve had a spiffing idea: this year you do the Memorial Rant. I’m tired of banging on about a subject on which practically everything has already been said and fat good it does, too. Not that I haven’t got anything to say that I haven’t said before but I simply can’t be arsed. There. The small monster’s text is from Leonard Cohen Story of Isaac.

Cat & Bull. aka Funereal Jollities. It’s done! Alegrí­a, alegrí­a, alegrí­a!
Here’s a little jubilation for something I never thought it’d happen in my lifetime. Or anybody else’s for that matter. Not that I’m too impressed, really. It’s a purely symbolic act and as such of little practical value. But sometimes a symbol may, just about, mark a transition in consciousness. People might start to believe that other seemingly impossible things are actually possible. Who knows?
So, off they go -out of the obscene mausoleum he had slave labour build to the poxy glory of his own gruesome ego- the pestilent leftovers of a man that almost single-handedly stopped Spain from joining the 20th century and damaged the national psyche to a degree from which it still hasn’t recovered; not really, as demonstrated by the jack-in-the-box emergence of foul parties like Vox.
Now the old bastard’s grubby scraps will rest in a fairly conventional burial ground, if in similarly unfortunate company: Fulgencio Batista, Ante Pavelic, Rafael Trujillo and Marcos Pérez Jiménez. How lovely, they can all be dead tyrants together.
I know what I say ad nauseam about good news: few, far between, small, etc. Still, let us celebrate this one, puny though it is.
Next stop: pension the monarchy? 🙂
As for the ghastly shrine itself, I’m all for razing the whole grisly thing to the ground and turning it into a sanctuary for orphaned badgers, lynxes, wolves, tigers, lions and bears, oh my!  The Shoggies have kindly offered to rip to shreds the little horror themselves, gratis, for free, por la cara, as they say. Alternatively, they suggest that we temporarily wake up Great Cthulhu and remind him that he might want to take a leak and have a quick snack. Either will do, I think. Salud camaradas!
And here’s a couple of jokes, kindly translated from the Spanish by the Shub-Niggurath. 1) is for the old goat himself and 2) for his chum and heir-apparent, who fortunately never was, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco.
1)
Franco, Hitler and Mussolini are boasting of their respective operatic achievements. Hitler says: “In Bayreuth, we’ve just had a performance of The Ring with one thousand German extras!.
“Bah!. says Mussolini. “In Naples we have performed Aí­da, ten times, with ten thousand Italian extras..
“That’s peanuts. says Franco. “In Spain we do Les Misérables, every day of the year, with thirty million Spanish extras..
2)
Of all his ascents, the last one was the fastest.
Sic semper tyrannis, my friends. Have a spiffing weekend.

Pensive Puss. Here’s another handy APGI (All-Purpose Gripe Indicator) for your use and convenience. Brexshit? The Assange kangaroo court? The Catalan Silly Question? Thriving totalitarianisms on the up-&-up? Climate catastrophe? Take your pick. The choices are nearly infinite, unfortunately. Unlike good news, which persists in being few, far between and often ever so small. Still, here’s a wee bit: Netanyahu’s practically out. Nobody likes him anymore. He may as well go eat worms. 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRzhflMkGLg
And here’s a link to the kind of thing that gets me in stitches. It might amuse you, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOmdkN6MOwU&feature=youtu.be

Pisces. The Fishes. Water. Mutable. Instructed (and sadly occasionally drowned) by Neptune. Like Aquarius, very creative and imaginative, Pisces swims in the waters of Chaos with supreme ease and so it can make connections between seemingly totally disparate ideas. The ultimate lateral thinker, it can think off the beaten track like the clappers without even breaking a sweat. But whilst Aquarius reaches his insights by intellectual pathways, Pisces operates on such a subtle intuitive, emotional plane that often it’s unable to articulate how it reached its startlingly accurate conclusions; sometimes its visions verge on the prophetic. Dreamy and prone to mysticism, loving to the point of motherliness, like Cancer, Pisces is caring, compassionate and gifted with great empathy. It is also endowed with a keen sense of sacrifice that unchecked can be its downfall, leading it to martyrdom -real or perceived, uncalled-for renunciation and sometimes paranoia. Pisces is contradictory, conflicted. Or at the very least ambivalent. The two fish swim in different directions. So the wisest, most compassionate of friends at its best, when lacking a clear sense of identity and thus self-assertion, it can overcompensate by being a manipulative, mind-games playing git, even a brutal authoritarian. Like Scorpios, Pisceans can be great fun to be with, for their imagination knows no bounds and it has always an extra, almost extra-terrestrial quality that makes them marvellously stimulating companions. On the down side, it can beat Scorpio hands down at moaning, whingeing, carping, masochistic bouts of self-pity and blaming others for its often self-inflicted misfortunes, one of which is a tendency to misuse drugs and alcohol. Two beloved Pisceans in my life drank themselves to death, so I know what I’m saying.
A Closing Disclosure.
So that’s it, folks. End of the first draft of this small project.
Having had my fun with the graphic part of the Zodiac and having pontificated to my heart’s content about the meanings and characteristics of the signs, I must hereby confess that I don’t actually believe in Astrology. Mostly I don’t believe in anything. You could say I don’t believe in believing. But after a lifetime of asking people that ultimately silly question “So, what’s your sign?” and having observed a great deal, and read a bit, and talked a lot about the subject with folks that do believe in it, it has always amused me immensely to notice that indeed most Taureans are stubborn bon vivants and most Aries impulsive pussycats and nearly all Scorpios fascinating covert explosive devices and 90% of Virgoans fun-loving vivisectionists and so on. Still, I maintain that to believe that the positions of the stars at birth can influence our psyches and our behaviour, let alone allowing this belief to determine our actions, is pure lunacy. Then again, ever since I came across quantum theory, I’m prepared to leave this door open a crack or two. If there be such bizarre things as neutrinos, why shouldn’t Mars endow a person with a degree of belligerence or good old Venus doom us poor old bulls to an inordinate love of teddy bears, pure cotton, the colour blue and the vines of Valdepeñas? After all, in the merry month of May the neutrinos also go through blossoming flowers and lively birdies in the mood for love and blue skies; and in winter, when Capricorn holds sway, they cross days short and full of gloom so that one may be apt to be stern and brooding; and by the time Pisces gives way to jolly Aries one is quite ready to take to the bottle, if one hasn’t done so already. And so forth.
Answers, suggestions, theories and further insights on the customary e-postcard, please
And A Wee Request.
As I said at the beginning of this series, these are all old-ish experimental sketches. The blurbs that go with them are impromptu frivolous chit-chat (see previous paragraph). Any blunders, mistakes, inaccuracies, outrageous untruths, plain piffle and fatuous clap-trap you may detect, please do tell me and I shall endeavour to correct them in the final version. Or not. I do not aspire to perfection for only Allah is perfect. 🙂

Aquarius. The Water-Bearer.  Air. Fixed. Under the tutelage of Uranus and, some astrologers say, Saturn as well, the celestial water boy is highly intellectual, imaginative, creative, idealistic, ferociously independent and latently explosive. Loyal to his friends, able to inspire loyalty and a talented leader to boot, he is nevertheless particularly antagonistic to cults, gurus and other varieties of group-thought, herd mentality and “expert. authorities. Egalitarian and forward-looking, he is the archetype of the revolutionary reformer but not for his own advantage or the benefit of his ego but for the gain of all mankind. Original and often eccentric, Aquarius is emotional but seldom shows it. He can appear detached and even cold but inside he’s a stockpot of passion and high principles. Don’t trample on his ethics, don’t piss him off, and don’t betray his trust if you don’t want to get scorched by the full radioactive heat of his ire. His vase has been identified by some with the cauldron of Cerridwen, the vessel of Knowledge carried by the Celtic poet-friendly enchantress. Gone South Aquarius can be listless to the point of inertia and abandon himself to static, barren concepts devoid of any practical use or any realistic chance of implementation. At times he can slither into irrational subversive ideas for their own sake or aesthetic value. But find an upright, healthy Aquarius, get on his good books, gain his trust and he’ll have you in stitches with his witty, frequently wickedly sarcastic sense of humour on regular basis.

Grinning Twins.  This is for anyone who still has doubts about what kind of country Britain is becoming.
You know the old saying on how to boil a frog, don’t you? Well, the water just went up a few degrees. Not that we didn’t have loads of warning signs. My heart is with the twins all the way and back.
https://twitter.com/afshinrattansi

Doggie Dirge. A quick modest tribute to a beloved departed dog, Kabubi, my little brother’s hound. He was 13 years old and he had had a jolly good innings, really, but all the same, it has been a wrench, especially for my brother who was totally besotted with him. May Bumba receive his subatomic particles and let them frolic amongst the stars, where they belong.
And because you can’t have a wake, memorial or funereal whatnot without music, here’s link to a song that is not terribly relevant except for a) it’s about a dog and b) I adore Rafael Farina.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bloo6RrogPs

Capricorn. The Goat (The Goat-Fish to the Babylonians). Earth. Cardinal. Saturn cloaked. The rock climber par excellence, this beastie will navigate the most hazardous of high terrains often with great ease and elegance. Because of its ability to get up to the high ground, it has a good overall picture of situations and goes in for long-term projects. Hard working and perseverant, heedful of its duties and respectful of the social order, for it appreciates stability, the goat-fish can lapse into dogmatic conservatism and be very impatient of points of view other than its own. Nurturing, committed and practical by nature, devoted to both knowledge and to the spreading of it, this creature can be an excellent teacher, although it can also be susceptible to behaving like a smart-ass know-it-all and occasionally try and teach you how to boil water; and then get all pissed off and huffy when you tell it that you already know how to boil water, thankyouverymuch. When they slither into this Ecclesiastes-ish mode, the best way with them is to remind them that haughty stroppiness never persuaded anyone. Capricorns find very difficult to admit they ever were wrong, for they be proud beasties, hence they’re apt to have Saturn Returns the size and consistency of a colossal iceberg. Spare a thought for them when that happens.

Sagittarius. The Archer. Fire. Mutable. Domain of Jupiter, the big cheese of Olympus. Expansive, adventurous and philosophically inclined the centaur trots merrily along whichever path her fancy takes her. Her range is wide and she travels light: her bow, an arrow or two and her wise snake, who rights all sort of wrongs and heals all kind of injuries. Warm-hearted and sincere to the point of bluntness, she has no time for euphemisms, half-truths and sentimental flim-flam. Courageous and headstrong, she doesn’t mind taking risks and occasionally she’ll gamble against heavy odds. Her pitfall is that she can get easily bored, which impinges on her perseverance. Well, that’s fire for you, innit. Still, she’s great fun to travel with and besides, soon, soon, soon she’ll be dragging the Sun back into a higher position in the sky. The Solstice is nigh, people. And Brexit might yet not happen. Rejoice. Hope. Resist. Bite!
PS. I’ve just noticed that I’ve misspelled Sagittarius on the pic. Too bad. Sorry. But it’ll have to stay this way until I do the next, new & improved version.

Scorpio. The Scorpion. Water. Fixed. Once said to be ruled by Mars and now by Pluto, either will do, really. Scorpio is perhaps the most intense creature in the whole zodiac. Also the most contradictory, ever oscillating between the maggot it can slide into if it allows itself to become self-indulgent and the eagle into which it can transfigure if it channels its powerful drives along the right path. Passionate, curious to a fault and stubborn .“or tenacious, as they prefer to call it- Scorpios will look everywhere, investigate anything and everything, look under every stone, including their own, fearless of what they may find. Intrepid and resourceful, Scorpio can take itself to the brink of self-destruction and then swiftly recoil, bounce back and regenerate itself to a daisy-like freshness. Most Scorpios have prodigious memories. Also a remarkable aptitude to bear a grudge, so if you annoy or offend one of these beasties be prepared for it remembering every little sordid detail of your affront many decades after you’ve forgotten the lot and throwing it all back on your face given half a chance. Having said that, and having unintentionally offended a few of these mesmerizing beings and consequently having had my hide slightly scorched, I do like Scorpios. They are dicey and irritable and they can be devious but they are never boring .“except when they go to the dogs, at which point they turn into Ms or Mr. Universal Whinge and never stop kvetching and make you implore the Great Void for the boon of deafness.