noted, excerpts from 2009 - 2014

“Words don't really describe anything. Words are used to obtain something, not to describe or define.”

“What we can describe is what is known; and knowable. Words keep out the world”. - Iain Sinclair, White Chappell.

“soil mining” – disturbing new name for modern agriculture - David R Montgomery

fake sayings attributed to anonymous:
“A politician will stand for what he thinks people will fall for.”
"None of us are as stupid as all of us."
"I'm so tired I could sleep a horse."
"This sentence no verb."
"Zero is like the number one, but one less."
"Don't fall before you're pushed."

“apophenia” - the discovery of patterns in random data.

“pareidolia” – the mind’s unstoppable urge to extract concrete imagery from the abstract. A psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound), which is perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, also hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse.

A "pattern-seeking animal" see(k)ing a pattern where there is none.

“cognitive dissonance” – a state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions (ideas, attitudes, beliefs, opinions) that are psychologically inconsistent. - leads to self justification, lies.

“mongrel art” – art that is mixed in its origins, its form or its execution.
also pathetic art, non-pathetic, and un-pathetic art.

Note re: dogs
Only thin dogs become wild.
Dogs do not eat dogs.
Dogs only hear vowels.
Dogs see only black and white.
”Their language is in their nose.”
A dog’s breakfast.
Old droppings don’t stink.
Boner.

“prepone” - to move forward in time, the opposite of postpone.

“dotsam” - web flotsam.

“sexsomnia” – now a precedent of legal defense, a sleep disorder that causes people to have sex or masturbate in their sleep, without waking up. A rare subset of sleep problems known as “parasomnias.”

“organic shrapnel” – tiny fragments of a suicide bomber's body that are embedded in the bodies of the survivors. Bumps develop in their skin months later.

“to have a sparrow” - Cuban phrase for feeling homesick.

“The bird does not sing because it has answers. The bird sings because it has a song.” - Chinese proverb

“Goldilocks planet” - a planet that can support life because it is neither too hot nor too cold, too big nor too small, too near its star nor too far.

Note re: dogs
One dog steals / and another gets punished.

“They throw earth over your head and it is finished forever.”
-  Pascal, Pensees, 210

“… so why not add a knob or two, as in a landscape by Giotto…”

Note re: “Literary Darwinism”
Argues that use of metaphor is one of the essential tools of a primeval cultural revolution that allowed Homo sapiens to take over the world.

Metaphor is a form of synesthesia, a kind of neurological cross activation where humans who have the capacity to think hypothetically have a practical advantage over those who cannot.

Art, and literature or story telling in particular is a type of cognitive play. Cognitive play exists in many species, providing a learning oppourtunity to master routines in a non-threatening environment.

Story telling techniques extend back to literary prehistory.

“Schlimmbesserung” - German word for bad improvement. A new version of an old thing that, in pursuit of upgrade, eliminates some essential appeal of the original. eg. aluminum baseball bat, polyester shirts, faster moving zombies etc.

“cryptomnesia” - inadvertent plagiarism that occurs when we mistake memories of another person's notions as new ideas of our own.
– Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy

“properganda” - anti-propaganda. Actual facts and information as opposed to disinformation.

“tragedy hijacking”- inserting oneself into another's misfortune.

“grief voyeurism” - Lady Diana, 9-11 flower and stuffed toy shrines, Highway of Heroes…

KINESICS (the interpretation of body language).
Non-verbal behaviour is related to movement of whole body or body parts.
Signs of deception:
Emblems – substitute for words or phrases (lift hands and shrug)
Illustrators – accompany or reinforce verbal messages
Affect Displays – show emotions
Regulators – control flow and pace of communication. These can be both kinesic, such as the nodding of a head, as well as nonkinesic, such as eye movements.
Adaptors – release physical or emotional tension “verbal anesthetic” – phrases like “in my opinion” or “my thinking is” whose purpose is to take sting out of critical or contrary statements.
The content of speech is usually secondary to the tone – the “verbal quality” with which the words are delivered.
Kinesic attributes of defensiveness, body parts folding, stature shrinking. Arms, legs crossings, other signs of aversion.
Looking away is an aversion gesture.
Covering parts of face, ears etc – “negation gestures.”
“No. Really. I swear.” – are “denial flag gestures.”

“nonversation” – a conversation of no value, such as a discussion about the weather.

“sleeveen” – a guileful fellow, a schemer, a trickster ( Newfoundland English ).

“ADR”- Attention Deficit Recession, regarding the end of multi-tasking.

“remantle” – antonym of dismantle, attempt to put something together after having taken it apart to see how it works.

“sousveillance” – when ordinary citizens make digital recordings of authority figures and their actions.

“The alleged artists could face charges of “spreading depraved cultural items.”

“jouissance” – a term which may be understood as pleasure but also as sexual climax and the bliss of enjoyment without fear of the costs.

In June 2010, a lock of Napoleon's hair sold for £8,900.
in October 2007, a lock of Che Guevara's hair went for £77,100.

Imagine: A shorn lock of John Lennon's hair sold at auction in December 2009 for £32,000…

In 2002, a small jar of hair clippings from Elvis Presley sold for £75,000. Today, single hairs from the exKing's head are sold for over £1,000 each.

“flarf” – a movement whose followers believe phrases found on the internet and strung together into poetry provide a critical social commentary
eg. google search history.

“prosperrity gospel” “adrenal fatigue ” “21st Century stress syndrome.”

“re-calibrate and re-cogitate...recap and reconsider and recognize... reconnoiter, recondition and reconnaissance... ” -a muttering harper

"If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes."
- Charles Lindberg

Note more re dogs:
Bones raining from the sky.
A bone to pick with...
a collar looking for a dog.
dog-eared, dog days.

“Just outside of Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1938, the itinerant bluesman, Robert Johnson, still in his late twenties, died a horrible death, likely of strychnine poisoning, said to have been slipped into his whiskey by an angry juke-joint owner. A fellow musician said Johnson “crawled on his hands and knees and barked like a dog before he died.” – Hampton Sides

"Outside of a dog, man's best friend is a book,
inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." - Groucho Marx

“biomimicry” – in which aspects of nature are emulated to help solve human problems.

a “consilient” thinker, using an old word recently revived by E. O. Wilson, means that one combines insights from different disciplines and different scales of investigation.

our communicative purposes are increasingly urgent.
YMCA has become Y - the more frequent, necessary or popular a form becomes for communicative purposes, the more likely it is to be rendered compressed or econimical in structure.

IWE -an individual with exceptionalities.

Note more re dogs:
Like a dog with a bone.
Bone up.
A bag of bones.
A bone of contention.
Bare bones.
Dry as a bone.
Chilled to the bone.
Back bone, funny bone, wish bone, smart bone cut to the bone, close to the bone. Skin and bone.
Bone sick.
Dog-faced.
Work fingers to the bone.
I feel it in my bones.
Bones from heaven.
A skinny bag of bones.
A bone in my throat.
Throw you a bone.
Dog act.
“Woe to bones.”
Eat the meat and spit out the bones.
Big dog in the meat house.

”…listened to the echo of it with his head tilted like a dog…” - Cormack McCarthy

"Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards." - Samuel Beckett

bark up the wrong tree.
all trees have bark.

"clang associations" - formally defined as "psychic associations resulting from sounds, often observed in manic phase of manic-depressive psychosis."
They are groupings of words based on their sounds, generally rhyming, without logic in their assembling.

"Orthodoxy serves men much more than it does women." - Mona Eltahawy

"Transparency just means fine print." - Timothy Wu

Electro, a robot of two years, counted numbers and smoked cigarettes at the the New York world fair in 1939.

"There are no accidents in the world of magic."
- WS Burroughs

A house is imagined as a vertical being.
"...the conscious acts like a man who, hearing a suspicious noise in the cellar, hurries to the attic and, finding no burglars there decides, consequently, that the noise was pure imagination. In reality, this prudent man did not dare venture into the cellar." - Jung

Do we dream of going both up and down the attic stairs,
or dream only of going down the cellar stairs?

“A dream about a house means different things to a carpenter and an arsonist.”

Re: Gore Vidal
His view, reiterated continually, is that our government, however popularly elected, represents only the large corporations that control it, as they control the media, through which they persuade the voters to support only two parties, conservative and reactionary. Wars fill their coffers, so at their behest the government levies heavy taxes for the purpose of waging unprovoked and undeclared wars: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace lists almost two hundred from 1945 to 2001.
- Edmond S. Morgan.

“Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along…All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism. It works the same in every country.”
- Hermann Goering, at Nuremberg.

Note more re dogs:
Lazy as a tired dog.
Dress up a dog and his tail will stick out.
It's a poor dog that can't wag his own tail.
No dog ever enjoyed a hunt unless he could do some barking.
He's where the dogs won't bite.

A hit dog always barks.
That's a hard dog to keep under the porch.
I don't have a dog in that fight.
Sun doesn't shine on the same dog.
Let sleeping dogs lie.
Can't teach an old dog new tricks.

That dog won't hunt.
Sad as a hound dog's eye.
If you aren't the lead dog, the scenery never changes.
Swearing like a big dog.
That's a dog-ass idea.
Dead dogs are best left asleep.
The dog that digs the hole is the one that knows what's buried.
Lie down with dogs, you'll get up with fleas.
Even a blind dog finds a bone every so often.
a dog-and-pony show.
lying like a dog.
dog ass crazy.
dogged me.
dog eat dogshit world.

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” - Mark Twain.

Dog-whistle politics , also known as the use of code words , is a term for a type of political campaigning or speechmaking which employs coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has a different or more specific meaning for a targeted subgroup of the audience. The term is invariably pejorative, and is used to refer both to messages with an intentional subtext, and those where the existence or intent of a secondary meaning is disputed. The term is an analogy to dog whistles,which are built in such a way that the high-frequency whistle is heard by dogs, but appears silent to human hearing. - Wikipedia.

"We're being hornswoggled once again."

"petty fogged"

“by celanthropy” – celebrity philanthropy.

”I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.” – Stephen Hawking

“Lebensabschnittspartner” – German word for “the person I am with today.”

boondoggled by the sleight of hand from Big Polluters.

collapsing in despair at the failure of political leaders to move beyond platitudes and bullshit.

Pollution, in the form of clouds, has been found to contain human dandruff, flakes of skin and fur fibres.

“Take your bulldozers from under our noses,” sang the activists,
“Hands off our greenery, fuck your machinery.”

“Look at my ears, buddy. They're too small to be on a dog, see? That means I can talk for myself…” – Daniel Woodrell, Under the Bright Lights.

Note re: Black Dogs
"At first… I couldn't tell they were dogs, they were just dark shadows moving in the night, smallish in a sort of boastful way, quiet, and they would pause, noses twitching a billion bits of data.

…What were they doing in the halls? They're not allowed in the hospital. Why were they wandering in the corridors and rooms in the dark? Staring into the different rooms, sniffing?

1. large black dog, 2. large red glowing eyes, 3. stares at me silently,
4. has strong breath, 5. vanishes.

In traditional lore a dog appears as a forecaster of bad weather,
typically appearing on roads, laneways, and other boundaries, and bridges, rivers, stairs, leys …the edges of things.
A high proportion of sightings involve water,
The remains of dogs are found frequently in proximity with wells,
Beware a black dog by still water.

the black dog of depression.

Note more re dogs:
Give a dog a bad name and hang him.
‘The cat will mew, and dog will have his day."
A dog returns to its vomit.
It's dogged as does it.
Dogs bark but the caravan moves on.

The notion of dogs as spiritual guardians,
'psycopomps' - guides and guardians on the paths to the Otherworld.

“The idea of some kind of artificial companionship is already becoming the new normal.” - Sherry Turkle

Invasive species names - quagga mussels, fish hook and spiny waterfleas, round goby, alewife and blood red shrimp.

puzzles…shook…on our knees…holy…strife…mud dead limp.

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” - Albert Einstein

“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough”
- Albert Einstein

"Don't cry because it's over. Smile that it happened." -Dr. Seuss

"Rat shit, bat shit, dirty old twat! Sixty-nine assholes tied in a knot! Hooray! Lizard shit! Fuck!" - George Carlin

"Ostensibly there are sweet and bitter, hot and cold, ostensibly there is color; but in truth there are atoms and the void." - Democritus, the founder of the theory of atomism.

"We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here." - Richard Dawkins

Is there still time to shilly shally? There's always time to shilly shally.
“living among punishments and ruins”

So and so has a taste for jargon.
So and so says that So and so thinks that's what So and so says.

Shams and deceptions bring crowds into the streets.
“Authoritarian, indiscriminate, and disproportionate responses have become the norm.”
Greedy guses, hogs and “sleeveens” infest our principles.

Agitate for the random drug testing of politicians, and other leaders.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
- Gandhi

I'd rather get a tit for a tat than a shit for a shat. So said that..

Note everything was fucked up like a soup sandwich,
And I tried one, and thats when the screaming by the red-eyed dogs started...

“This country is finished, it’s been sliding downhill a long time, and everybody’s got a cell phone that makes pancakes, and they don’t want to rock the boat.” - George Carlin

2014 “Military Speak”
Bombs and bullets are now called “ordnance consumables”.
Missile strikes and bombing raids are “kinetic events”.

Clearing a battlefield of corpses is now called “consequence management”

Extra-judicial assassination, drones, killer robots, extraordinary rendition, black ops, wet ops, psy-ops, silly ops... cyber-ops. The current preferred term for drones is “Remotely Piloted Air Systems” (RPAS).

The previous term “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle” (UAV) was considered off message.

Another current idea is to paint drones in bright colours to make them more acceptable to the public.

Demoralizing - officially defined as “the use of stigma as an explicit policy tool.”

Demoralized - “removed from the mainstream of daily life.”

BOHICA (acronym) - bend over here it comes again.

"It's not the people who vote that count. It's the people who count the votes."
- Josef Stalin

“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.” - Emma Goldman

“When they give you lined paper, write the other way.”- Juan Ramón Jiménez.

"So the institutions in the city are seen as occupation forces."
“ultra co-ordinated mother Fuckery”

“A riot is the language of the unheard.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Note one more time Re: dogs (with sources)
A dog may look at a bishop. France
One dog can’t fight. Ireland
Only thin dogs become wild. Madagascar
A blind dog won’t bark at the moon. Ireland
A dog’s mouth yields no ivory. China
The tail wags the dog. England
A dog with money is called “Mr Dog." USA
Old droppings don’t stink. Kenya
A dry bone is never licked. Albania
A dry spoon scratches the mouth. Russia
A dog’s breakfast.
Bone dry.
Bone up.
Sticks and stones may break my bones.

“Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is a product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, and forever beyond understanding.” - Tristan Tzara

“Money is a kind of poetry.” - Wallace Stevens

"precarity" - the condition of living a precarious economic existence.

”I shut my eyes in order to see.” - Paul Gauguin

Capital is a dish best served cold. "Prosperity Gospel" plays some part in this.

“Nobody seems to recognize the term corporatist, and neo-con seems to be somewhat ambiguous, but everybody recognizes a fascist.” - Anonymous online

The destiny of animals is…our world deprived of animals…intensive breeding and all the modes of confinement…the direct origin of the most serious epidemics ever known…the dictates of total control… thousands and thousands of carcasses burned …the new common graves of birds …a world without wild animals.”

“The mystery of our world is being commodified and sold.” - David Deane

Annihilationism - In Christianity, annihilationism is the belief that the souls of sinners will cease to exist after death, rather than be tormented forever in "hell" as in the lake of fire.

If you’re a truth teller, you better be funny. - Fran Lebowitz

“All their lives, artists of the silver screen give the world the spectacle of their slow decay.”
Actors die in public.

- this is what makes the grandeur and specificity of an actor’s work, that is, “displaying the meat”. - Blutch

- what William Faulkner called “the raw meat on the floor.”

“Be regular and ordinary in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
- Gustave Flaubert

proliferation of drone technology, electronic snooping, and bizarre quasi-pornographic airport-security protocols

“People will never know how hard it is to get information, especially if it’s locked up behind official doors where, if politicians had their way, they’d stamp TOP SECRET on the colour of the walls.” - Helen Thomas

“We were suddenly surrounded by a hundred monkeys."

“A group of monkeys suddenly appeared in front of me and attacked me," she said.

“and it’s just a way to ensure that nobody feels incentivized to do that.”

But as the society said on its website, "The votes are in, so let the pant hooting begin!" - pant hooting being the characteristic call of an excited chimp.

“In the morning it was morning and I was still alive.”  
“love is a dog from hell."
"what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”

“Find what you love and let it kill you.” 
- Charles Bukowski

"Blood will tell."
"Blood will have blood."

“It is easier to resist at the beginning than at the end.” - Leonardo

"...you have to watch it, you have two hands, we're not like dogs." - Fred Vargas

"There is no overall." - Margaret Atwood