If only we could have peace on earth but we are descended from the most aggressive primates… why many of them were sadomasochists.Well, some were sadists and the rest were masochists I gather.The ones who weren’t died out as they never mated.

This is the first line
Of the poem I wanted to write
After you smiled
But I never wrote it
I didn’t understand what was happening
I didn’t understand
Anything
But remember someone loved me
Called for me
Howled for me
And I went
And now I am all alone
And I can’t call for you
Yet we were in a dream last night
Together
But you were silent

https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?

On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba. On the voyage were 937 passengers. Almost all were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich. Most were German citizens, some were from eastern Europe, and a few were officially “stateless.”

The majority of the Jewish passengers had applied for US visas, and had planned to stay in Cuba only until they could enter the United States. But by the time the St. Louis sailed, there were signs that political conditions in Cuba might keep the passengers from landing there. The US State Department in Washington, the US consulate in Havana, some Jewish organizations, and refugee agencies were all aware of the situation. The passengers themselves were not informed; most were compelled to return to Europe.

Since the Kristallnacht (literally the “Night of Crystal,” more commonly known as the “Night of Broken Glass”) pogrom of November 9–10, 1938, the German government had sought to accelerate the pace of forced Jewish emigration. The German Foreign Office and the Propaganda Ministry also hoped to exploit the unwillingness of other nations to admit large numbers of Jewish refugees to justify the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish goals and policies both domestically in Germany and in the world at large.

This person keeps saying she wants to commit suicide.So I said to her, first you need to buy a Tablet

Will one be enough, she asked in surprise?

Yes,buy a Kindle Fire Refurbished

She said, what does refurbished mean?

So I said,someone has used it but Amazon have cleaned it up

She said, you expect me to take a tablet someone else has already used? I might catch a bug from it.How did Amazon get hold of it?

I expect the relatives sent it back!

Good grief,how many people can one tablet kill?

I said, wait till you see it and then you’ll get to learn a lot of different things

I don’t want to learn anything.

But you asked me how to commit suicide

I just don’t believe one will be enough

Ask for the 10 inch one

It won’t go down my throat.I will choke

There you are, you’ve found your own solution

I think I’ll stay alive.

Tablets, love them, hate them but never mate with the,

digital art by Katherine

The reality of the stupid things phone 999 for is funnier than these manufactured jokes

https://www.callcentrehelper.com/more-call-centre-jokes-155.htm

WordPerfect Customer Service Joke

This is rather an old one, that has been around for a few years, but is one of my personal favourite jokes.
Tech: “Ridge Hall computer assistant; may I help you?”
Customer: “Yes, well, I’m having trouble with WordPerfect.”
Tech: “What sort of trouble?”
Customer: “Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden the words went away.”
Tech: “Went away?”
Customer: “They disappeared.”
Tech: “Hmm. So what does your screen look like now?”
Customer: “Nothing.”
Tech: “Nothing?”
Customer: “It’s blank; it won’t accept anything when I type.”
Tech: “Are you still in WordPerfect, or did you get out?”
Customer: “How do I tell?”
Tech: “Can you see the “C” prompt on the screen?”
Customer: “What’s a sea-prompt?”
Tech: “Never mind. Can you move the cursor around on the screen?”
Customer: “There isn’t any cursor: I told you, it won’t accept anything I type.”
Tech: “Does your monitor have a power indicator?”
Customer: “What’s a monitor?”
Tech: “It’s the thing with the screen on it that looks like a TV. Does it have a little light that tells you when it’s on?”
Customer: “I don’t know.”
Tech: “Well, then look on the back of the monitor and find where the power cord goes into it. Can you see that?”
Customer: “…Yes, I think so.”
Tech: “Great! Follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it’s plugged into the wall.”
Customer: “…Yes, it is.”
Tech: “When you were behind the monitor, did you notice that there were two cables plugged into the back of it, not just one?”
Customer: “No.”
Tech: “Well, there are. I need you to look back there again and find the other cable.”
Customer: “…Okay, here it is.”
Tech: “Follow it for me, and tell me if it’s plugged securely into the back of your computer.”
Customer: “I can’t reach.”
Tech: “Uh huh. Well, can you see if it is?”
Customer: “No.”
Tech: “Even if you maybe put your knee on something and lean way over?”
Customer: “Oh, it’s not because I don’t have the right angle-it’s because it’s dark.”
Tech: “Dark?”
Customer: “Yes-the office light is off, and the only light I have is coming in from the window.”
Tech: “Well, turn on the office light then.”
Customer: “I can’t.”
Tech: “No? Why not?”
Customer: “Because there’s a power outage.”
Tech: “A power… a power outage? Aha! Okay, we’ve got it licked now. Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came in?”
Customer: “Well, yes, I keep them in the closet.”
Tech: “Good! Go get them, and unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it. Then take it back to the store you bought it from.”
Customer: “Really? Is it that bad?”
Tech: “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”
Customer: “Well, all right then, I suppose. What do I tell them?”
Tech: “Tell them you’re too stupid to own a computer.”
——————–

My new coat is described as wool rich
21%…I’ll not itch
It’s mostly man-made fibres
Unlike Lady Godiva’s.
I paid £99 for a stitch.

Years back, we were told silk and wool
Would be no longer here,so I mulled
I decided on plastic
And cardboard domestic
For in Hull there will be no pure wool

Yet lamb is still sold with the meat
So their mothers must be sad as they bleat~
Have their fleeces now been tampered with
Or the farmers been hampered with,
Losing the skill to shear sheep

So if there’s a heat-wave next year
The sheep will be hot,so I fear
Imagine your winter coat
Gripped round your hot flushed throat
As you sit by the Thames swigging beer.

Or if you should walk on cliffs sheer,
Near Dover, they are white,So one hears
Don’t pet a sheep or ram
They are more fierce than men
They may push you off and then leer

So you would drop into a ship
Full of illegal white chaps
They may be from Poland
They may be old Romans
I say, are your rightly equipped?

Suppose that the ship is on its way
To France or to Russia,oh hey
Remember what the Jews went through
As their ship was not permitted to
Dock, so as grey smoke these Jews blew.

And if the wind came from the East
All of us here and our beasts
Would have taken in the gays and Jews
Gypsies as well abused
So don’t take deep breaths when you feast

http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-marion-milner-the-life-by-emma-letley-1-3008515?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

What she knew was how to write about joy. She knew about moments when what you sense is suddenly vivid and full of energy: looking out at a tree, perhaps, and in that moment discovering a response in your whole being, in body as well as mind. Travelling, she had a brilliant eye, but it was for the “wide, unfocused stare”, not the “narrow, deliberative concentration”; she goes out after rare orchids and stops in wonder at the white blossoms of a whole hill of wild garlic. Falling in love was her model for such moments, “images with a ‘still glow’”. She wanted to get past the cant idea that the unconscious mind is a kind of dustbin of the soul where everything is shameful, and to reconnect mind with body. She’s the useful version of fashionable talk about consciousness because she knows writer’s block but she also knows the moments when you put away intellect and let the mind go as it wants; when the block breaks. She thought creativity, whatever its form, was the whole point of being human. You may not know Marion Milner, but you will be glad when you do.ost cutting insults
Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/books/book-review-marion-milner-the-life-by-emma-letley-1-3008515?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3440/margaret-drabble-the-art-of-fiction-no-70-margaret-drabble

” I don’t like placing other writers much and avoid the temptation to do so when asked, though I don’t mind admitting my immense admiration for Angus Wilson, Saul Bellow, and Doris Lessing.
INTERVIEWER
I know you’ve done your share of interviewing. What is the first question you ask someone?
DRABBLE
Oh dear. I never know how to begin. I find it to be a very difficult job, actually. I’m rather a bad interviewer because I never ask people things that they don’t want to be asked. As soon as they look annoyed or nervous, I never persist.
INTERVIEWER
I read your interview with Doris Lessing and I thought that many of the things that came out of it could have been said about you as well. You quote her as saying, “In writing novels, we bring into being what we need to be.” Can you comment on that?
DRABBLE
In a sense, the fiction creates the reality, but it’s a very complicated relationship. I think if you imagine a certain kind of person, then that person comes into being. You become that person. Or at least this kind of person becomes a possibility. But you have to be careful what you imagine, because the act of imagining is the act of encouraging yourself to be a certain kind of person. The fact of going in a certain direction has something to do with what you imagine as good or proper for yourself.
INTERVIEWER
But it also seems to me, that as far as you’re concerned, the kind of person you are has as much to do with fate or accident as it does with self-creation.
DRABBLE
This is what is so interesting about life: choosing to be something and being struck down while you do it by a falling brick. The whole question of free will and choice and determinism is inevitably interesting to a novelist. Perhaps I go on about it more than some. Are your characters puppets in the hands of fate or are they really able to make free choices? I think we have a very small area of free choice.”

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6223/michael-holroyd-the-art-of-biography-no-3-michael-holroyd

“I’ve always believed that there’s no such thing as a definitive biography and, particularly if you write about writers, that you are offering your subject the opportunity to write one more book, posthumously, of course, and in collaboration with you. Even if you and I were writing about the same subject, and even if our research were identical, we would produce different books. The dates and so on would be the same, but some themes would seem important to you and insignificant to me.
INTERVIEWER
You have written that you have “traded somewhat in invisibility as a biographer.”
HOLROYD
I believe that we are there between the lines, but most readers are not particularly aware of us.
INTERVIEWER
Are there subjects you considered but didn’t pursue?
HOLROYD
I thought a long time ago that Katherine Mansfield was a good subject. And I was asked to do one or two other books—Pamela Hansford Johnson, Stephen Spender—but I was always in the middle of something else. I was also asked to do a life of Jacqueline du Pré, whom I met, but I wasn’t competent to do it.
INTERVIEWER
Because you felt you didn’t know enough about music?
HOLROYD
Yes. It would have been interesting—in a way my subjects have been the tutors I never had, because I didn’t go to university. So I would have learned a lot. But it was difficult, too, because she was alive, and she suggested how I should do it, and I thought, This won’t work. I think it’s important to keep a distance from the person you’re trying to get close to.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44367/love-iii

BY GEORGE HERBERT

Love bade me welcome. Yet my soul drew back
Guilty of dust and sin.
But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lacked any thing.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here:
Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?

Truth Lord, but I have marred them: let my shame
Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?
My dear, then I will serve.
You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
Source: George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1978)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/17/george-herbert-poetry-faith-vocation

The poem takes its title from the parable of a perfect pearl hidden in a field: a man finds it, and goes and sells everything he has so that he can buy the field and own the pearl. In the final verse, Herbert uses this metaphor of buying and selling to great effect, making it clear that he went into the bargain of ordination with his eyes open:

“I fly to thee, and fully understand / Both the main sale, and the commodities.”