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Happy Halloween

31/10/2018

 
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Chaos reigns here in the Blackthorn kitchen on this most sacred of nights.  Whilst rain
​swept any soliciting children back to their homes, we macerated our intellects
with Resident Evil and stuffed our gullets with unsightly profiteroles laden
​with home made ganache and passionfruit cream.  I am lactose intolerant and not too
good with grain starch
 either but life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.
These are the ghosts of profiteroles past now.

Halloween is our anniversary.  26 fucking years in close proximity is a long time not be
stabbing each ​other with whatever comes to hand.  I have learned a few important
things about relationships: there are no soul mates, just the people you choose to
be with.  Good will is everything.  Apathy will sour empathy.  No one really emphasises
boring shit like this, but they are the pillars of enduring regard.
Just thought I should pass that on.

Have a good time tonight or whenever you're celebrating.  It's the start of summer for us
so there are no fucking pumpkins.  Only flowers.


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Photoessay: Orange

30/10/2018

 
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homegrown canary / LA hybrid lilies 
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port otago / european wasp on banksia
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dinghies / arctotis daisies
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spider and streetlight down a macro lens / geum
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pet shop goldfish / osteospermum
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See more of our photography   *   Photoessays   *   The Lovely R


The Blackthorn Orphans Serialization:  Dakhma 3

26/10/2018

 
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Daylight caught her eyes with its slanting, assaultive slivers as Susan leant out across the stone footing the archway.  The contents of her stomach poured in a long slick down the rain-streaked rock below; frothy golden bile signaled their end, its way greased by the liquids she had already divulged.  Coughing out the last of it, she lay in silence on the broad sill with her arms compressed beneath her, the bass pounding in the hotly bloated sections of her face racing with her heartbeat.  Her knee crushed a box of UHT milk lying on the floor and the thought of it pushed her out again over the drop, the rolling heave answered only by stained saliva and she slid down to lie against the wall.  Though vertigo had abated, its violence was redeployed by the infection in her head until light and sound began to distort at its evil behest.  Susan heard hinges grinding as something distant and academic and felt the hands beneath her arms as half-imagined adjuncts to her desire for her makeshift bed, but she was laid out on stone instead of mounded needles.  She lifted her head to cough again and dry-retch, spitting out the taste of the necrotic tooth.  Someone wiped her chin with something soft and warm.  In the midst of screwing up her face she looked into the bright colours of the brothers' stares and grew still, breathing slowly.

"It's better..." she croaked, trying to rise between them.

They ignored the shabby perjury, the cordon of fait accompli closing in an arc as she was forced back down, Sachiin taking her head and shoulders into his lap until the stripe of silver in Edward's hand became a knifeblade and she cried out, scrambling from torpor into desperate rigor and kicking out.  Her feet caught a hold on Edward's trousers and shoved him backward, surprising him with the strength that was left to her.  He reached across and seized her left arm, using it to drag her toward him and secure her head in the crook of an elbow while he pinned her flailing legs with one of his own.

"Get off me, you... fucking sadistic mental case!" she snarled, still twisting in his grasp; his hold tightened until she conceded and lay stiffly, breathing hard and shying from the hand he laid against her cheek.  It found the buried heat and brought his fingers to the broken premolar directly despite the clenching of her jaw, a measure she was compelled to give up as blood poured from her gums.  Susan screwed her eyes closed.  "Don't let him do it... not him, please... I don't trust him..." she sobbed.  Sachiin glanced up at his brother as she lapsed into despond between them, tears pooling in the hand he slid beneath her cheek.  Edward loosed his hold, settling her head on his thigh and stowing her hair behind her ear. 

"Prends ton courage á deux mains." he told her.

​Blinking up at him slowly, she looked to Sachiin, who closed his hands around hers.  Edward slid back her lip with the side of his thumb and in his free hand flipped the knife, swung the horn stock downward and struck the dead tooth loose.  While she coughed out a cry he tore it free and Sachiin spat a wad of bark into his hand, watching the new blood well and flush the wound before applying his palliative chemistry, taking her in both arms and speaking again into her ear.  The task discharged, Edward drew the face cloth from the pail and dropped the extracted tooth into the water.
​


​CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
​© céili o'keefe  do not reproduce

   Read the Book onsite   *   Go directly to this Chapter


Photo du Jour: Arisaema taiwanense- emergent

25/10/2018

 
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​My god I love Aroids.  Will post more pics when it's fully out.

Monday slash Tuesday slash hello strangers slash go ahead and throw another nutsack on the fire this All Hallows omg you know you want to.

23/10/2018

 
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My apologies to Edgar and vintage Daniel but with great hotness comes great responsibility.

Language.  It's interesting, isn't it?  This may not be a particularly original observation, universally speaking, but I only just noticed the other day that right wing fuckwits always have to have some sort of euphemism for who they are and what they're doing.  While Antifacists are just plain AntiFa, liberals are just liberals and feminists are feminists, white supremacists and male tears outfits always have to call themselves something else, don't they?  Skinheads.  Futurists.  Nationalists.  MAGA.  All those puzzling acronyms.  The Proud Boys.  Why not Proud Men?  You guys are all about super-literal interpretations of fucking everything, so your tricksy reticence confuses my feminine perception.  I think we've already established that you're not too concerned about looking/quacking like massive wankers.  Surely your self-evident and inherent truths require no such verbal ganache.  Why not just stand on a corner shouting white people/men in general are inherently superior and the best at everything please reinstate every nanogram of our unjustly-revoked privilege immediately or we'll kill you?  It's your only real  thing.  Why be coy?

I urge all interested parties to just go on with their bad selves, stop treasuring their ballbags in private and summon the courage to call their arsehole parties Men Are Furious At Even These Token Concessions And Will Rule Over You Again or something equally forthright.  Just go for radical honesty and demand full Viking funerals with 10 teenage girls assaulted and incinerated with every drunk high-value citizen who falls through river ice chasing a dog that looked at him wrong.  Don't ask, don't get.  Jesus fucking christ, even Incels, that most reviled, maladaptive and fucktarded of demographics somehow summon the fortitude to moosh two brutally explicit descriptors together and wear them with the kind of petulant abandon that underpins their assaults upon randoms.  Who's more chickenshit than a fucking Incel?  

​Logic.  Invented by men, for men.  We can but spy it dimly.  There is a moral to this story and that is never get involved in something that needs a euphemism the way dirty fingernails need a dark polish.  

Also: in light of the historic weight of judgement regarding feminine presentation, and with his consistently puerile execration of us in mind, I'm pretty sure it's equitable for me to note the endless gratitude we should feel toward Trump's physiological and mental repulsiveness.  I know it's hard, but consider this; imagine the extra legions of sloppy apologists there would be for his shit if he was even remotely cute or smooth.  There are a lot of shallow cunts out there who would vote for him in a trice if they could bring themselves to identify with or aspire to him physically.  I'm happy he has a face like a sunburnt toe wart and the conversational skills of a dead dugong.  That he has to walk, in public, like a poor person, for fear of getting perigluteal with a mobility scooter and losing that thing forever.  

Especially post-politically, when no one will ever go hunting in that cleft again. 

liked these Animal Spirits by Maxim Shkret

22/10/2018

 
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I want all of these pieces.
See there rest here.

Blackthorn Rose Review: Agnes (Rugosa Hybrid)

19/10/2018

 
(I've decided to finally get onto reviewing the hundred-plus varieties of roses that have cycled through our garden in the last 20 years, just because most reviews are generated by suppliers and thus pretty suspect to peeps worried about dropping thirty damn dollars on one bloody plant; just saying.  If this prospect bores you, too fucking bad.  Everyone should garden, where possible.  Your body needs the exercise.  Your brain needs the tranquility.  The dirt needs friends.  Roses and indeed most other plants are indisputably preferable to the company of most people and far better for you than that other shit you're doing.  Prove me wrong.)
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Agnes is a really odd sort of rose, a hybrid-looking thing with the wild-type foliage of one parent and the feral habit of the other.  The flower form resists effective classification too, seemingly stranded between Old Rose fluff and 70's Floribunda realness.  She doesn’t get a lot of love, perhaps due to this misc. look and the often whack nature of the label photos that always seem to misrepresent her.  She's a survivor, though, a flapper minted in 1922 from the wild roses Rugosa x  Foetida persiana.

​Agnes deserves far more attention.  Her hair is full of secrets.
Firstly and importantly, she is massively indestructible.  A bit of confessional background: despite their iron-clad reputation and for no obvious reason, I’ve managed to kill fully half of the Rugosa-derived varieties that I’ve planted and Agnes has been treated worst of all.  I have yanked it out of a range of shitty positions, from the almost complete shade and hungry competition of an encroaching Arrow Bamboo grove to the utterly indifferent, summer-baked clay of the slope it inhabits currently.  The only real change in Agnes’ performance has been more flowers in the brighter situation.  She seems to put on a good face even in those annoyingly seedy half shade/crap soil marginal areas.
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The foliage is pleasant bright emerald green and an attractive, atypical ferny cutwork look that is never bothered by pathogens.  I repeat: never bothered by pathogens.  I don’t spray for anything, ever, and while my other roses are being rusted and defoliated, Agnes never turns a hair and she should be grown in droves for that quality alone.  
The parent plant Foetida persiana is a notorious black spot magnet, so the clean Rugosa genes must prevail in this respect.

She puts forth modest, slender, tufted buds that open to a flower featuring gradations of buttermilk yellow with a slight mellony scent, the form puffy, informal and sort of scrunchy, like a looser Centifolia with tissue-thin petals.  There's a first late spring flush that goes on for about a month or so, then the odd single flower and a late summer rebloom, depending on the year although this second episode has become more reliable as the plant has matured. 
​
As a result of her wild heritage, the effect of Agnes’ foliage+blooms is uncommonly complimentary and wholly naturalistic, as though the two truely belong both together and within the wider fabric of an informal garden.  The colour and form just don't scream rose bush, yo, which is a bit of a shocker really after so long staring at the depressing clownishness of so many modern hybrids.
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Negatives?  Well, she does bristle with Gooseberry-like thorns, making her a great hedge prospect and a menace to the unwary.  The only other 'difficulty' I've encountered with Agnes is in regard to pruning, which usually means it's best to just put down the secateurs and back away from any impending hack job.  My cack-handed meddling has made her a wee bit flat-headed at the moment as you can probably see in the pic below, but I intend to leave her alone from now on in the hope she regains her original, more graceful Rugosa form.  Agnes may not knock you on your arse with her drag show, but there could not be a more low-maintenance, aesthetically sympathetic and uncomplaining rose.
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