Wayne Cowling

Edith Piaf - Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (1959)

Edith Piaf - Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (1959)

Alfonso Yuste Navarro is a street artist active in Spain. He makes little, very detailed homes for stray cats in the streets of Valencia [📹 Jeanne Paquette / jea.nnee]

Nobody who never listened to Joan Baez before is prepared for that voice. Joan's voice is so incredibly clear and soft, yet it hits you like a hammer when you hear it for the first time. Joan Baez - 500 Miles (1965)

This polar bear died of starvation in its homeland, which is supposed to be teeming with prey. Photographer and biologist Paul Nicklen, who has spent more than 30 years in the Arctic, says that during most of those years he only came across one dead polar bear, and then within just two weeks his team found two that had died of starvation. Polar bears rely on sea ice to hunt seals, and with rising temperatures and receding ice, the search for food becomes longer and more difficult, potentially ending with some of them dying of hunger.

This mailman started writing fake letters for a dog because he could not stand seeing her disappointed. Back in 2016, Australian mail carrier Martin Studer had one very enthusiastic customer, a golden retriever named Pippa, who every morning would wait by the gate for Martin, gently take the family’s mail from his hand, and proudly carry it back inside as if collecting the post were her official job. On days when there was no mail, Pippa would be left waiting with nothing to collect, and Martin could not bear to disappoint her, so he started carrying blank postal cards in his bag and writing “Mail for Pippa” on them [1]. Whenever there was no real post, he would hand Pippa one of the fake letters so she could still complete her daily mission. One mailman, one golden retriever, and zero real letters were needed to make her day. Sometimes the smallest act of kindness can mean everything to a dog

Swans might have one of the most underrated landing techniques in the animal kingdom.

Imagine living like this for FIVE YEARS. Your entire life. This is what mother pigs endure in factory farms across the globe. My wife @rose__patterson and her org @AnimalRising released this footage at a supposedly high welfare farm today. This has to stop.

On 24 August 1899, Jorge Luis Borges was born in Buenos Aires, and if one knows what he would later write, it is tempting to suppose that his family had been selected in advance by Borges himself: an English grandmother, Spanish-Argentine ancestors, soldiers, lawyers, books, lost political causes, two cultures, two languages and a library large enough eventually to become the Universe. His father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was a lawyer, teacher of psychology, anarchist by conviction, reader of Spencer and a man with literary ambitions who wrote a novel but never received the literary life he desired, and somehow silently bequeathed it to his son. His mother, Leonor Acevedo, came from the other great Borges narrative, the Argentina of military honour, civil wars and heroic ancestors, and remained beside him for almost his entire life, particularly when hereditary disease gradually deprived him of sight; she became his reader, secretary and companion, a maternal presence so powerful that the future women in his life practically had to conduct separate diplomatic relations with her. His sister Norah, a painter, was more sociable and visual, and illustrated some of his early texts. His divergence is not chaos, but an ability to see secret kinships between things ordinary thought keeps in separate drawers. With Borges, a library becomes a model of the cosmos, a lottery turns into metaphysics, a garden of forking paths contains all possible times, and a man pursuing another man eventually discovers his own face in the pursued. That is why Ficciones, The Aleph, The Book of Sand, A History of Eternity, The Other, the Same and Dreamtigers read less as separate books than as rooms within the same Borgesian architecture. And at its centre stands his old philosophical problem: if time is a mystery, memory unreliable, language never entirely coincides with reality, and the self changes, what exactly do we call “I”? Borges loves Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Hume, Spinoza and the ancient paradoxes not as a man searching for a philosophical system in which to settle comfortably, but as a writer who enters systems to see what literary monsters live inside them. He can take an idea someone else would develop over four hundred pages and turn it into a ten-page story after which the reader is no longer certain whether the world exists outside the library. With women, his certainty is even smaller. There is Concepción Guerrero, the first great love of his youth; later comes the writer Estela Canto, free, intelligent and far bolder than the shy Borges, with whom he falls in love during the 1940s and to whom he gives the manuscript of Then there is Elsa Astete Millán, whom he had known since youth and marries in 1967. And finally María Kodama, pupil, interlocutor, companion in Old Norse and Icelandic sagas, the eyes of the blind writer during their travels and the last woman in his life; they marry in 1986, months before his death in Geneva. Borges experiences love, fame, political disappointments, progressive blindness, old age and worldwide recognition, yet continues to treat reality almost as a book someone has written with far too many cross-references; even blindness, which could have been the ultimate cruelty for a man who lived through books, does not end his reading but transforms it into memory, voice and listening. Perhaps that is why in Borges a labyrinth is never merely a labyrinth, a mirror never merely a mirror, a tiger not merely a tiger, and a library certainly never merely a room filled with books. And when, toward the end of his life, he has to name the most important event in it, the man who received almost every major literary distinction except the Nobel Prize does not choose fame, journeys, love or his own books. He chooses the room where everything began: “If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my father’s library.”

On this day in 1952, Big Mama Thornton recorded the original version of "Hound Dog", years before Elvis ever touched it. The song was actually written specifically for her, and she absolutely killed the vocals. It ended up sitting at #1 on the R&B charts for 7 straight weeks.🎶

Every creature needs a hug, sometimes

What A Sociopathic Scumbag 😡! “No-one can define the rush of adrenaline that sends the pulses racing but the hunter himself” – Ron Thomson, trophy hunter. Ron Thomson is credited with having shot more than 5,000 Elephants; 800 Buffaloes, 50-60 Lions, 30-40 Leopards, 50 Hippos and many more. He once shot 32 Elephants in the space of 15 minutes. Another time he and 2 others shot 2,500 Elephants using military NATO 7.62 mm semi-automatic rifles. “We did it exceptionally well,” he said afterwards. Sign the petition to ABOLISH Trophy Hunting at BanTrophyHunting.org today #BanTrophyHunting

@CountBinface come on Binface lad 👍

i found you behind a box… only hours old. i raised you, fed you, brought you to work just to make sure you were safe. i made you a promise to take care of you… and i kept that promise the best way i could. so i buried you with your favorite things… and planted a rose above you. even after death… you still bloom. i love you goosh mcpoosh luna ♾️🌹

“I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'.” Bob Newhart

Vanilla Fudge in 1968 absolutely melting Ed Sullivan's stage with a psychedelic, borderline heavy-metal version of The Supremes Motown classic “You Keep Me Hangin’ On”

“It takes nothing away from a human to be kind to an animal” ~ Joaquin Phoenix. After this dog was afflicted with paralysis, it was cruelly thrown out onto the street. The man in the video found him in this state, adopted him, and made a wheelchair for him. Watch the dog's joy and happiness. 🦽❤️.