January 31, 2012

Ethel Mormon

As anyone who knows me or who has been following my blog regularly should be well aware, I am no fan of chronic liar and dog abuser Willard “Mittful of Dollars” Romney.  But, as a karaoke devotee who quite regularly sets Frank Sinatra to spinning in his grave, I felt a certain amount of

The First Robot-American Candidate for President

sympathy for him when I saw this.

Despite his  unimpressive singing voice, the ploy really should have worked.  This was an elderly Republican crowd, the kind of people who regularly railed at Barry O for not wearing a flag pin, who wear the flag at every opportunity, who just love all that patriotic schmaltz, and they would have joined right in if they’d been asked by anybody with even a smidgin of stage presence.  But Mitt Romney is like the dark matter, the negative energy, the polar opposite of a motivational speaker or an evengelical preacher.  When he did his Mormon mission to France, I’m imagining wine drinking and the smoking of nasty Gauloise cigarettes actually went UP.

This was not just a politician failing to connect with his audience.  This was like a comic bombing on amateur night, this was like Rick Perry forgetting what he was talking about in the middle of the sentence, this was like Miss South Carolina going off on maps, such as, and people in the Iraq and South Africa and wherever.  This was horrible.

It was embarrassingly bad, but will it finish Mitt Romney?  I doubt it.  He has apparently survived the revelations of his secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, his horrible job-slashing record at Bain Capital, the whole tying the family dog to the roof of the car thing, and wiping out the hard drives to conceal whatever nastiness he was up to when he was governor of Massachusetts.  It sure didn’t help him, though.

So, why did he do it?  Well, it was undoubtedly in response to this.  But it was a foolish, and counterproductive response.  One rule of politics (which also applies to war and foreign policy) is, don’t get involved in a fight you can’t win.

If Mitt doesn’t understand that then he won’t, and shouldn’t, be president.

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January 30, 2012

Or Maybe It’s Something They Put in the Sushi

Of course, one must take all surveys with a grain of salt.  It depends very much on how the question is  asked, which depends in turn on what results the survey taker wants to get.  But the results of this survey are bizarre and fly in the face of what I thought I knew about human nature.

Japanese Sex Robot - They're Not Just Blow Up Dolls, Any More

I’m not sure if they are alarming, or if this is actually a positive development for the human race, but it’s definitely something worth keeping an eye on.  Here it is, via Huffpo:

A startling number of Japanese youths have turned their backs on sex and relationships, a new survey has found.

The survey, conducted by the Japan Family Planning Association, found that 36% of males aged 16 to 19 said that they had ‘no interest’ in or even ‘despised’ sex. That’s almost a 19% increase since the survey was last conducted in 2008.

If that’s not bad enough, The Wall Street Journal reports that a whopping 59% of female respondents aged 16 to 19 said they were uninterested in or averse to sex, a near 12% increase since 2008.

There are a couple of possible explanations.  One is that they’re so far ahead of everybody else in the virtual world and robotics that they don’t really need it.  In a way that’s very sad because no virtual relationship or robot sex doll can really quite replace a human companion.  I don’t think.  They  won’t really care when you get sick or if you die.  Then again, not all people do, either.

In a way, it would be positive, because the world’s population needs to drop and they are showing the way.

Basically, though, I think the survey is probably bullshit and what is happening is that it’s currently cool to say you aren’t interested in sex – like some people think it’s cool to pretend not to like certain kinds of music, because it makes them sound more sophisticated or something, but they  can’t get it out of their head  nonetheless.

Hell, everybody likes sex, especially teenagers.  It’s biological, it’s ingrained, it goes back millions of years.  And don’t worry about the population growth thingie, Japanese teenagers.  As long as you use a condom, everything’s cool.

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January 29, 2012

Poetrouble

Quite a spirited conversation going on on my facebook page, which began with a poet’s tale of a conversation with a musician friend, bitching  about small audiences.  (redacted) was of the opinion that it’s valid to read for an audience of one or two and, if I understood him correctly, he gave two

Poetry was still poetry, and nobody called the stewardess a bitch

reasons.  First, because you can have a more direct, intimate connection with the audience and second, because it’s all about your work.  If your poem is good, you should feel comfortable reading it in front of a mirror.

They way I see it, if I’m already there, I’m going to read, even if the audience is small, and I’m going to do it sincerely and to the best of my  ability, because why in the world not?  But I’d much prefer a larger crowd and I’m not buying the intimate experience thing.  Everybody who can hear you is getting the exact same experience.  How they interpret it is pretty much up  to them.

But, of course, being a spirited thread, the discussion pretty quickly branched off into a discussion of how poetry is different from other art forms and why so much of it is so bad.  One person said that poetry is the only art form which has more practitioners than admirers.  I don’t know if that’s literally true, but judging from some of the poetry readings I’ve been to, it’s not far off.  That person’s point was that poetry, now that the need to have rhyme and meter has come to seem as quaint and outdated as the need for wearing a jacket and tie on a plane or using Robert’s Rules of Order in a meeting, is something anybody who can write can write.

It works at poetry readings.  You could get up on stage with a page out of your diary or your weekly to do list, read it out loud, and it will get the same polite applause and lack of critique as everything else that’s presented.

I don’t know.  It could be I’m missing something, and people have more to say than I’m understanding – it’s possible- I’m a reasonably intelligent guy, but not terribly sensitive or deep – in fact, not really very poetic, in that sense.  But here are my 3 rules for good poetry:

1. It should rhyme

2. It should have meter

3.  It should mean something

I’m ready to waive the 1st two if the poem is good, because I know I’m swimming against the current anyway, but not number 3.  It really, really has to mean something.  I like it even better when I can understand what that is.

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January 28, 2012

One Hit Wonder J.D. Salinger

I was just reading an interesting, although not particularly enlightening, article about J.D. Salinger.

J.D. Salinger 1919-2010

The gist of the article was whether or not he had unpublished works lying around the house when he died, two years ago at the age of 91, and if so, are they any good.  Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, and that’s what he’s known for.  Literary types rate the Franny and Zooey stories highly, but outside of literary types nobody’s ever read them.  “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” was a kind of a boring story about an upper class pervert.

I suspect that the reason his widow and his son haven’t released any of his works posthumously is because there’s nothing to release.  He wrote a lot, by all reports – even as he walked around town, he could be seen jotting things down in notebooks – but that doesn’t mean it ever amounted to completed stories or novels.  He was mostly known, in the last 40 or so years of his life, for being kind of weird and reclusive.

I Loved Catcher in the Rye, though.   It’s O.K. for an author, or a musician, to be a one hit wonder.  That’s enough.  And it will probably have to be.

Joseph Heller wrote one great book (Catch 22) and probably should have stopped there.  I got a couple of chapters into “Something Happened” and said to myself, yeah, something happened.  You forgot how to write.

Ken Kesey wrote two great books (“Sometimes a Great Notion” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”) and then retired to a ranch in Idaho, saying two was enough.  He did come out of retirement with one book later in life,  but it was embarrassingly bad.  Not only had he slipped as a writer, he no longer even had enough sense of self-awareness to know that what he’d written truly sucked.

Not every great writer can be, or should be, like John Grisham or Terry Pratchett.  Not every writer is meant to churn ‘em out.

If I am ever fortunate enough to write something half as good as Catcher in the Rye, I will be damned proud of my life’s work.

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January 27, 2012

Newt’s Lunacy

The libertarian viewpoint is that it’s every man for himself.  The liberal viewpoint is that we’re all in the same boat.  Put that way, I am squarely in the liberal camp.  Although Ron Paul says a lot of things I like – legalize marijuana, normalize relations with Cuba, end U.S. imperialism and bring

You know why there's no good restaurants around here? No atmosphere.

the troops home – I can’t see myself ever becoming a supporter.

Amazingly, though, it was Newt Gingrich who said something recently that I agreed with, and he’s drawing a lot of ridicule over it.  He said we should have a permanently  manned moon base.  Mind you, Newt deserves the ridicule.  He wants the moon base for the wrong (military) reasons, he hasn’t outlined how he plans to pay for it or explained how this is consistent with shrinking the government and cutting government expenditures (because it’s not) and, basically, he’s just spouting bullshit because he’s Newt Gingrich and has no intention of ever increasing the size of the  space program.

Granted, my  reasons for wanting a moon base are also not that substantial.  Mostly, I just think it would be cool.  If we are talking about scientific value, robots can probably  do anything we want on the moon and there are several space projects which should take priority, e.g. a space elevator, space stations used for industry and tourism, space based solar panels beaming cheap energy back to earth and next-generation space telescopes because Hubbell has been amazing but, come on, it’s been up there since 1990.  Remember 1990?  Cameras were cameras and phones were phones.

But also, I think that the solutions to the problems we have on this earth will not be political, because democracy is only as good as the demos, and unfortunately we’re not all that great, as a whole.   When the solutions to all  the world’s problems are found, they will be technological.

So, I like the idea of a permanently manned moon base.  But Newt Gingrich is still a putrid old windbag.

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