Rick "Go Ahead and Fling Poop at my Head" Santorum

weathered that political storm….”

Then, today, I saw this.  OMG and a double WTF.

It is enough to make one think that Rick Santorum is totally unaware of his little “google problem” but we know that that is not the case because he wrote to Google, several months back, and asked them to clear it up for him, and they said ‘too late, dude, and besides, it’s not really our lookout.  We just tabulate the hits and put up whatever shit pops up,’ or words to that effect.

When I saw the ad, it made me wonder “Does he actually want to win?”  But then we’re getting into unnecessarily weird conspiracy theory land.  In the beginning, lots of people were saying that Newt, like the Donald, was just running for the publicity, to sell a few books, but even with Newt we’re past that stage now, and we never were at that stage with Santorum.  No, these people are politicians and every politician wants to be president, just like everybody in the NFL wants to be on a winning Super Bowl team.

So, is he embracing the Santorumousness of his name and turning it around to drop a bit of shit on Mitt?  Maybe.  Might even work.

Or is he just so bloody clueless that he didn’t associate the disgusting sploogy substance being kersplattered on the walls behind his head with his own much maligned moniker?

My guess is that it’s option #2, but in either case…he made the ad, so you can’t blame me for passing it along.

Is it my imagination, or does he like a bit satanic?

relishing the bitterness with every sip.  They are angry with Obama as they shower, shave and head off to work.  They spend their day plotting against Obama, their lunch hour ranting about him with their friends.  When they go home in the evening, they go home hating Obama and I’m absolutely sure that he haunts their dreams.  Good.

The Catholics are aligned with them currently because it’s an issue of birth control.  Obama wants it covered under health insurance, even if you are employed by a Catholic college or something like that.  A couple of priests, who were on the Sean Hannity show, said it was a war against religion.  Newt Gingrich made a similar statement, saying that if Obama is re-elected, the first thing he will do on the first day of his 2nd term is to declare war on the Catholic church.  War.

Of course, the whole problem could be avoided if the U.S. had universal health insurance like Europe, or Canada, or pretty much any country in the civilized world has.

But the one thing that’s getting overlooked in all this is how petty the argument is.  As far as the cost is concerned, the government could absolutely give out the pill free to every woman who wants it and put big buckets of condoms on every street corner for less than they spend on farm subsidies.    Less than they give away to Israel.

Also, birth control is important; not just to women, not just to their boyfriends, but to society as a whole.  We’ve got 7 billion people in the world and we’d better get that under control pretty damned sharpish before we strip the planet of all of it’s resources, like a swarm of locusts in a wheat field.

What the Pope thinks doesn’t matter.

Whitney Houston: May Her Voice Live Forever

birds, and microscopes and telescopes see things man can’t, so the internet provides us with a brain that is better than our own brain.  Well, better in some ways.  Certainly, it has more facts at its disposal.

I worry that people will no longer bother to learn, much less memorize, facts in the future because why bother?  For instance, I never calculate currency conversions anymore.  It takes 2 seconds to look up a conversion chart and, Bob’s your uncle, it takes about 2 seconds to do the conversion.  Call me lazy, but I trust the computer’s math skills more than my own.

Because of facebook and all the other sites of that ilk, it’s not only  facts that are stored in the great global cranium.  Our hopes, dreams, bad habits, secret desires, likes and dislikes are all embedded in the universal think-box.  It’s a bit of an eye-opener, really.

Who ever would have guessed there were so many cat lovers in the world?  If they were to form their own political party, they could take over the world.   Of course, there’s been an explosion of porn (it’s not just for guys any more), but it’s also brought all of the hate groups out of the closet.  So, some good, some bad.

I saw two things today.  Both were entitled “25 Disturbing Tweets About….”, which could possibly be considered a disturbing trend in itself, or maybe it’s just a bad meme, I hope.  The first one was 25 disturbing (I’m not sure if the word disturbing was used.  They might have said 25 Unforgivable Tweets About Whitney Houston.)  Some of them, admittedly, were pretty callous and insensitive.  But a lot of them were just saying “Who was Whitney Houston?”  The compiler of the list wasn’t even trying to differentiate between people who were being sarcastic and nasty, and those who genuinely didn’t know.  Whitney had a beautiful voice, but her fame peaked in the early 90s.  Somebody who’s under 25 might easily be forgiven for not knowing who she was.

The 2nd one was 25 disturbing tweets about Chris Brown, and they  most definitely were.  Singer Chris Brown was arrested 3 years ago, on Grammy Eve (so this was sort of an anniversary), for beating the living crap out of his girlfriend, Rihanna.  Even though she still has a restraining order against him, they both were at this year’s Grammy Awards.

The tweets were all from women, saying “Chris Brown can beat me any time he likes,” and “I don’t know what Rihanna’s complaining about.  He could punch me in the face if he wanted to.”  Stuff like that.

If a psychiatrist wanted to examine the human race as a whole, to try and figure out why we’re so crazy fucked up, he (or she) could start with the internet.  The insanity is on display.

Yup. That's me, more or less

I go to poetry readings once a month and very often my poems are intended to be comical.  But not always.  Also, at a poetry reading I have it written down and I can read from the paper.  That’s against the rules at this event.

Which makes it an entirely different discipline.

I also like singing at karaoke events so, as you can see, I enjoy being on stage but at karaoke, like the poetry readings, you get to read the words off the prompter, so you can’t actually screw up the words.  You can screw up the melody, sure enough, especially when you volunteer to sing a song that you don’t know as well as you thought you knew, but you can’t screw up the words.

The only place where I stand up and perform before an audience unscripted is in front of a classroom.  Even there, although I don’t follow a script,  I’ve been teaching for 14 years and I’ve got a routine that I could follow in my sleep.  My classroom patter is as unthinking as my signature.

Also, with my adult students, I am not trying to make them laugh.  With my kids, anything up to about 4th grade, they laugh too much.  They laugh at everything, they hide under the tables, they tease each other, they conspire.  (One 2nd grade group, when I was drilling them on colors, conspired to answer all questions with “yellow.”  They thought it was the most hysterical thing in the world.)

So, it won’t be easy tonight and I’ve decide to keep it short and simple.  A  couple of my poems, short ones that I’ve got memorized, and a very brief routine with a couple of classroom anecdotes.  So that in case I totally suck, at least it won’t be too long.

Wish me luck.

Good times

The problem is, whenever i see a retrospective of the ’60s (disclaimer: I’m actually more of a 70s person – I was 15 in 1969) i wind up shouting at the TV screen even though they’re not actually lying, most of the time.  They’re just missing the point.

Yes, guys had long hair and everybody wore bell bottom trousers and t-shirts and headbands and lots of bead necklaces, but it wasn’t a fashion statement.  It was an anti-fashion statement.  It was like “I’m not going to look like anything that anybody wants me to look like.”  Bit of youth rebellion.  Happens in every generation.

So, that wasn’t it.

There were a lot of drugs, for sure, but there’s still a lot of drugs, maybe even more now.  There was a lot of opium in San Francisco in the 1890s, and laudanum.  I suspect that ancient Druid witch doctors probably drank a lot of crazy mushroom tea.

So, it wasn’t the drugs that made the 60s unique.

The music was great, of course, and had a transformational effect on the relationship of music to culture, but every decade produces some great bands and a fair bit of crap that eventually is, fortunately, forgotten.  Remember Freddy and the Dreamers? (actually, I quite liked Freddy and the Dreamers, but nobody talks about them any more)

Still, even the music wasn’t quite it.  It wasn’t quite the thing that made the 60s different from every other decade in recent memory.  It wasn’t quite the thing that makes people speak of that decade, and think of that decade, with a bit of reverence.  It wasn’t quite the thing that made the 60s not just different from other decades in the ways that each one is different, it was different from them all, in some fundamental way.

It was a decade which actually had it’s own philosophy, it’s own vision of what it wanted to be, how it wanted to define itself:  Love everybody, share everything, do whatever it is that feels good.

It was a noble vision.  If enough of the human race had lived up to it, we would have been living in a Utopian society, without poverty, war or hate for the last 40 years.  We’d have legal marijuana, too.

But not everybody loves everybody.  Almost nobody’s willing to share everything and some people aren’t willing to share anything.  And, for some people, doing whatever they like involves doing some really nasty stuff to other people.

So, the hippie movement eventually died.  But I keep hoping it will come back some day.