Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Nobody knows what’s up with Kim Jong Un, which is par for the course. At least one Japanese paper, and the New York Post, have reported that he’s in a vegetative state, and the news in Hong Kong have reported that he’s dead.
No word out of North Korea, but there never is.
I guess he had a heart attack, which is surprising at his age. He’s only 36. 37 according to other sources.
It might be that he’s perfectly fine and recovering in hospital, and all those wishing him dead will be frustrated and he’ll live and rule for a half century, like Castro.
But, what if it’s not? We have no clue what’s going to happen next. His oldest child, a girl, is about 10. Our source of information on this is Dennis Rodman. You remember, the basketball player with all the tats and piercings who talks all sorts of shit and was dating Madonna for a while. We actually don’t know if he has other children, or how many, but the family line of descent will definitely be broken, and North Korea won’t be the same North Korea without them.
Maybe another relative will step in. Maybe the military will take over. Maybe the South might see an opening for re-unification. Maybe China will manipulate the situation somehow to try to bring North Korea into their orbit, like more than they are already. Maybe the Chinese will just move in and take over. Maybe the Russians will (that one’s far fetched, but they do have a border) Maybe there will be fighting within North Korea as the power vacuum reveals political fault lines that we in the West know nothing about, because we truly know nothing about what’s happening inside North Korea.
So, I guess we’ll just wait and see.

We often say there is no such thing as a stupid question but, like so many things we often say, it’s not literally true. When Trump made his statement today about disinfectant to cure the coronavirus, he was, indeed, asking a question. Well, more of a rambling speculation, really.
It was enough to cause the CDC to make a formal statement that people should not be shooting up bleach, no matter what the crazy old man said.
And, of course, Trump lied about it later, saying it was sort of a prank, just to see how people would react, which is a defense that stopped working for most of us in about the 4th grade. And it’s obviously not true. There are things like tone of voice that we can analyze.
Trump actually thought he was asking an intelligent question, and doesn’t understand why so many people are mocking him.
His supporters are defending him, saying he never actually suggested that people with coronavirus should tie off a vein, boil some bleach up in a spoon, and inject it into their arm behind the dumpster in an alleyway like a heroin addict, that’s all just media hype, he was just asking a question.
Yes, bless your hearts, he was. A very, very stupid question. From which you should be able to tell that he’s a very, very stupid person.

My wife and I will now need to find a new series to binge on that we both like, which is not at all easy. The Venn Overlap between our viewing choices is narrow indeed.
We just finished The Crown. It didn’t really change my opinion of the royal family much, heightened it in some cases, maybe mitigated it a bit in some others. One thing surprises me, if it’s true. I heard that the royal family gave their stamp of approval to the production. If so, that was pretty bold of them, or pretty out of touch of them, because they really did not come across as a nice bunch of people, collectively.
Philip is an arrogant jerk, with nothing but contempt for the common people, and his friends were all the same. “A peasant shoot, ha ha”
The Queen Mother was a meddling old witch.
Philip and Elizabeth were, as a general rule, shitty parents.
Margaret got treated like shit, and her grudge against the family was totally justified.
I liked Princess Anne.
King Edward VIII got treated like shit by the family but I don’t feel too bad for him because him and his gold digging wife were both fucking Nazi lovers.
Charles is a sad case. Basically, like Margaret, the family pressure destroyed him as a person.
That Tommy Lascelles character reminded me of Professor Snape, minus the whole turning out to be good at the end part.
Elizabeth herself started out as a likeable character, but her dutiful patriotism doesn’t make for a rousing tale, she took bad advice almost every time, showed no real character, and got colder and more bitter throughout.
In the end, I think it was Edward who described her best, as “a woman of mediocre intelligence with zero imagination.”
It’s not my country, not my problem, if the British people want a monarchy fine by me. But, damn, they are a dysfunctional family.

I am a bad person, no doubt about it. Not so much because of the things I do – I’m generally polite, easy to talk to, co-operative. I separate our garbage for recycling, occasionally offer my seat to somebody in need of it on public transport, and yesterday I gave a bit of change to a beggar because I felt bad for her dogs. But sometimes I think very bad, mean thoughts.
With regard to this virus and quarantine thing, for instance. There are people out protesting against the quarantine, walking around outdoors without masks on. The governor’s of some states, where the protesters are a major electoral force, who are going to end the quarantine earlier than other places. Bowling alleys, hair salons, and tattoo parlors will soon be open in Georgia and a couple of other states.
Will there be a huge spike in deaths, which will prove me, the doctors, and most scientists right? Or will there not be that many deaths, in which case it will be proven that all of these precautions we’ve been taking were largely superfluous and, like some of my more conspiracy minded friends believe, a plot to make the people more compliant, a test run for complete totalitarian rule?
I must confess, I am hoping that a very large number of the protesters die. And that is not a very nice thing to hope for at all.
Ergo, I am a bad person.

I am seriously beginning to worry that soon I will arrive at the point where I have watched Netflix. I mean totally watched it, in the sense of having read a book, or seen a specific film.
Today, I just did a search on Science Fiction, because that’s mostly what I like, and I’d watched most of the titles (some of which were not science fiction at all). I went looking through them, and I couple I realized from the blurb that I’d watched before, and a few others I gave a couple minutes before realizing I’d watched them before.
I wound up watching one called Discovery, which was such a snoozer that I was well into it before I remembered having seen it before. It had Robert Redford as an aging scientist, but he was only there because there were no big stars in the movie, and they wanted somebody important in the credits. He wasn’t the starring role.
The idea was that he’d found proof of an afterlife, but the repercussions from that were kind of ugly, as suicide had become very popular. So, his son returns, I guess to try and get him to end his experimentation, and falls in love with a suicidal woman who thinks his dad is just great.
I don’t recommend it. Maybe 2 stars on a 5 star system. Up until the last 20 minutes, it’s just people talking, and then it’s just the son and the girl talking in a series of alternate timelines which, if that had been the whole movie and there had been a little bit of sex and action, maybe a few car chases or explosions, and fewer miserable characters being miserable in dark rooms and rainy exteriors, it might have been worth watching. The premise wasn’t so bad.