Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.  Genesis 11:1-6

Like so many stories in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, the story of the Tower of Babel portrays God as an absolutely unforgivable dickhead.  God didn’t want the people building a tower, because if we did, we might realize we’ve got the power to do anything.  Which is true.  We’ve got brains which can imagine things that don’t exist, we’ve got hands and fingers to build them, and  we’ve got language to plan out and communicate how.  We’ve got all  the resources of the Earth, we’ve  got the energy of the sun, the wind, and the rising tides, and we’ve got manpower aplenty.  (figure of  speech, gender police.  I could have said people power, but that has connotations of rioting in the streets, whereas manpower has connotations of labor, which is actually what I am talking about at the moment)
So, God split us into different languages so we couldn’t communicate.  Now, I’m not a believer at all, but particularly not in anything found in  Genesis, the Book of Magic.  As a metaphor, though, the meaning is clear.  We have different languages, different cultures, and so  we fight with each other when we could be building towers up to  the stratosphere (I think the Space Elevator could be a nice modern example of the Tower of Babel).  We also have something we didn’t have 6,000 years ago: a universal language.  No, I’m not  talking about English, although that  is an important international lingua franca for day to day activities.  I’m talking about science, and math, and architecture and engineering, which are universal languages just as much as sex and music are.
Forget about God.  He’s not going to stop us again.

I really should have picked up on this yesterday, but didn’t even notice it until a Facebook friend pointed it out.   I guess I wasn’t reading very closely (that’s probably it) or I didn’t want to rain on the ‘liberal’ parade, but the sentence Nancy Pelosi uttered, in her meeting the other day with President Pumpkinhead, that’s got all the centrist Democrats all aflutter, saying “Oh, my goodness, she is such a badass,” is really kind of nonsensical, a sort of a covfefe moment.

“Mr. President, please don’t characterize the strength I bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory.”  Don’t  characterize the strength I  bring to this meeting as the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory….as what?  If you’re going to characterize something, you have to characterize that something as something.  Please don’t characterize it  as a bad thing, an impediment to negotiations, or a threat to your tiny manhood.  Something like that.
But no, she just said “Don’t characterize it.”  On the other hand, if she were being more literal, she may have just slipped over a qualifying word or two, like ‘Please don’t characterize the strength I bring to this meeting as if it’s due to me being the leader of the House Democrats, who just won a big victory.”
Which  doesn’t make much sense, because how else could he characterize it?  She is the leader of the Democratic Party (not that I’m happy about that, but that’s not the point now), and they did just win a big victory, which gives her x strength points, and everybody in  the room already knows it.
But my guess is she was just throwing words into the air gratuitously, trying for a nice sound rather than any substance, quite the way Trump does, come to think of it, and it appears she has gotten away with it – this time at least.

Oh,  would some gift the giver give us
to see ourselves as others see us – Robert Burns

One thing I found quite amusing today was watching Republicans trying to claim that Google was fixing their Google searches against them, because every time they googled themselves, they got bad results.
I mean,  nobody even had to say a thing, they said it themselves.  “Why is it every time I search on Google, the first 3 or 4 pages are just articles saying what a giant shithead I am?”  It’s one of the downsides of the information age, I guess.  If you happen to be a giant shithead.
It’s sort of like a mirror.  The image that you see is, to some extent, the image that was entered.  At any rate, after you’ve calibrated for the fact that everybody has different opinions, and some of them are wrong, and there’s quite a bit of gray area in deciding what’s a negative article and what’s a positive article and what’s from the Waterford Whisperer.  Maybe not as much gray area as there used to be.  Most people are pretty blunt nowadays.
When I google my name, I find that I am not the most famous Willie Watson in the world.  I’m not even in the top three.  I used to think it was a unique sort of name.  I mean, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see lots of Bill Watsons, or Wills or Williams, but that’s not even it.  Among people named Willie Watson, I don’t pop up until page 3 or 4.  So, I’m pretty insignificant, which is probably what most people find when they google themselves.
But, if you are a celebrity of any sort, you’re going to see what the public thinks of you.  The good, the bad, and the very, very ugly.  Maybe mirror was not the best analogy.  Maybe it’s more like that Robert Burns poem I put there at the top.  Maybe social media is that gift, and we’ve now been given it.
We will all just have to deal with that in our own way.

At a recent appearance of Donald Trump in Florida, a state senator name Doug Broxon, a Republican of course, that should go without saying, was giving the introductory speech.  Doug Broxon is a very religious man.  Like, nutty religious.  Which is a big part of Trump’s base.

He praised Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem (full disclaimer: when that decision was made, I didn’t think it was the most egregious thing he’s ever done.  Jerusalem has been the de facto capital of Israel since 1948, and the location of the embassy is mostly symbolic.  I didn’t expect the outrage that it brought on), but of course he put it in biblical terms.  The nuttiest biblical terms possible.
He talked about how Trump’s decision may bring about Armageddon, the battle at the end of the world, the end of the human race.
The crowd cheered.

It reminds me very much of the Heaven’s Gate doomsday cult a couple of decades back where 39 people committed suicide because they were told that the Hale-Bopp comet was the chariot to heaven so they put on purple pajamas, took some pills, and laid down to die.  Of course, the world carried on, minus 39 extremely gullible people (that’s not even the right way to board a plane, much less hitch a ride on a comet).

The problem this time around is those who share these visions of Armageddon, this wistful longing for complete extinction, are not so much ready to die for their cause as they are anxious to kill everybody else.  And there are millions of the fuckers.

Every night as I struggle to figure out what topic  to write my blog about (which is by far the hardest part of writing a blog) I ask my wife “what should I write about?”  I never write about that, because she always says something boring that I’m not interested in, but tonight I am REALLY stuck for a topic, so yoga it  is.
I’m quite skeptical about yoga, it strikes me as aerobics for lazy people, and she isn’t much more into it herself.  She’s signed up for  yoga once a week, but she often ‘forgets.’
I remember one time I went to a yoga session in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t the fitness center kind of yoga, the guy was from India and all full of how long he could meditate for, as if that was a real accomplishment, and I totally failed at the crossing my legs part.  I suffered through the session and never went back.
Meditation is another thing, and I doubt if that is a major factor of the type of yoga Helena does at all.  I’m skeptical about that too, but it certainly seems to work for some people and it’s hard to argue with the idea that , when you’re stuck, you should take some quiet time and just think about stuff.  Like the pie scene in Men in Black II, or maybe III, did they make 3?  I don’t know, but I think so.

Another thing I’d just like to mention tonight, although I don’t really have more to say than one comment and that’s not quite enough for a blog, but re Donald Trump’s comment that his payoffs to hookers were ‘private transactions.’  You know what else is a private transaction?  If I go  over to my friend’s house and buy a honking big bag of weed because I want to get stoned af.  “Private transaction” doesn’t mean they can’t throw you in jail for it.