Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

There is a long history, even a tradition, of picking trying to be clever and funny by slipping some finger gestures into a photograph.  Casually scratching your cheek or  rubbing your eye with the middle finger, or holding up rabbit ears behind somebody’s head…childish stuff, really.
Then there’s Zina Bash.  She is an assistant to Brett Kavanaugh, the extreme right wing racist who Donald Trump wants to appoint to the Supreme Court, and before that she worked for extreme right wing Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito.  Yes, she’s a Harvard graduate with a law degree, but she is as extreme right wing as they come.
Well, she was sitting right behind Brett Kavanaugh at his first confirmation hearing today, flashing a white power sign big as life.  Now, some might say it was not a white power sign, because these racist types almost never own up to it when they’re caught  (although I’m afraid that’s changing – I mean, she must have figured people would notice this, that’s sort of the point), and some might say  it was nothing at all, but that is NOT a normal, random way to hold your fingers.  The snotty, ‘I’m too good for this shit’ look on her face clearly said she was not glad to be there, and the finger sign was an in-your-face fuck you to anybody opposed to Kavanaugh’s nomination.  It said ‘Yes, we are white supremacists.’  And the scary part is, there are a lot of people in congress who aren’t opposed to that at all.

It is September, and the kids had their first day back at school, and for me, the poetry readings are back.  Tonight was Alchemy and in a couple of weeks there will be the other one.
It was not a bad night, I enjoyed the piece by Mike Rowland with some bits of old folk advice he’d made up himself, like ‘If you are urinating on a construction site, say a blessing for the future residents’ or ‘If an elephant lifts its trunk to you, you will marry  your true love.’  It was wicked original, but a lot of thought went into them, like the psychology of sandwiches part.  ‘If you slice your sandwich  in two diagonally, you know what you want in life and know how to get it; if you slice it in two horizontally, I forget that one; if you slice it into equal triangles you are gregarious and open in life; if you don’t slice it at all but eat it whole, you are content with your life (that’s me and that’s true); and, if you don’t eat sandwiches, you don’t understand life.

I liked the new guy with the guitar.  Very easy to  listen to.  I liked the new guy with a short, rhyming poem but I already  can’t remember it.  I liked most of the people who read.  Nobody went on too long.
And, it was a reasonable sized crowd.  But, it was our last reading in that place.  It happens sooner or later everywhere.  My theory is that poets just don’t spend enough money.  They can put a band in that space and have lots more people spending more money.  From the management’s viewpoint I can totally understand it.

Speaking of theories, I’ve got a conspiracy theory about the museum fire in Brazil, but that will be another blog.

I woke up this morning full of hope and optimism that the week long orgy of love for John  McCain would finally be over.  I mean, as much as people  loved Aretha Franklin, people said what they had to say and after a couple of days it was over.  Her musical legacy will  live on  forever, of course, as it should.
However, my hopes were quickly  dashed.  The news people had to go over everything everybody said at the funeral (or funerals, rather – there were different services in different places), and who was giving nasty looks to who, and on and on about what a great patriot he was and what a great hero, and what a bi-partisan politician, which I don’t exactly see as a virtue and he really wasn’t one, either, so I  don’t quite know what to make of that.
After he died, I sort of thought I would take the ‘speak  no ill  of the dead’ route, because there are even worse warmongers than John McCain, but it’s been so damned over the top, I just have to say something.  This morning, a couple of reporters were talking about how ‘stirring’ and ’emotional’ an air-force fly-by was.  These people are probably unhappy they won’t get to cover a big military parade in Washington.
So, let’s examine the life of John  McCain,  to see if he stacks up as a hero and a patriot.

Well, he never, that we know of, did anything heroic.  Except to pilot planes, of course.  That’s pretty brave, and I  wouldn’t do  it.  But he wasn’t flying rescue missions, and he wasn’t flying to defend the U.S. against foreign aggression.  It was not a heroic war.
He got shot down, and he spent time in prison.  That is sad, and I can understand feeling sorry for the guy.  But, it’s not particularly a heroic thing.  Lots and lots of  unheroic people wind up in jail.
Patriot?  Yes, I’m sure he loved America.  But, the America that he lived in  was one of mansions, luxury, and power.  What’s not to  love about that?  He didn’t really love the American people.  Not all of them.  Not equally.
Anyway, I hope by tomorrow everybody will stop talking about him.  He wasn’t a president.  He was not a particularly good person.  Just let him stay dead.

Well, it was a night out, a date night I suppose you  could say, and as far as that goes it was great, but as far as concerts go, I’ve seen better.  I’m not complaining.  That’s because we had free tickets, courtesy of a friend of Helena’s at work.  If we’d paid, I’d be complaining.
It was a night of multi-media, was how it was billed.  All that meant, in the end, was that as the band was playing, there were slides, and sometimes video, on the big screens behind them.
The musicians were good, I suppose, competent and all.  It was Eric Serra, the guy who composed the music for Golden Eye, The Fifth Element, and a whole lot of bloody  stuff with Jean Reno.  It was, at the best of moments, like watching a bunch of movie trailers.
On the plus side, I  like watching movie trailers.
That’s it for tonight.  Short blog.  It’s  late.

I couldn’t write my blog last night because the internet conked out and then it was super slow, like to the point of not working, all morning.  I’d get two posts, but even responding to those took forever, and didn’t always take at all.  However, of course, when it finally returned some time shortly after noon, I realized I  hadn’t actually missed any news at all.
The world keeps turning, the wind keeps blowing, it had rained a bit and now is cooler, and almost all of the things that happen happen when we are not looking.
Anyway, the funniest news I saw today, even if not the most significant, was Alex Jones trying to explain how he doesn’t watch tranny porn (I suspect that means Chicks with  Dicks, but this was never specified) on his phone while actually delivering his show:

“There’s two types of people: people that look at porn and people that lie about it,” Alex Jones said. “I wasn’t looking at porn on my phone. I don’t take phones on air that I look at porn on.”

First of all, if he’s saying there are two kinds of people in the world, and he’s not the kind who’s looking at it, then he must be the kind who is lying about it, which means he’s looking at it, which is a paradox.  In his defense (sort of), he did say that he wasn’t looking at porn on his phone, that he had in the studio.  He went on to say “It was just a pop up, I get sex sites popping up all the time, it’s probably happened 500 times, it happens to everybody.
No, not everybody, Alex.  These ads don’t come out of nowhere.  500 times means you are a regular customer with a credit card.  That seems pretty clear.