Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

To tell you the truth, I believe it’s one of the scientific impossibilities, like faster than light travel.  However, it makes for a rollicking good sci-fi story, when it’s done right.  I’ve enjoyed the comedies, Back to the Future, Bill and Ted, and so on.  I’ve enjoyed the more serious attempts.  The Star Trek episode where Kirk goes back to depression era Chicago and falls in love with Joan Crawford.  Even Superman traveled  back  in time, but that was stupid.  In fact, the whole Superman story was stupid.
Anyway, it blends history with science-fiction, which is like the peanut butter and chocolate of genres that I like.  Right at the moment I am watching two back to back time travel programs, it’s like  a four hour binge and everybody else in the house is  asleep.  The thing is, I’m not really sure about either one.
The first is called Outlander, I think, about a 20th century (40s and 50s) woman who has somehow been transported back to 18th century Scotland, where she’s trying to prevent the battle of Culloden Moor, and seemingly not doing a great job of it, but it’s really not so much about time travel as it is just about her surrounded by men in kilts who talk about honor and Scotland and stuff and are led by her truly buff husband.  It’s got interesting characters and the battle  sequences are quite exciting, but they almost never show her in the 20th century and I still don’t understand how she got there.
The one I’m watching at the moment, called Time Travelers, is a bunch of people  who travel back to our present from the future, because the future’s all messed up and they want to repair that, like in 12 Monkeys.  They inhabit the bodies of people who are about to die, so they’re not really  doing anybody a disservice, except there are people who know them and so  it gets confusing.  There’s the couple from the future, but he (his host body) has a wife who’s also not half bad, and she has a tyrannical ex-husband.  There’s the guy in the body of a high school student, so high school stuff, and another whose host is a heroin addict, and another who was retarded and her poor social worker has no idea what to make of it.  But, it’s basically an excuse for action adventure as they run around rescuing kidnapped kids and preventing terrorist attacks and getting weird messages from girl scouts who talk like robots.
It’s O.K., but I wish they’d show how their future is messed up and just what is their long term plan for saving it.

“A little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: there shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.”

-Alexander Pope

A large part of  my  frustration, I am certain, is due to falsely inflated  expectations.  It is a life problem for  optimists.  Our hope in humanity, and the future, is constantly being dashed on the  sharp and jutting rocks of reality.
What frustrates me most, of course, is bad spelling.  I’ve learned to accept it, usually.   Correct  people  and they just get snippy.  Even, sometimes, people who claim to be writers and lovers of  language.
But, there are a few instances where I’ll call people on  it.  Loose instead of lose, for example.  Seriously, if you  write it like that, I  know you are not a reader of books, and grant far less credence to your opinion than I would have otherwise.   Another is one poetry site I belong to, where the idea is to critique other people’s poems.  Some people there can be seriously mean and nasty.  I mostly just correct people’s spelling.  They think I’m shallow.  That’s O.K.  I can live  with shallow.  Another case is if it’s a ‘meme’ or, in any event, something with a background color.
Now, I know how easy it is to do those things.  The colored backgrounds are available if you just keep it short enough, and since lots of people are used to Twitter, that is not a problem.  Even memes are pretty easy to do.  You just go to a site that generates them and they walk you right through it.  So, it should not be surprising that a lot of people who can’t spell for shit post them.
But, it surprises me just the  same.  Every  damned time.  The colored background,  or the picture, grabs your attention and  there’s an implication that this post is a little more professional, a little bit more worthy of consideration.  And then, you see the misspelling.  The one that set me off today, which is the irritation acting  as the inspiration for this blog, as a grain of sand activates the pearl making substance inside the  oyster, was when someone wrote ‘Quite Down,’ when it was clear from the  context they meant Quiet Down.
Despite the fact that it’s very  easy to edit your own posts, it’s remained up all day unedited and will probably remain that way  forever.  It  could be because the original poster doesn’t know how to edit their own meme – which is why I used that famous quote from Pope at the beginning – but it’s more likely  they just don’t give a shit.  Some people are like that.

There’s another scandal  of Catholic priests molesting small children, mostly boys.  Of course, this  scandal comes up  now  and again.  But it  seems this  is  a  pretty big deal, this time.  300 priests in Pennsylvania, charges spread out over the last  70 years.  Some old men with  long memories must have come forward.
Although it’s still a small  percentage  off  all  the Catholic priests out  there, it  is a not insignificant  number.
The thing is, what do you expect?  One of the  requirements of the  job  is that  you be unmarried.  You have to  take  a vow of  celibacy.  What kind  of guy is going to answer a job application like that?  Well, I suppose some men who are completely uninterested in  sex, but that is a rare breed, indeed.  Probably rarer than actual child rapists.  Most of the men answering an ad like that are  looking for a way  to hide their eccentric sexual tendencies.
These old priests were probably molested  as children themselves, and their molesters before them, on and on  back into the mists  of time.  I’d be willing to wager that pedophilia is older than farming or  fire in  the march  of human development.  The Catholic Church just hung a sign on the door.

We shouldn’t rush to judgement, of course, innocent until proven  guilty  and  all that, but one thing I’ve been reading has convinced me, personally, of their guilt:  their lame excuses.  “It  was just horseplay, and inappropriate contact.”  Most grown men feel no inclination to engage in horseplay  with  young boys.  The kinds who will,  and will have ‘inappropriate contact’ are the  same kind  who  will take it farther if they  can get away with it.
“It’s not rape if there was no  penetration.”  Well, just  what exactly  is  it that you’re admitting to doing?  Does fellatio  count  as penetration?  And even  if you’re  found guilty of something  short of  rape, it  would  probably not be a good  idea if  you continued to be a priest.  Or  had  any job around children.
And the classic “I thought she  was 15.”  The girl in  question was 11.

The presidency, I’m sure, is  a tough job.  Trying to protect the environment, not tank  the economy, negotiating with foreign  powers who all have different interests, and so on.  But, there are some easy things, some things they can get right almost automatically: sending congratulatory letters to people on their hundredth birthday, rushing aid to disaster zones, and making a nice little eulogy and speech of condolence when somebody dies, things like that.
Well, Trump has a track record of screwing up even the small  stuff, so I was wondering how he would react to Aretha Franklin’s passing.  I figured he would just let it slip by and spend the day slamming Bannon and Omarosa, because all of Trump’s former employees are crazy, or incompetent, or dogs.
But he did worse than that.  He praised her, of course,  and said she was a wonderful woman “who worked for me on  several occasions.”
I doubt that very much.  She achieved stardom in  her young 20s, back when the Donald was merely the spoiled college student son of a racist slumlord.  He hadn’t even had his first lawsuit yet, much less his first bankruptcy.  The other point is that Aretha Franklin was not only a great singer, she was also pretty political.  She knew Martin Luther King personally, and championed several causes which Trump would have heartily disapproved of.
So, for him to say she worked for him (unless it is technically true, like maybe one time she sang at an event he had his name associated  with) is slanderous.  Maybe  he’s confusing her with Omarosa, because there can’t have been that many black  women who’ve ever worked for him.  Maybe he’s just so arrogant and delusional that he assumes everybody must have worked for him at some time.
I suspect, though, that he knew what he was saying  wasn’t true,  and  just didn’t give a shit.  Shame on him.  Shame.

We went to see Isle of Dogs tonight, but the idea was more just to go see something at the outdoor cinema, which is a very cool thing to do, both  in  the literal and metaphorical senses of the word.  The fact that  it was Isle of Dogs, a movie I’ve wanted to see ever since it came out, kind of sealed the  deal.
It’s literally cool, of course, because even after a baking hot day, it is reasonably pleasant outdoors after dark, when the great source of heat is  absent  from the sky, and the air temperature begins to devolve, and become somewhat closer to the temperature of outer space, which it fortunately never reaches, because we are still under the blanket of the atmosphere, even  if it  is invisible and we can see the stars.
It’s cool in the metaphorical sense because you can sometimes see very good movies at a greatly reduced price, and sometimes you can see bad movies too, and you don’t feel too  guilty about it, because it is a greatly reduced price.  It is a cool thing to do because it’s a thing in our neighborhood, something we can walk to, a cultural event we try to tick off at least once or twice in a summer.

Anyway, Isle of Dogs.  All four of us liked  it, which is pretty rare, because we  can never agree on which TV programs to watch, half the time the kids just walk out of the room if I’m watching something in English.
It was kind of a weird film.  Animated, but not Disney style, that’s for sure.  Much  more Japanese than I thought it was going to be.  Not just because it was set in Japan, and the people were speaking  Japanese a lot (it was in  English when  it  needed to be, which they accomplished by  the plot expedient of having all  dogs speak English), but Japanese as far as the story telling and animation style goes.
So, worth watching just  stylistically.
I’d give it a an 8 on a scale of 10.