Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I guess we’ll hit daylight  savings time here in the Czech Republic in a couple of  weeks, but  apparently it was this weekend in the states because plenty  of  people are talking about it  on my Facebook page.  More than are talking about Yemen, or Global Warming, or the oppression of  women in Saudi Arabia, for instance.
On the one hand,  I  think the whole concept of Daylight Savings Time is pretty  silly.  On the  other  hand,  I think the objections  to  it  are pretty silly as well.
It’s silly because it doesn’t  actually change anything.  The hours of  sunlight are the hours of sunlight, and the vast majority of  people  in the 21st century do not work in fields where it makes any difference.  Even those who do can  always get up earlier, or later, regardless of what  it says on  the clock.  We don’t need social approval for that, we  don’t need  to take a vote, we don’t need to arbitrarily change  the way we tell  time.
But I’ve seen memes  saying that suicides, crime and traffic accidents increase after the  switch, and I’m almost sure that’s bullshit.  I’ve seen people say they feel sluggish  the  day after the change, and take weeks to adjust.
Get real.  A few people are always late  to work the next Monday, some because they just weren’t paying attention and some, I suppose, because they are pretending that they weren’t paying attention, and everybody  has a laugh over it and it’s done.  It’s a topic of conversation for one day, or 5 minutes out of one  day, at least, in the same way that Groundhog Day or Talk Like a Pirate Day are.  People are desperate for topics of conversation that won’t piss people off.
In reality,  it does  nothing at all to affect our circadian rhythms, certainly less than an intercontinental flight.  So,  say you’re in favor of banning it if you will.  But,  don’t tell me it takes you a week to adjust.  I don’t believe that any more than I believe you’re allergic to gluten.

I was a bit cynical about things this morning as I scrolled through  Facebook and I came across a comment, it was not an evil  comment, in fact it was pure and sweet in intent and I’m sure that all  else who saw it either gave it a like or scrolled on  by, it was so innocuous, but in my cynical  mood it was an irritant to my literalist tendencies, and I responded.

The comment was that human beings  had a long  way  to go before we could be as good as dogs because dogs love unconditionally and dogs are much better at living in the present than people are.

Now, both of those are  true statements and I’ve certainly got  nothing against unconditional love.  It’s the ‘living in the present’ part that got me.  This is like a new age platitude that we’re all just expected to agree with, but it’s off the mark in so many ways.  People are not dogs.  There are several reasons we don’t live (at least not exclusively) in the present.  First, the present is a  seriously  small bit of time.  If you’re in it, you’re simultaneously coming into  it and going out of it, that’s how tiny it  is.  If time could be measured in space, the present  would be less than a single step, no more than a single beat of the heart.  Also, though, more importantly and quite unlike dogs, we have a very keen awareness of the past and the future.  Not just the near past, for we know the history of mankind even  back to ages when we weren’t entirely human, back before that, we know  of  dinosaurs and volcanoes and the formation of the universe.  We can see forward in time as well, we are constantly imagining  scenarios and considering strategies to bring them into being or to avoid them entirely.

Now, all of that is true, too.  But, I should have let it  slide.  She loves dogs.  That’s a good thing.

We’ve got a house full so let me just crank out this blog as quickety split as can be so my mother-in-law can sleep on the couch, along with the nephews and niece.  Haven’t had too much time to stare at Facebook and pretend I’m keeping up with the news and finding something to blog about, because as soon as I got home from my class I was left baby sitting (took them out for pizza, that worked pretty well), but I am glad to see Martin Shkreli sentenced to 7 years.  Of course, it was for some kind of financial fraud and not just for being a complete wretch of a human being, but 7 years is 7 years.  Except it probably won’t be, after appeals and wrangling and such.  Still, it is a night for celebration.

I did get a couple of very short poems written today (4),  in my series of poems based on a stolen first line.  The literary merit of the project is questionable, although it did go down well at the last couple of poetry readings, but there is another benefit (to me, not to any  of my imaginary readers).  That is, remembering the  first line (which is not always the first line) I generally google it, and read or re-read the poem, just so I  won’t totally embarrass myself and get the line wrong or attribute it to the wrong author (up until very  recently I thought The Red Wheelbarrow was e.e. cummings, not William Carlos Williams.  It sort of seemed to me like  something Cummings might have written.
So, I’m giving myself a mini-course in classical poetry as I write the book, and I guess that’s not a total waste of time.

I didn’t have my computer today because Helena took it to work today and I didn’t know how to sign into hers because I am a technotard, a computer klutz, etc…and then I dropped my  other pair of glasses on  the floor and cracked the frame and a lens popped out and then I dropped the remote on the floor and there went the TV.  Actually not completely, it was weird, at first it was stuck on a kiddie channel, a Czech kiddie channel, there was  something with talking  cars and cement mixers but it wasn’t Bob the Builder,  it took me back to the  day when the kids were little  and that’s all we watched, now they’re in double digits and they watch horrible police procedurals, the ones I call copraganda because that’s what they are, and then I manage to get a range of channels, but only about 10 or 15 of them, all in Czech but one in French, and they weren’t the ones we usually get, it was like a different TV set.  Helena didn’t get home until about 8 and then we went out to dinner at the Chinese for Women’s Day, another Hallmark guilt day but I don’t need too much of an excuse to go out for Chinese, but then we didn’t get home till about 10 and the kids wanted to play a board game, USA, it’s Trivial Pursuit, basically, but with very easy questions, in Czech, so it is  usually easy for me if I can at least understand the question and harder for the kids, partly because there are some things I take for granted as an American that they don’t know, and partly because there are things I take for granted as an adult, like Isabel got a question about Hurricane Katrina and said “How am I supposed to know about that, that’ before I was born!
So, I’m done, I’m out, I’ll try to write about something of great social and political import tomorrow, or maybe not.

Water.  We drink it, we bathe in it, we cook with it, we water our lawns with it, we go to water parks where pools are filled with it and streams of it come  pouring down giant slides.  We literally cannot live without it.  We evolved from it and mostly consist of it.
And there are places  on Earth which are about to run out of it.  South Africa is probably the most urgent, but plenty more will follow.

The problem, of course, is that a lot of the world’s water is salt water, and we can’t drink salt water.  Can’t water  crops with it, either.  Desalination would solve the problem, and we  have  the technology.  It’s expensive, some might object, but most of  that expense is because the process is energy intensive (there are other methods, but one is just to boil the water, run the steam through some pipes to cool it down, and collect the fresh water. It’s a large version of a still, or a mini-version of a rainstorm.

The thing is, energy is only artificially expensive.  People make money off coal and oil burning power plants (and nuclear is kind of expensive, too, because of all  the safety problems), but cheap energy (solar panels and windmills) is within our grasp and that would make desalination cheap and we could have fresh water anywhere in the world whenever we needed, or even wanted it.

It is  an insane, and morally outrageous, state of affairs.  People are going to die, possibly millions of people, because there is no money to be made in keeping them alive.