Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Well, first off, I’m pissed off because it took so long to publish the first draft of tonight’s blog that I started fiddling around and somehow deleted the whole thing and I’m not sure if it’s because I’m at the cottage and the speed is slow, or maybe it’s Christmas and traffic is high, which I doubt, because  of all days I suspect this is the one when people are spending the LEAST time online, or maybe it’s because Trump killed net neutrality and the forces that control the internet, and the world, are just fucking with me because they can.  Call me paranoid, but that strikes me as the most logical of the three.

We are at the cottage, which means that Christmas is now officially underway.  All presents are bought and wrapped, there’s nothing more to do except the cooking, and I’m not likely to be asked to have anything to do with that.  So, the part of Christmas I really dislike is basically over and I  can coast.  Of course, everyone will probably be watching some bad Christmas movies tomorrow, and I hate that aspect of the holidays as well, but I can ignore that.
Outside of a dinner of carp and potato salad, and tomorrow night’s opening of the presents, I can use this 3 day, 3 night getaway to get some reading done, get some writing done, sleep a lot, and maybe go for  some long walks but… it’s not exactly a winter wonderland outside.  Nobody says “I’m dreaming of an extremely viscous, gray Christmas,” but that’s what this is shaping up to be.  Mud all around, and a few scraggly little patches of snow, looking forlorn after all the other snow has gone.

That’s global warming for you, I guess.

I was just watching The Witches of Eastwick, dubbed into Czech.  I’d seen it in the cinema when it first came out, so remembered what it was about and that I’d quite liked it, so it wasn’t a problem.
Jack Nicholson really is an amazing actor.  Even without understanding probably more than 50% of the dialogue, it was not at all  difficult to follow the story, and as a physical comic he’s on the same level as Jerry Lewis or Jim Carrey.  The bit where the girls (Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Cher) are doing voodoo on him had me rolling on the floor, damn near.

Something else that strikes me as funny every time I see it is that there is now a Trump figure in Disneyland’s ‘Hall of Presidents.’  The thing is, while Trump may look bad compared to Obama, people who hated Obama don’t see it that way.  But, when you put Trump up among ALL the presidents, seeing him on a stage with Washington, and Lincoln, and even Coolidge, McKinley and Hoover, he looks ridiculously out of place.  A sad, fat robot with bad hair.  None of the same gravitas, the air of having belonged to the job, even if they all weren’t equally brilliant at it.  None of the same dignity, at all.

Sad.  (but still funny)

I must confess, I have been  surprised by the reaction to Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.  I mean, the U.S. has always supported Israel, giving them billions of dollars  in  military aid every year.  If that wasn’t enough to piss everybody  off, why would moving our embassy?

Nonetheless, it has caused an outcry.  Still, most presidents, and even most politicians, have some idea how to survive an outcry, and usually it involves keeping a low profile and waiting for the storm to pass.

So, when Nikki Haley (I am absolutely certain it was on  the advice of Trump) said to the U.N., ahead of the vote condemning the U.S. for aforesaid embassy relocation, “we are taking names,” it struck me as a completely unnecessary provocation.  She knew  darned well, the U.S. was going to lose the vote.  Very regularly, since 1948, certainly since 1967, there have been U.N. resolutions condemning Israel and the U.S. is usually the only country standing by their side.

So, 9 countries supported the U.S.,  including Israel, two  central American countries whose governments were probably installed by the CIA, and a slew of Pacific Island nations, which I would not be at all surprised to hear are economically dependent on the U.S. Navy.

138 countries did not.  So, where does that leave Nikki Haley and Donald Trump?  Right where anybody watching could have predicted.  Alone, and looking stupid.  They said they were taking names, putting everybody who didn’t tow the line on a shitlist, and 138 countries of the world said “Go ahead, you ain’t the boss of me.”

And there isn’t a damn thing Donald Trump can do about it.

Everyone is in bed, it’s quiet now, it’s blog time and my mind is  as devoid of original thought as the DNC is as devoid of a sense of shame, but here’s the two poems that keep bumping around in my head, I mean, I don’t actually have any of the words written, well, a couple of lines that sound good, maybe, but nothing that sticks together, nothing that could even be called a framework, and certainly nothing on paper.

One is the idea that some people have expressed that time is happening all at once, which would mean no pre-determination at all, and I’m big on pre-determination, because I like to think that anything can happen tomorrow, and the bit I came up with is “without time there is no music, there’s no space between the notes, there’s no space so there’s no beat, no sound to make you move your feet, to clap your hands, to leave your seat” and that’s about all I’ve got so far except I’ve thought that the end line should be ‘we’ve got time.’

The other is that the space inside our mind, although physically  small, contains myriad universes.  Not only is the Discworld and Middle Earth and Westeros all in there, but many scenes from the historical past and even conceivable futures is there, and it’s all just stored as information, like not a real thing at all, but totally real, like once you get right into it, drill down into the middle, then everything expands again, but on a different level.