Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Earlier today as I was out on my  balcony getting high, as I tend to do, I was gazing rather aimlessly at the trees.  We have three large chestnut trees right in front of us.  As we have lived in this flat for almost 15 years, I am probably as familiar with those particular trees as I have ever been with any in my life.  I have seen them bare naked  in the winter (I am speaking of the trees, but any way  you read that sentence is true), with snow on the branches, budding in the spring and solid green in the summer.  I’ve followed the seasons of their nuts forming and falling, brilliant brown treasure nuts  for  children to collect.

Anyway, I digress.  I was looking out, the air was still, it was a blank slate of a day,  and I could hear a strange noise.  At first I thought somebody was doing some kind of work, with a machine that made a rhythmic crunching noise, like a flash mob eating potato chips in unison, kind of like locusts but it wasn’t  locusts.  Couldn’t place it at first.

Then I realized it was coming from the trees, and the birds moving around in the trees.  But, the leaves wouldn’t have sounded like that a week ago.  They have turned brown and brittle and soon they will fall.  That was to be expected, eventually.   It is the  cycle.  A bit early, though.  That may be because it’s been such a hot summer.  Not only are the leaves nearing the end of their life cycle, they are also drying out  in the sun like  grizzled, old prospectors.
And the cycle continues.

I don’t have anything important to say tonight but I’ll crank out 250 words nonetheless.  It amazes me how people who write columns for magazines – never mind that the magazines are all online now, they seem to stick to the same length, which I’m guessing is at the command of their editors – they tend to be about 5,000 words long.  While I am an opinionated (the older I get, the closer that looks to ‘cantankerous’) person, there are few subjects on  which I could hold forth for 5,000 words without being hideously repetitive.  In fairness to myself as a writer, most of them wind up being repetitive as hell as well.
Just watched a Chris Crocker video, r.e. racist statues.  He sure has mellowed a lot since he burst into fame with his ‘Leave Britney Alone!’ video, he seems to be as credible a pundit as Lee Camp or Niko House.  With his strong southern accent and all cleaned up, he seems like a gay version of Trey Crowder.

Was watching another video today of a woman enumerating why Trump supporters are racists, and morons, and she was sounding quite intelligent and inspiring right up until she mentioned Hillary Clinton.  Seriously, Clinton people have got to get over it.  She was a terrible candidate, she would have made a terrible president, and the very clear message for the Democratic Party is  ‘Choose a better candidate next time.  Better yet, let the people choose the candidate.  That way, you get a candidate the people have chosen and they’ve got a better chance to win.’

That’s 260 words and I’m out.

Trump’s bombastic blast in Phoenix last night sure has people talking, but that is his style, keep everybody talking about him and he’s still in the game.  Perhaps the purpose was just to rally the base, or perhaps it was to distract from other issues the press maybe could be focusing on, like his support of Nazis, or the ongoing controversy over his Russian contacts, or the turmoil in White House staff.

All of that stuff is important, and worth howling about, but the important issue, the one that should have us all on the edges of our seats, is the  spate of collisions at sea.

Since January, four U.S. navy ships have been in collisions – three with civilian vessels and one with  the Japanese coastline.

I’m skeptical about the ‘just a coincidence theory.’  Four in seven months is just to many for that.

Could it just be incompetence?  If so, it’s a bizarre level of incompetence.  Even if their instruments didn’t show an approaching ship, wasn’t anybody at all on deck, just looking?  Nobody knew how to turn?
Which leaves the hacking theory.  Somebody had external  control  of the ships and crashed them on purpose.  I must confess, when I first heard that suggested, my first two thoughts were ‘drug dealers’ and ‘aliens,’ neither of which, on a bit of reflection, seems likely.  North Korea?  Well, they’ve got motive, I guess, in their somewhat deluded (an inevitable result of isolation) world view.  I’d be surprised that North  Korea is  the first to come up with a cutting edge attack like  that.  I think terrorist’s are unlikely, for the same reason, but you never know.
If I was forced to guess, I’d say it’s the Chinese.  That’s a guess, though, without  any evidence.

One thing for sure.  If it’s deliberate, then the world’s  balance of power has shifted.

I wonder how long this technology (which could just as easily  hack a car or an airplane) has been around.  Before September 11th, 2011, perhaps?

Now, I just came on this program in the middle, this guy was showing a chart, something about how some set of random events related to 9/11 had occurred before the first plane hit, and then you get the mellifluous and soothing voice of Morgan Freeman, saying “Could this be proof that we have a sense of precognition” or words to that effect, and I thought “Only if you totally rule out the possibility it was an inside job,” because that would totally explain the chart (if it was stock buys, canceled plane tickets, worried phone calls, or any other activities that might have happened if people had advance knowledge).
It’s a shame.  I like Morgan Freeman.  I know he’s not Michio Kaku, I know he’s just an actor narrating a science show and not necessarily a scientist himself.  Nonetheless, he is a trusted figure.  He is the Walter Cronkite  of weird science.  So, I’m very disappointed in him.
Let’s look at Occam’s Razor.  Occam’s Razor is one of those laws that isn’t actually a law at all, it’s more like a zen koan or an internet meme.  Something that sounds nice, and might even work most of the time, but has no real basis in science.  Basically, Occam’s Razor says the  simplest explanation is probably the right one.  When it supports something I disagree with, I’ll point out that it’s not a law, not like the laws of physics are laws.  When it supports something I agree with, I’m not above citing it.

So, which is the simpler explanation?  That the human species has suddenly developed a 6th sense and can predict the future?  Or, that powerful people inside the U.S. power structure knew about it in advance, and acted accordingly?
It would be pretty amazing if we did have a bit of precognition, might save us a lot of problems in future.  But, it’s more likely it was just an inside job.

I probably shouldn’t be making a joke out of  this, because it just happened and ten people are probably dead, but the Navy Ship that had  a collision today with a civilian tanker was the U.S.S. John McCain.  It just seems to me a bad idea to name a ship after somebody who did not exactly have an accident free record as a pilot.  It would be like a curse.

Then again, maybe the ship is named after his father or grandfather, in which case never mind.

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The funniest photo of the day had to be Trump standing on a balcony, looking directly at the sun.  Melania had the sense to be wearing sunglasses, and Barron had apparently been instructed not to  gaze directly at the sun, but the slack-jawed yokel in chief apparently hadn’t got that message.

It’s not just that he’s stupid, although there is  that.  It’s  that he’s seriously  uninformed.

Is it mean of me to hope that he’s damaged his  eyes?  Very well.  It’s mean of me.

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Wrote a couple of really good poems today, and I’m pleased with them.  I don’t see it as plagiarism to take a line from somewhere else, something that was used  as a line in a different context, and write something around it.  Because in one case the guy started with a really interesting premise, i.e. when you hear a voice inside your head, whose voice is  that?  It can’t be yours, because your mouth is closed, you didn’t speak.  So, I like the idea of some manifest consciousness inside yourself, but then he got all religious and I stopped there, but wrote a poem about ‘The World of Dreams’ which used that idea.  In the second case, somebody  was peddling books on Meeting the Universe, or something new-agey like that, but I liked the title and wrote a poem about that , but using the intransitive ‘meet’ as in, the point where you are at is the point where you and the universe meet, and I’m not sure that’s what the author meant at all.
They are definitely original poems, perhaps ‘inspired by’ other works, but that’s O.K.  They’re the most I’ve written for a while.