Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

First of all, let me make it very clear:  I will  be very happy  if Donald Trump is impeached, even if  he pulls a Nixon and resigns to avoid impeachment.  Forced from office is forced from office and it should happen to far more presidents.  It’s happened a grand total of once in American history and, just judging from the presidents I’ve known in my lifetime, it should probably be the fate of about 2 out of 3.

Sure, we’ll have to deal with Pence, who thinks prayer is a viable  alternative to health insurance, but it’s the principal that’s important.  There has to be a level of quality below which a president is  not allowed to sink.  Democrats failed to impeach George W. Bush and now look what we’ve got.

I’d also like to make it clear that this has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton.   She is still garbage and no matter what dirty tricks Trump may have employed to beat her, they could be no worse than what she did to secure the nomination.

One odd, and shocking, observation is that as stupid as Donald Trump is, his son might be even stupider.

Now, I don’t know exactly what kind of legal trouble  he’s in.  If it turns out he never did get any usable dirt on Clinton from Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lady lawyer who he met, and that’s likely since Veselnitskaya says she talked to him about a (Russian) bill to ban Americans from adopting Russian children, and sanctions, then he’s in the same position as a drug dealer who gets busted and it turns out the stuff he was peddling was oregano.  His customers will be pissed off, but he’s not going to jail.

Nonetheless, it should be enough to get him on the witness stand, or at least in front of a congressional hearing, and somebody as dumb as he is is almost bound to screw up under the scrutiny.  Should be fun.

It’s stinking hot and hard to sleep, the little fan on the table is very nearly worthless and so it is hard to sleep, and that’s why I’m still up at 1 a.m., I wouldn’t mind at all if it would rain tomorrow, but I’ve got no actual indicator that it will.

Got back to routine today, a little bit, had one lesson this morning, riding the Metro there and back felt very nice having the contrast on New York (why don’t they have any ventilation – people are sweating down there – and what’s up with the loudspeakers?  I thought this little problem of clear sound had been settled, but the announcements in New York still sounded like somebody speaking from the bottom of a half full bag of potato chips) and D.C., which Sam preferred because ‘they keep it dark  in all the stations.’  My son is a bit strange, I sometimes think.

Prague Metro, by comparison, is clean, uncrowded, clear and unconfusing, efficient, and very, very affordable.

Then, I had a poetry reading tonight but all I had written was a little two liner and one half baked idea, but I  put it back in the oven and brought it out full  baked, and wrote another short one that  I was actually quite pleased with.  Short, but not graffiti short, nicely rhyming and it made a good point, i.e. with  so many people in  the world it’s a damned good thing that we don’t all have the same biorhythms, we manage to survive without all going nuts and killing each other like rats in  some perverted experiment because we are living on timeshare Earth and half the people in the world can safely ignore the other half.

Anyway, 1:15 and I’m done because this is bloody ridiculous.  Good night.

One thing that sometimes happens when you come back from traveling is that you look at your home with a tourist’s eye.  The thing that’s new in our neighborhood is an art exhibition, specifically sculpture, in our local (Invalidovna) park.

We saw two sculpture parks while traveling.  One in Des Moines, which was part of the newly revitalized downtown, and one in Indianapolis, which was featured in the book “The Fault in Our Stars,” by John Greene.  So, I got to compare it to the other two.  There is one difference, which is that the exhibit here is temporary, and I am grateful for that.

All of the parks contained some lame statuary, and in Des Moines and Indianapolis, my reaction was “Nice park, and I like the overall concept of art in the park, but I don’t really ‘get’ all of the statues.”  In Prague, I am very familiar with the park, and know for a fact that it looks much nicer without all that crap in the middle of the lawn.

It could be I  am just a philistine, an uncultured clod.  I don’t think so, but I am not the one who defines those sorts of things.  If I am, so be it, but I like statues to be statues OF something.  Not a plain slab of granite, with a few  right angle cuts, and a radiator attached to it.  Not an oversized metal birdcage, but not really a birdcage, heavier and uglier than that, just the same shape.  Not a bunch of satellite dishes standing together, which looked like what you might find in the parking lot of a defunct satellite dish company.

Same with paintings, I like them to be paintings OF something.  Same with poetry, I want there to be a point and I want it to be clear.

“But, it’s supposed to make you think,” people more cultured than I might say.  I don’t need to be made to think.  Thinking is what we do all the time.  It’s like breathing.  That’s why we need to employ meditation, so we can stop with the thinking all the time.

When I read a poem, or see a painting or a statue, of course it makes me think. When I see dog poop on the sidewalk, it makes me think.

The question is, does it make me think about the subject of the artwork, or does it make me think “Oh, for Christ’s sake, this is garbage, how did somebody actually convince somebody that this is a work of art?”

I think about it, but I don’t have an answer.

Last night’s flight wound up delayed by about 4 hours, which wasn’t really  too horrible.  I  finished a crossword puzzle, several  sudokus, and watched The Princess Bride, which was something I hadn’t planned.  I’d figured  since it was  a transatlantic flight, I’d be able to squeeze in a couple of  films I’d never seen before, taking advantage of the opportunity, but films have become like TV shows in that there are dozens of  them all  the same which I don’t  feel I  need to bother seeing as they will neither educate, inspire or  even greatly amuse me.  And usually I don’t like rewatching films, because  I know  how  it ends  so  what’s the point, but I hadn’t  seen TPB for many years, and it was very worth watching again, even though Inigo Montoya’s name is still, and will always be, Inigo Montoya.

Then they served  dinner shortly after takeoff, which kind of surprised me as it was already 2 a.m. but it was a good dinner and after that I did fall asleep, despite the turbulence.

Nonetheless, I am very tired now and plan to get to bed  shortly.  I have  made a list with my goals  for the rest of the summer, now that I’m back  from all that vacationing, all the way from losing weight to developing materials for  the next school year, and publishing at least one more  edition of poetry along  the way.

I’ll get started on that tomorrow.

sitting at JFK expecting to board in 5 minutes for our flight back to Prague at the tail end of an incredibly eventful trip, which was sometimes stressful, not least on the New York City subways, and I will breathe a big sigh of relief once the plane takes off and we are on our way and everything is decided and finalized and no catastrophes have taken place, we did lose Helena’s jacket today, left it at Bernice’s old age home and it was too late to go back, that was the main purpose of the whole trip was to see Bernice and that went very well, plus we saw an incredibly amount of things in New York City, Baltimore inner harbor, the mall and Capitol and White House in DC, the beach and a lovely small town in North Carolina, the St. Louis arch just from the road, ate at a wide variety of fast food places and had one good Chinese meal and a couple great bagel breakfasts at the deli next to Dean’s, saw where the house I grew up used to stand, which is  now torn down and it looks so small, my old High School looks much larger though, because, in fact, it is, large sections of Des Moines have been revitalized, met my nephew Don’s wife and their two kids, and now they are calling us to board so tomorrow’s blog will be from Prague.