Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I recently joined a group called writerbeat.com, which is sort of a blogger’s collective, or at least a collection of bloggers. The administrator keeps sending messages saying that the best way to get more readers is to comment on other people’s blogs.
It’s sort of like going to poetry readings. People listen politely to other people’s work and applaud, but they’re really just waiting to take the stage themselves. Some people are like that in every day conversations, too. Not so much listening because they care about what the other person is saying, just waiting for an opening, listening for some key word which will open the door to their comment.
I can’t claim that I’m entirely unlike that. I’m not selfless. I have a me-centric view of the universe.
But, I understand where the moderator’s coming from, and I am willing to play ball, but…
Damn, it gets tiresome. First of all, there are about 50 blogs listed at any given time, and there’s no way anyone can read them all, so you have to be a bit selective. Secondly, the comments threads go on forever, nobody wants to let anyone else have the last word, and it generally degenerates into a pissing contest. A better than average pissing contest, I’ll grant that. There are some bright people over there. But, third, they tend to be awfully long winded.
Someone mentioned they have a word limit (on the blogs) of 3,500 words, and I believe most of the bloggers there have taken that as a goal, rather than a limit. Come on, people. Most ideas can be expressed in less. Far, far less.
I plan to keep using the site, it’s an extra outlet for my own blog and I’m sure as I navigate my way through it I’ll find writers I have an affinity with, but maybe I’m not going to be visiting every day. Life is short.

I’m not sure about this Justin Trudeau guy. In some ways, he seems like a good progressive. I liked his diverse cabinet, but don’t know anything about them other than that they’re a diverse bunch. He’s been really good about welcoming refugees, which makes him popular around the world, but I’m sure there are people in Canada who aren’t happy about that, which makes me like him more. He does seem like a Hollywood Prime Minister. But, I seem to recall, his Dad sort of cultivated that image as well. So did JFK. In all fairness, if you’re super good looking like that, people are going to accuse you of being a Hollywood type whether you are or not, so might as well go with the flow.
On the other hand, he isn’t on the side of the good guys in the DAPL dispute, and I find it pretty hard to forgive him for that.
Now, my Canadian friends might be thinking “Hey, you’ve got some nerve criticizing our Prime Minister. I mean, look at the funny hairdo on the retarded man you Americans call Mr. President,” and they’d be right, but I’m getting to that, and it’s something that makes me like Trudeau a lot, even if he’s kind of a schmuck about the environment.
Recently, the press has noticed (because they were walking around blind for the past decade or so) that Trump has an obnoxiously aggressive way of shaking hands. Here he is with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiitQ-5_E_Y

And there are other examples. I’ve known people who shook hands like that, treating it as a test of dominance, and it irritates the hell out of me. According to people who knew him well, Lyndon Johnson used to be like that. It is not a good trait.
Well, long story short, Trudeau was ready for him, met the challenge head on, and out handshook the old son of a bitch.

Here’s the moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_TlMUb4kvA

I don’t know if he broke Trump’s confidence, or taught him a lesson, but he did put him on notice: don’t fuck with Canada.
The rest of the world’s leaders could learn a lot from Justin Trudeau.

One of the great results of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy was that he dispelled the myth of America being a right wing country. I was overjoyed to join the ranks of the Berners, and to realize how many of them there were, how many people felt like me, how many took positions that I’d started to think of as my own, kind of crazy positions.
We didn’t win, but we are awakened, we are aroused, and we are more or less united. We’ll be back, and back, and back until we do win.
Now, with Trump’s Muslim Ban and all of the protests against it, I am starting to realize that another idea I had considered to be a micro-minority position, one which I didn’t even talk about much, has millions and millions of adherents. That position is simply this: We are one world, and there should be no borders.
Of course, I know it’s not going to happen overnight and I can understand (although I disagree) the position of those who say keep ’em out. Some are racist assholes, sure, some have real concerns. Any country that flings its doors open wide, that says ‘Come on in!’ is going to have some serious overburdening of their social system, i.e. schools and hospitals and stuff like that. Short term, at least. Others are concerned about their local culture being overshadowed. I find that a weak argument. If everybody prefers a good Doner Kebab to whatever your plaster bland, meat and potato cuisine has to offer, maybe it’s time to raise your game.
So, it’s a problem. Here’s my solution, although I’m sure it has no chance of being implemented:

The United States has military bases in over a hundred countries around the world, and a heavy concentration of them in countries which have the most refugees, because those are the countries we’ve been bombing like crazy and just generally making life intolerable in. Most of those bases, I’m sure, have running water for showers and toilets and drinking and stuff, and electricity, and kitchens, and medical facilities. All of the stuff that’s needed for a refugee center. So, there’s your plan. Convert all U.S. bases into refugee centers, have the soldiers at those bases stop going out to kill people and start defending those people who show up, empty handed. Safer for the U.S. soldiers, too, which I’m sure they’d appreciate.
Give the incoming refugees jobs, making vegetable gardens, erecting new homes, doing all the things they need to do to establish a new life, and don’t bomb them or shoot them because they are now in a refugee center, where they were never allowed to bring in any weapons in the first place.
If the bases are overrun, expand them a bit, they’re mostly surrounded by desert. Continue until problem is solved.

Had a nice sleep in, by the time I got up Helena was busily cleaning the house for the arrival of our guest. Mostly I didn’t do much in the morning except I took out the garbage, a mass of garbage, stuff we’ve needed to throw away for years, and went down to the store, and finished a poem which wound up being as far from the original concept as anything I’ve ever written. The original idea was ‘everything is metaphor’ and I envisioned that as the last line, everything else in the poem working up to it, but in the end it does not appear in the poem at all, not the phrase, not the concept, it’s just a nice, little nature poem about a rock thrown into a still lake and how it destroys the reflection but then everything snaps back to normal again and I guess the metaphor of the poem, or the allegory, is that any stable situation is just waiting for a rock, all complacency is false complacency.
Also, I’d envisioned it as a long poem and it wound up as a sonnet. That’s not a problem.
Then we went to the airport. Now, I do not travel so often that I have become completely jaded to the airport experience. Airports, to me, are still magical places, filled with people who are flying off to, or arriving from, exotic destinations, who are experiencing some major life change. The kid we were waiting for is a 17 year old Frenchman who will be with us for a week, as same stayed with his family in Bourdeaux last year.
He seems like a good kid, although he was fairly unimpressed with my French. Never said as much, but kept reverting to English. Not too surprising, really. My French is not that fluent.

I enjoy movies about clashes of cultures, and last night we watched a cute film, Sam’s recommendation, called The Hundred Foot Journey, which was a food movie, and I wouldn’t have thought it something that would interest him at all, so I suspect maybe some girl at school recommended it to him, because that’s why boys do most things.
It was the story of an Indian family who moved to England after the mother died, but England didn’t really work for them and so they moved to France and then their brakes failed and they nearly crashed and wound up in this spot in the French countryside and that was the establishing scene, you knew they would stay in that village and you knew that the hero would wind up with the pretty girl who helped tow their car to a service station, it was all very predictable, but that was also the lovely scenery part.
Then the father found the perfect spot for their restaurant but it was a dump which led to a fix-it-up montage scene with Indian music, but the problem was that across the road was the big, snobby restaurant, whose owner took an instant dislike to them and this led to a restaurant war which was the comedy part of the film.
But, the son, which surprises nobody because it was clearly announce in the very first scene of the movie, turns out to be a total genius of a chef and that leads to the rags and riches part of the story where he moves to Paris and becomes an acclaimed chef, and a bit of an arrogant jerk, but he misses the little village and especially the girl, and comes back and there is peace between the two restaurants and everybody lives happily ever after.
It’s like Ratatouille, but with humans. Cute, but I’d never say it was a must see.
Then, tonight, Helena wanted to watch My Big, Fat Greek Wedding II, which I found to be totally unwatchable. Some movies just should not have sequels, and that was one.