Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I just saw an ad today for an airline, I believe it was China Air but it doesn’t really matter, saying “We make flying exciting again” and I thought “Who wants flying to be exciting?” When I get onto a plane, I want it to feel like a long and tedious bus ride, with a meal. If I want excitement, I’ll bring a book.

There is a rumor going around that the Chinese have perfected an “EM” drive, and I’m guessing that stands for electro-magnetic, although I’m not sure. It has something to do with shooting particles around a tube which is narrow at one end than the other, but you’re going to have to look elsewhere for a more technical explanation.

I’m a bit skeptical about the story for a couple of reasons.
1. It sounds too good to be true. This would cut travel time to Mars down by more than half, and start to make even interstellar travel sound possible. I know some in the West are worried, because it’s the Chinese, but I say bring it on. White people have dominated the planet for the last 4 or 5,000 years or so, and mucked it up properly. Somebody else’s turn.
2. It seems I’ve heard this rumor before. In fact, that would explain why it’s called the Tiangong II and not just Tiangong, but if Tiangong (senior) had accomplished this successfully, it would have been front page news.

So, as with all things of modern provenance, we will have to wait and see. Good luck to us all.

This little video made my day: https://www.facebook.com/LikeTheLedge/videos/1411552732194971/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED

and if that doesn’t come up in blue, you can curse me for a technotard, it’s true, but I’m doing this on Chrome because I can’t do it on Firefox at all any more and yet don’t know how to do some basic, basic things on Chrome like add a link or a picture, but in the time it takes to shake your head and mutter, you can copy and past it into your header line and get the same result.

It’s a very cool robot doing very impressive things, like walking upstairs, putting a glass in the dish washer and a soda can in the trash (it’s cool but I don’t know if that’s just very specific programming, or if the robot knows the difference between a glass and a can) bending it’s knees to walk under a table, showing some spiffy dance moves and using it’s head (literally) to regain its balance.
The amazing thing to me is that we saw, not so long ago, within the last year if I remember right, another robot video from the same company, you remember the one, where the guy kept knocking the poor robot over and their were all sorts of overdubbed you tube videos having the robot saying things like “Fuck off, mate” because that’s always hysterical. I was impressed with that video, but this new one puts it to shame, takes it to a new level entirely.

So what, you might ask, do robots have to do with global warming? Both are advancing far more quickly than we ever would have thought. But robots, if this latest video is any indication, are evolving even faster, and the rate of increase is increasing. So, it’s a race, and the robots are going to win it.
This means one of two things. Of course, as robots become more sophisticated, so do computers, and maybe a robot will be invented that can single-handedly repair the environment, and make revolutionary changes to the economy as well.
Or else, when we all die because we’ve changed the atmosphere into something unbreatheable, robots will be ready to take over.

This is not a pro-Russian blog or an anti-Russian blog. This is not a pro-Assad blog or an anti-Assad blog. I do feel sympathy for any innocent civilians still in Aleppo, and hope the atrocities have been greatly overstated, but I don’t know about that.
This blog is not even to condemn Mevlut Mert Altintas for shooting the Russian Ambassador to Turkey in the back, several times, at close range. He deserves condemnation, to be sure, but I’m confident he will hear it from many quarters, and I want to do more than just add to the chorus. I may just be a cog in the great machine of civilization, perhaps even a trifling, minor cog, but I don’t want to be a redundant cog. Besides, he’s dead.
This blog is just to comment on (and I’m not even necessarily totally condemning it – free speech is an absolute)the sudden spate of humorous memes centered around Mr. Altintas as he was waving his gun around, terrifying all who were present, and giving his angry little speech about Aleppo. I saw one with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in a famous pose from “Pulp Fiction” and another comparing it to Saturday Night Fever. Strikes me as a bit too soon, especially since the video of Karlov’s assassination is basically a Facebook Snuff Flick.
The thing I can’t figure out, and there must be some kind of formula, is when is it possible to make jokes and when not – how soon is too soon. And I’ve got a theory, which is probably almost as offensive as the memes themselves: it’s the suit.
Seriously, people don’t even wear suits to the office any more, half the time. He bears no resemblance to the other terrorists you’ve seen, even in the movies. The only person who wears a suit while killing people is James Bond, and he is portrayed as a good guy. Go figure.

Of course, it’s hard to categorize, because every day in our complex, world spanning society contains so much good, and so much bad. Somewhere, a baby is being born. Somewhere, some guy in his garage just invented something that will make all of our lives better. Somewhere,people are dancing.
But, there were three incidences of ‘terrorism’ today. I hate that word. There was nothing similar about the attacks at all, and yet that’s how this day will probably be remembered. The day when there were all of those terrorist attacks.
The first was in Zurich, Switzerland, when a lone gunmen came into a Mosque and started shooting people. Three men were injured, a couple of them pretty seriously. I don’t know if they’ve made an arrest yet, but this sounds like your typical white supremacist bullshit.
Then, the shooting of the Russian ambassador to Turkey. This was maybe the most disturbing, just because there was good film of it. Good film of a man at the point of death. Snuff flicks are now standard on the news. It was also the most clear cut of the three. You know the assassins politics because he stood there and shouted about them until police came and gunned him down.
Then, by far the worst in terms of body count, the attack on the Christmas market in Berlin. Just like that incident in France a few months ago, some cretin with a big rig drove into a crowd and killed a whole bunch of people.
What can be done? Well, in the case of the market, maybe events like that should have traffic inhibitors at either end. In the case of the ambassadors’s shooting at the art gallery, ambassador’s should learn not to let people stand behind them.
But, we shouldn’t have to think about that, even, and normally we don’t. But Today was a bad day.

Sunday night,end of the weekend,not much done but progress on one front,at least, we’ve started putting together my newest book, “The Meaning of Life in Easy English” and the process (well, of course the process is for me to hand it to Helena and say “Here, get this online” which can lead to some resistance. Anyway, the process is she takes one of my previous books, in this case “Uncle Willie’s Very Silly Animal Poems,” which is similar in that it’s populated exclusively by very short poems, accompanied by very childlike drawings.
So, we’ve got a book production machine going on. I have often thought that a poet is basically a poetry producing machine,and every writer is essentially a sentence producing machine. We have the raw materials, which are the words and phrases that have been passed down to us from generation to generation, changing through time, polished like the pebbles in the churning stream. We have the assembly of the materials, and the beginning of the production line, putting the words into sentences, trying to attach them to a specific thought, or maybe not so quickly, just trying to get them to sound good, or to rhyme, or to say anything at all.
Only then comes putting it all into a package and sending it off to market.
I’ve watched a lot of Food Factory, and it’s always the same routine there, too.