Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I’m typing this with my right eye and watching Angels and Demons with my left; a film which, as far as I can see, has no merit whatsoever except that they knew it would make money.
The bloody eye in the opening scene was straight out of Criminal Minds, as was the scene of the rats eating a corpse that I just watched.
Tom Hanks is not bad, if there was one actor who I had to sit through every single one of his films, he’d be a good pick. He’s been in a lot of good movies, only one of which I thought was irredeemably awful (Road to Perdition) and, then, maybe this one.
The thing I hate is how the dialogue is written so as to explain the plot details and not to be realistic dialogue. “He’s buried in the Pantheon. That’s a church, isn’t it?” “It’s the oldest Catholic Church in Rome.” Now, since this is a conversation between a guy who has written all sorts of books on Catholic arcana, a top level Vatican honcho, and an Italian super genius physicist (who I suspect is mostly there for Tom Hanks to fall in love with, because of course she’s a hot physicist, which is so realistic, but maybe I’m underestimating the film. That hasn’t happened yet.)you’d think they’d all know that little fact – hell, I even knew that, and I’ve been to Rome precisely once, more than 20 years ago.
I suppose worse films have been made, but it’s less than compelling, so I’m going to wrap this up and go to bed, assuming that Tom Hanks gets the girl and saves the Vatican from being blown up by the anti-matter bomb, probably with only seconds left on the clock.

I do not keep up with trends much, it’s just too much effort and once you’re not single there is no reason to be cool and in and giving all that up is actually a bit of a relief, so I don’t know the names of all the musical groups out there and stuff, but I’m watching VH1 at the moment because there’s nothing else on TV that doesn’t suck, 3 out of 4 of the Discovery Channels have shows about cars and my opinion about cars is the sons of bitches should be banned and we should develop a society that runs on high speed trains, electric buses for short hops, and bicycles.
So, I’ve noticed a trend in music videos lately of putting the lyrics into the video, and this is a trend I totally approve of.  Of course, it isn’t going to work with every video, if every other word is fuck there really isn’t much point, if most of the words are la la la la, it’s also kind of unnecessary but I have seen that, maybe they’re being ironic, but usually you see it when the lyrics are actually trying to say something, they have some value, they are like…poetry.
Which is to say that poetry is not dead, it’s just that spoken word poetry has a hard time competing with spoken word poetry that’s set to music, because music is an addition to the art form, it in no way reduces from it.  Art builds on art.

My latest  time waster/addiction/bad habit is a game called PixWords, which is generally very easy as you just look at the picture and if you  know what it is, you fill in the letters and you fly through the levels, four words at a time, but then you come to a picture which makes no sense and you use up all your clues and you’re just  stuck, you’re  staring at it  for two or three days, trying all the letters offered in random combinations until you enter btfsplk and, lo and behold, it’s right.
Usually, though, they play fair and once you see the right word it’s obvious and you just  feel stupid.
Today one clue was a picture that was  obviously  in a hospital, but I didn’t recognize the specific equipment.  I looked at my letters and thought “Aha – anesthetic,” which it wasn’t because  there  was no c.  But after that I just  couldn’t think of  any words without a c (antiseptic, carcinoma, endocrine) and it took me a good half hour  before I realized the word was anesthesia.
So, dial back to this  morning.  I was  watching a thing on  Discovery about how to boost your brain  power and they were showing memory tricks, like mnemonics, and demonstrating how juggling increased your sense of focus, and they showed a magician.  Now, magic is something I find very frustrating because, even though  I tend to think I’m a fairly clever guy, I almost never figure out the trick – like, I don’t even come up with any theories.  So, they tracked the hosts  eye movements and showed them on a computer and then the magician explained the trick and it was totally obvious – sort of like the PixWord words are totally obvious, once they’ve been filled in.
I am sure that all the problems that face mankind – overpopulation, the  extinction of the honeybee, war, crime, rogue asteroids and the Yellowstone caldera – have solutions, and it’s not even that we’re not  smart enough to find them.  It’s just  that we  haven’t solved  them yet and, once we do, the solutions will seem completely obvious and we’ll wonder how we could have been  so stupid.  And we’ll move on to the next level.

On the plus side, no sting
on the down side, no honey
and whoever makes them
will make lots of money
they’ll rent out the robots
charge farmers huge fees
We’ll be better off
if we just keep the bees

In news of the ugly, scientists have invented an artificial bee.  It’s a bee sized drone, a little , metal stick, looks like something you’d plug into a USB port, and  it can pollinate flowers.

Fantastic, eh?  Doesn’t even sting.  Doesn’t make honey, though, or even beautiful sculptures of wax.  Just pollinates flowers and flies  around looking ugly.
On the up side, if honeybees do go extinct, which I’m imagining the manufacturers of this product have got to be rooting for, it  will not be the end of the human race.  The artificial honeybees will be available, for a price.  Ain’t that great?

Of course, it would be easier to ban all pesticides with glyphosate in them and save the honeybees, and better for the environment, and more aesthetically pleasing, and better for the overall economy of the planet, if by economy we mean the system by which we measure society’s collective wealth, and by wealth we mean the means to produce the things we need, such as food, in great abundance, and not just some conniving fuckers making a lot of money by exploiting a problem which they have helped to create, because I may be a loopy conspiracy theorist but I see the long hand of Monsanto behind this.  Or somebody very like them.

Tonight was my regular poetry reading, but first I had to accompany Isabel and her friend to their street dance lesson.  I should have taken an umbrella.  It was drizzling when I left the house, coming down pretty steady when I met the girls, and pouring down after we got off the bus to walk up the hill to the school where they have their class.
Still, I left them there for Helena to pick up and went.  When I got to Andel, I was still a little early  but  very aware of the fact that I hadn’t had any dinner, so I stopped at McDonald’s (yeah, I’m one of those low-class types that actually  likes their food), and a couple of gypsy kids tried to con me/beg money, I don’t know what they were trying to do (‘Hey, that was my order!,’ the  smaller one said)
I  was still only about 5 minutes late, which normally is still early, but tonight  it started right on time and the featured speaker was in full swing.  He was good.  A little rap, a little spoken word, with a definite them running through it: becoming.  What am I becoming, when will I become it.
The interesting thing was that almost everybody was new.  Not completely new, there were a few who’d been there last month, a couple who’d been there once or twice before, but I walked in and realized I was pretty  much in a room of strangers.

It’s cool, Alchemy goes through these phases, where there’s a total change of people.  It’s good.  New blood.  I liked the  guy  who did the ten  word poems, with illustrations.  That was creative.  There were a couple of humorous, but mostly scatological, stories.
No women, though.  Oh, plenty  of women  in  attendance, but not one took the stage.  I don’t know what can be done about  that.