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It’s not as short and sharp a shock for me as it is for the kids, not nearly as traumatic and life defining, but I, too, am easing into the school year.  Today I had a new class, this is Isabel’s best friend and a couple of other kids from her school, and one of the mother’s will give Helena Spanish lessons in return, and that’s cool.
The lesson got off to a rocky start, as their buzzer doesn’t work and I couldn’t remember the pin number for my new phone, so I stood out in front of their building for 20 minutes, baking in the sun and sweating, until the kids came down, probably wondering why I was so late.

I was surprised at their level of English, and their  patience  at sitting through a full hour, both pretty impressive for a 9 and a 10 year old (and next week the 9 year olds little sister will join  us, she’s 8.)  We read Danny and the Dinosaur, and they were both eager to read, so it was a piece of cake.
Actually, it was a literal piece of cake as her mother brought one out after the lesson.
Tomorrow, I’ll start again at Gymnasium Bratři Čapku, and I’m looking forward to that, although it never goes as smoothly.  The older people get, the more complex their personalities.  It’s a whole different set of problems.  And I don’t really have a plan.  Hopefully I’ll wake up with one in the morning.
And, with that, good night.

I have often written of my hatred for cop shows; how they all follow the same formula, and have the  same characters, either the wacky computer person or the wacky forensics person, and at least one  ‘tough’ cop who just hates crime so much he has  no qualms at all about beating the shit out of a suspect, totally lying to them or coercing confessions, and a couple of hot lady cops.
Every now and again, though, I’ll start watching one, if I’ve never seen it before, and follow it for a few weeks telling myself ‘this one is a bit  different’ but they always  disappoint me.
The one I’m following now has gone from “Oh, this doesn’t look so bad” to “OMG, this is the biggest piece of shit on television, I’m embarrassed to be watching this” in about  two weeks.

Body of Proof takes place in the Medical Examiner’s office, so damned near everybody’s a wacky  forensics expert, except for  the detectives, who have no particular objection to beating the shit out of a suspect and lying to them about their rights because they just hate crime soooo much.

The boss of the office is  Jeri Ryan, (You know, Seven of Nine,  who is still looking good even though she hasn’t been  seen in much since….well, since she was Seven of Nine.) and the main character is pretty  hot, too, and they’ve got a hate on because one of them is sleeping with the other’s ex.  Anyway, they’ve got the hot lady cop  angle  covered.

Great moments in television

But it’s been getting ridiculously sensational lately, what  with  a bio-terrorist spreading  terror city-wide and  a serial killer who takes his  victims brains out with  a hook,through the  nose, after they are dead, and the killing off of a couple main  characters (I liked one, didn’t care  much for the other), so I’m tempted to give it up.

I was watching  today, though, and I realized something.  Almost none of the people on the show can act worth a damn.  Jeri Ryan is the best of them, and that just means she can read her lines without  actually putting the inflection on the wrong word  in the sentence, you know, the way you would in rehearsal when you’re reading the lines and don’t really know the story  yet.
The two lab guys are not bad, my guess is they were doing stand-up somewhere when they were picked  for the  cast, to play ‘comically fat black guy with attitude’ and ‘nerdy and trying too hard guy,’ which they do adequately, I suppose.
The tough detective tag team, though, are about as intimidating as a bag of marshmallows, and the main character is even  worse.  They keep trying to characterize her as this hard as nails, impossible to deal with woman, who makes new hires cry with her demands for perfection, but she doesn’t play the part.  Like, not at all.
She sashays around the set acting like a normal person in  a normal office setting and you don’t feel anything  driven  or angsty or obsessive at all.  In fact, she seems to get along well with her co-workers.
It’s as if the show’s writers said “Don’t worry about the acting.  We’ll write the  dialog and the viewers will know what they’re supposed to think.”
I may give it a few more episodes because, you know, Jeri Ryan, but it is a seriously godawful piece of crap.

The Alchemy series of poetry readings recommenced tonight  after a summer recess, so I had a wealth of material to present.  I picked my favorite six poems from all I’d written over the summer and went.

It wound up being  a great evening.  The featured reader had some good lines, there was a good crowd, Anna Marie was back from England and a couple of her friends from there were visiting, quite a few Brit poets tonight actually, Ken Nash  led off the open  mike (yes, that’s how I spell it, because I’m a rebel, yeah) with a series of  fake  reviews of fictional authors which was very  funny, there were lots of new readers, David Stringbreaker totally surprised me with some throat chanting, it sounded like a didgereedoo (not sure  how to spell that), but it was just voice, he  told me  afterward that it  was also  meditative  and a good  physical  workout, I think I’ll  just take his  word for it, and one of the new Brits read an  elegy for his grandmother (if I understood him right) that nearly had me in tears.

My stuff was appreciated O.K., I think, I thought my last poem  was going to be more of a blockbuster than it was, but I suspect the  audience  is a  better judge than  I as to its worth.

On the way home I  walked to Malostranska Metro and then figured what the heck, I’ll walk across the  bridge and catch the Metro at Narodni Třida, it’s yellow line so no need to change, and  then I wrote this poem:

The birds perform a looping flight

above the  Rudolfinum

If you’ve walked across Most Legií at night

I’m sure you must have seen ’em

They drift, pure white, in that glowing light

a sweet, angelic vision

but,

I know they’re just fucking pigeons

and I thought  that was a pretty good end to the evening.

I had my first direct experience  with  Pokemon Go today.  It  was fun, for a while.

Our original plan was to go for a family bike ride this afternoon but it was already after 3 and we could see that wasn’t going to happen, so when Isabel said she wanted to go out and hunt Pokemon’s, I  said I’d go with her.  I was kind of surprised, I hadn’t  realized she played.

As we walked along, I was surprised at how much stuff she was finding – Pokemons, Pokeballs, and Pokemon eggs, and she explained a lot more about  the  game to me, but I only half followed.  I was enjoying the concept, it’s sort of like a treasure hunt, and it showed me some cool stuff I haven’t seen, right in my own neighborhood.

She got  4 Pokemons, a whole bunch of balls, and a couple of eggs and then  it started to rain so we went home.  I thought that  was a pretty good  haul, but Sam is almost 10 levels higher and has more than a hundred Pokemons more collected, and I didn’t know he  was playing, either.  It’s O.K., it’s not Grand Theft Auto.

So, Isabel and I went out again a couple of hours later.  This time she found about 30 of them, and it was hard to  actually go anywhere because she kept stopping  every two seconds.  I’m actually kind of over the game already.

We saw a couple of boys, probably about Sam’s age, who seemed to be playing as well and I thought “Ah, the game has possibilities for social encounters” and then I immediately thought “Yes, it has possibilities for really inappropriate social encounters, too.”

Isabel offered to put it on  my phone, but I think I’ll  pass.

O.K., here’s the situation: Yesterday the FBI  released severely redacted  transcripts of some interviews they had with Hillary Clinton back in July.  The interviews were  all about the classified e-mails sent  from her personal  server.  So, this was not about the Clinton  foundation, or about vote rigging, those are other  investigations. Nor was it about the deaths of John Ashe, Seth Rich, and Shawn Lucas.  She’ll probably  just get  away with  those.

But, as  far as the classified material goes, well, wow.  She claimed she  didn’t know (C) stood for classified,  said she thought it  had something to do with alphabetical order.  The argument, as seen in this article, seems to be over whether she’s dishonest, or merely stupid.

I hate  this argument.  We always argue that the caught party  must be  either really dumb or really dishonest, and we can’t win, because they will just play  dumb long enough  to stay out  of jail, and then when we say, “Geez, you’re too dumb to be in office,then,” they will say “but I haven’t been convicted  of anything illegal”and refuse to drop  out of the race.  Nixon used to pull that  shit all the time.
Well, I’m not buying it.  That whole dumb or dishonest thing is a distraction, a time buying ploy.  We know damn well that  Hillary’s not  stupid.  Class valedictorian, all that,  that’s genuine.  That’s not our objection to her.

She IS, and the FBI must know this, having conducted  these  interviews, as crooked as the  day is long, as corrupt as rotten meat, and  every bit as self-serving as her not-so-esteemed opponent.

She knew damned well those documents were classified.  Because she is not stupid.