Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Most languages – but not English – have two different words which mean ‘to know:’  connaitre and savoir, conocer and saber, znát and vědět.  The first one, in each case, is to know a person, or maybe a place or thing, but to be familiar with.  The second one is to know as in a fact.
I may know that person x loves cats, chocolate, and detective novels but does that mean I know that person?  Not really, especially if I only know them through facebook and wouldn’t recognize them if we met on the street.

By my calculation, there are four kinds of people among our  acquaintances.  Those you know in real life but not on facebook, those you know on facebook but not in real life, those you knew first in real life and then on facebook, and those you knew first on facebook and then in real life.  I don’t actually have anybody in the last category, but it could happen.  A few facebook friends I’ve met once or twice in real life, and one I’ve talked to on the phone, but there’s nobody I’ve actually ever sat down and had a cup of coffee with.

But, for the purpose of tonight’s blog, I want to talk about group  #2.  That’s an interesting group.  There’s a girl I knew when she was in Prague, she was a great singer and a lot of fun at karaoke, never condescending to people like me who enjoy karaoke without actually having any musical talent.  But, before facebook, and before she moved away, I had no idea she was into extreme sports (not adrenaline sports, I mean she does Iron Man competitions) and is something of a math genius.  Another guy I knew as a creative and talented type, quite easy to talk to, but until facebook I had no idea how much he was into cross dressing.  There was a friend from my youth, i.e. just post High School, who I thought of as a fun party type who liked music, marijuana and motorcycles.  Now I know he also likes guns and Donald Trump.  Part of that may be our age, but I think it’s just a side of him I didn’t know.  There was the guy I knew as a rather clever poet, and had no idea he was a computer wizard.  Actually, I don’t know enough about computers to know that he’s a wizard, but I know he travels around the world as a rep for his seemingly innovative computer company, giving speeches, which is impressive.
Do I know these people better than before?  Not really.  Haven’t seen any of them for quite a while.  But  I know a lot more ABOUT them, I’ve got a more complete picture of their personalities.  It’s somewhere in the gray area between conocer and saber.
It isn’t exactly the same as real life, but I’m happy for it.  It will give us more to talk about when we meet again.

First, I’ll comment  on the politics of  the day.  It’s not surprising that the FBI is letting Hillary Clinton get away with having a server in her home and disappearing  30,000 e-mails after they’d asked to look at them.  Apparently, whatever Bill Clinton said to Loretta Lynch during their ‘accidental’ meeting was  enough.  It doesn’t mean  she’s innocent, any more than  that  swimmer from Stanford is innocent of raping that girl behind the dumpster.  Some people just get away with anything, that’s all.

We had a nice day today.  We went to a museum with the kids and a friend of Isabel’s.  The exhibit was ‘retro stuff.’   Clothes, toys, bric a brac, mostly from the 40s and 50s, the oldest item was a penny farthing bicycle.  I found it kind of boring, but the kids enjoyed it, which  is what counts, and I think Helena liked  it, too.

Then, we dropped Isabel and her  friend  off  at the cinema, because we had  precisely two  free tickets and Sam didn’t mind.  In fact, he pointed  out that it was a bit weird since we saw the movie on  TV and it was crap (Johnny Depp’s Alice in Wonderland), but it  was in 3-D and the cinema experience and all  that.
Now, Zlaty Smichov is, in most respects, a very ordinary mall.  But one, little used exit leads out to a wooden  slat bridge over a busy street and directly into a park, which not many people go to.  We sat there on a hillside and had a good view (the roof of the mall, interestingly, has a lot of grass on the top, and some solar panels) of the city across the river.  A panoramic view.  Easy to spot Žižkov Tower, of course,  and we thought  we had Naměsti Miru spotted, but  it was once I figured  out the outline of Appolinařska hospital that  the whole pattern fell into place.

We walked through that park for a while (they don’t actually have a zoo but there were a few exotic birds in a big cage and a couple of kangaroos), then  we walked down to the river and we were at Children’s Island, where we used to love taking the  kids when they were little, but they  closed it for reconstruction a few years ago and, from the look of things, they’ve got no intention of reconstructing  anything.  It’s just locked up and overgrown  with  weeds.  Lots of fond memories, though.

No real conclusions. That’s my blog for tonight.

Now, I’m pretty  sure I’ve touched  on this subject before, since I’ve been writing  this blog for about 4 years  now, but one other  thing I’ve noticed  is  that  you  almost can’t write the same  thing twice, not  exactly, there’s always a slightly different idea that creeps  in  somewhere.

It has  to do with the old “The patience to accept the things  we  can’t change, the courage  to change the  things we can’t accept, and the wisdom to know the  difference” line which, up until I attended a few AA meetings, I just assumed to  be a meaningless platitude, but it’s not.  You can’t change the past, you can’t change the weather, and up until recently you couldn’t change your gender.  So,even what you can and can’t  change is changing (and there’s one of those different ideas that creeps in during the writing).

But I want to focus tonight’s blog on what we can’t accept and I think the top of that  list  should be things which threaten the existence of life on Earth.  Those are things we really, really should not accept and once you’ve accepted that they’re unacceptable, you start seeing ways to change them.

The extinction of the honey bees.  Totally unacceptable.  Of course, it could be easily changed by totally banning any  herbicides and pesticides that  honeybees don’t like, planting a lot more of the crop  they like a lot, setting  up safe  zones, and keeping a DNA bank just for a worst case scenario.

Asteroid strike, like the one that killed the  dinosaurs.  This could be made a lot less likely with a good early warning system.  I understand some  scientists are working on that, but if NASA had the budget of the military, instead of almost nothing, we could  have space  telescopes surrounding  the Earth pointing out in every direction  and scanning  every inch of sky, we could have outposts on Mars and various moons of Jupiter and Saturn, contingency plans  for what to do when we do spot  one, and we could  have adequate  underground shelters in all major  cities.

Global Warming or, since anti-science voters don’t quite seem to get that term, “pollution.”  We’re putting too much shit  in the air and the water and it could kill  us all, and most of our animal friends,  too.  Cockroaches would probably make it.  We need to switch hard to solar energy, we need to plant about a  gazillion more trees, we need to end  fracking, offshore  drilling and all of that stuff.

But, we’re not  doing it, and I can’t understand that.  These are things  we can’t accept, so we  should have the courage to change them.

After Isabel finished her tennis lesson, we were eating  some cherries right off the tree there, and  she pointed  out that this is the season of red fruit; cherries, strawberries and red currents are all ripe right about now.  Perhaps that is why June, in Czech, is Červen, which means red.
It was her last tennis  lesson for the season, and today was the last day  of school.  Sam’s report card was better than last year, but still not great.  I was pleased that he got a 1 in  IT, but he got a 2 in English, which is pure laziness.  It was mostly a mix of twos and threes, with just two ones and one four (physics).  Isabel had two twos and the rest ones, so  I’m pretty  happy about that.

Tonight, we went to an outdoor film.  It’s walking  distance, by the park, and tickets are normally much  cheaper than at normal  cinemas, so it’s a great deal.  Tonight it was free, for some reason.

It was a French film, targeted at children but not a cartoon, about a boy in  a small village and his rather huge dog, Belle.  It was called Belle and Sebastian (2).  Basically, it was Lassie, but in Switzerland, in 1945.  Not a great film, by any  stretch of the  imagination, but some  real pretty  scenery.

Let me begin by saying that I like, and admire Robert Reich.  He’s a brilliant economist, a great communicator, and seems to be a nice guy.

Robert Reich

But today he wrote this:

I don’t get how Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump can be deadlocked (according to a new national poll of registered voters released this morning), with 42 percent supporting her and 40 percent backing him.

This frankly worries me. Trump hasn’t put up a single television ad, his campaign is in shambles, he has almost no field staff, he’s spent almost zilch and his campaign bank is nearly empty, and he’s been getting nothing but horrible press. Hillary Clinton has been blanketing swing states with ads, her campaign is being run like clockwork and it’s huge, and she’s pulling in and spending money like mad.

More to the point, Trump is a bigoted petulant egomaniac with the temperament of a hyena. She’s experienced, competent, and intelligent.

What’s going on?

I think Robert Reich is being a bit disingenuous.  What’s going in is that people really hate Hillary Clinton.

She started this campaign, over a year ago now, with 100% name recognition.  She had lots of big money donors on her side, all the professional politicians, and the media, because they love money, too.  She’s been spending money on advertising right along, and I doubt if she’s gained a single convert.  Certainly fewer than she’s lost.

She could blanket the airwaves 24/7 with her ads, it would not make a difference.  The only arguments she can give for voting for her are bad ones.  “Anybody who criticizes me just hates women.” “My lies aren’t really that bad.”  “If you don’t vote for me, you’ll get Donald Trump.”

These arguments aren’t convincing anybody.  That’s what’s going on.