Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I do not like these ‘days.’  You know, Mother’s Day, Women’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day.  They make me feel like an insensitive human being, like a less than adequate son, husband, father, etc…because to me it feels a lot like every other day.  If not for the fact that every single person on facebook seems obligated to weigh in on it, I would fail to notice these days at all.

I do enjoy being a father, though.  It gives a bit of importance to my existence.  Oh, I suppose the teaching is important, and I’m pleased with the books I’ve written, even though  almost nobody has read them, but being a Dad actually makes me sort of irreplaceable in the long chain of generations.  So, it’s cool.

I went to a football game of Sam’s this afternoon.  Not always my favorite pastime, especially when they’re at their home field.  The problem is, they have two football fields side by side, and most of the time they play on the one without bleachers, so the handful of  parents and others who come to watch have to stand, leaning on the fence, with no shade at all, and watch the game.  On a hot day, it’s hellish.
Today, I was very relieved to see, they were playing on the field with the bleachers.  It even has half a roof, so you’re covered.  Also, it was a cool, cloud covered, intermittently raining afternoon.  Quite pleasant.  I sat and watched the distant clouds with the streaky curtains of rain hanging down in the distance.  It caught up with us on the way home, but not too bad.

Today is father’s day, but also Juneteenth, a holiday which doesn’t get the recognition it deserves.  On this day in 1865, a full two months after the end of the Civil War, Union Troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and told the slaves there they were free.  Of course, they’d been free for a while, but no white person had told them about it.
Maybe we need a few more holidays like that.  Holidays to remind us how messed up the human race truly is.

I really hope this latest Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal is enough to bring her down, because it certainly should.  To clarify, I mean the Guccifer thing, with the e-mails that prove that the Democratic National Committee, which was formerly headed by Medusa, had decided on Hillary as the nominee before the primaries even began, and had no intention whatsoever of conducting a fair election.  Not the 31,000 missing e-mails scandal.  The woman is so corrupt she’s got more than one e-mail scandal going on -at once.
One line from the e-mail I think isn’t quite getting the attention it deserves is this: ‘Use specific hits to muddy the waters around ethics, transparency and campaign finance attacks on HRC.’”

To muddy the waters.  This was her official campaign policy.  To muddy the waters around transparency.  Which is to make them not transparent.  And once transparency is gone, she can go ahead and be as unethical as she wants, and have any crooked campaign financing she likes.
This should be the point where everybody turns on her, this is the scene in Election when they found the ballots in the wastepaper basket, but I don’t seem to be hearing any recognition of it even from my Hillary friends.  It’s as if Mr. Smith went to Washington and gave that great speech and everybody just said “Yeah, whatever” and they went ahead and let the developers build the dam and flood the scout’s camp, or whatever it was.
Really, this is some anti-democratic shit.  It should not be allowed to pass.

I love both of the classes I teach on Friday, but they are as different as night and day.  The first group knows how to read – a couple of them quite well, a couple less so.  The second group hasn’t got there yet.  The first group is generally well behaved,  The second group is not.  The first group has only four children and the second group has six.  You might think that’ snot a big difference, but for kids their age, each one  added to the group doubles the mob, and lowers the collective IQ of the group significantly.  Of course, group 1 is an average of a year  or two older than group 2.

Group 1 was quite interesting today.  We were playing Pexeso (I believe the Brits call it Memory.  In the U.S. it’s Concentration, after the TV show, naturally.  There are a couple of reasons I like this game.  For one, kids are just as good as it as adults.  It does not measure knowledge, it measures short term memory and how much you’re paying attention.  I don’t have to let them win, and I don’t, but they usually do anyway.  Second, I like it because the kids like it, so it makes for a nice, easy lesson.
Today, after I’d yelled at them a few times, saying “No Cheating!” they adopted that as a catch phrase, and that doesn’t happen with any lesson.  They just kept yelling ‘No Cheating!’ at each other and laughing hysterically.  That’s wonderful.  You can’t get a reaction like that if you plan for it.  So, I played a couple more games where I knew they would cheat, and just kept reinforcing it.

The second group was trouble right off the bat.  They didn’t want to sit down, they didn’t want to shut up.  Little Jirka, who shocked me a couple of weeks when he dropped trou to show me the scars from his surgery, is now giving me evidence with every session that that was not such an innocent aberration.  In the ‘find the  color’ game, when I say they have to find dowmthing in the room or a particular color, off they run.  So, I shouted out blue and he pulled down his pants and shouted “My underwear!”  That’s the kind of class that was.

I need to order up another book on Kindle pretty darned soon, because actually looking at other people when traveling on public transport gets old very quickly.  Most of them are not that attractive, and most of them are not that interesting.  Also, when I take Isabel to her lessons, there’s an hour to wait and nothing to do.

It passed rather quickly  today, though.  I sat a while in the playground, on a bench swing, and watched the little children playing.  Picked and ate a few cherries, two different varieties from two different trees, and it’s two different words in Czech – I can never keep it straight which one is visen and which one is tresen, but the point is, to a native Czech speaker, black cherries and red cherries are not the same fruit at all.

Wrote a poem, which is not a world shaking masterpiece, just a fun, little thing on the different ways life on Earth might end and the various merits of asteroid strike v. extinction of the honeybees v. global warming v. supervolcano, stuff like that.  I thought it was mildly humorous and it wouldn’t have gotten written  if I’d had a book to read but, nonetheless, I need to get  started on reading something.
Also, it would give me something to write this blog about.

It was an uneventful day, with a couple of good points.  I was very happy that Bernie’s meeting with Mme. Voldemort happened, and Bernie is most definitely NOT dropping  out of the  race.  I also found it quite significant (although barely reported, I just heard about it through the internet) that Bernie went into the hotel through the front door, cheered by throngs of adoring fans, while Hillary went in through the back.  “Avoiding fanfare,”they called it.
I spent the morning looking at Facebook, and was inspired by a poem from someone who I sort of used to know.  When I say inspired, I mean I wrote my own version, but then I didn’t want to look like I was stealing from her, or trying to upstage her, so just printed mine elsewhere and gave her a like.  Although I did get a little bit of work done on my next book, it wasn’t much.
Then, I went to my least favorite class, the dreaded German kindergarten. It’s a bit of awkward timing on Wednesdays, because I teach there from 2 to 4 and then have to pick up Isabel at 5, and it only takes about 5 minutes from one school to the other.
Anyway, I get there and both classes were canceled.  Maybe they told me last week, I don’t know.  So, suddenly, I’m left with not 1 hour but 3 hours to kill, so nothing to do but go home.  I decided to walk, because long walks in Prague are one of my  favorite things in the world, and it’s almost all downhill.  Prague is, and has been the whole 18 years I’ve lived here, a city in transition.  Wherever you go, you pass lots of interesting construction projects.  You can walk the same way again and again, and it’s never exactly the same.
Then, when Helena got  home this evening, she suggested we go out for  Chinese.  Another one of my favorite things.  Almost anywhere you go on this wonderful planet of ours, you will find Chinese restaurants.  People talk about where they’d like to go if they had a time machine, and romanticize previous eras, but if I were living in the middle ages, or ancient Greece, or walking with Daniel Boone through the unexplored wilds of Kentucky, one thing I would sorely miss would be Chinese food.

That’s about it for me tonight.