Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Ecopolis is a program on Discovery Channel, the kind of program Discovery should do more of and less stuff about Hillbillies and alligators, and I find it interesting.  The last episode dealt with fuels, now they’re  talking about buildings.

In the section on fuels, the one solution I thought was coolest was breeding algae.  It grows in water, self-replicates like crazy, and doesn’t take up much space.

The thing I don’t like about the show is the format.  They look at four or so new technologies,  and whittle it down to a winner.  This is good for sports, or talent show type programs, and it can even work for game programs, but it’s not the right format for trying to scientifically figure out solutions for our future.

We will need new technologies, and new ideas,  on many fronts.  Let’s try everything and see what works.

Not a bad day at all.  My morning student canceled, which was bad because I enjoy that lesson, but it happens about 50% of the time.  It was O.K. because I used the time fairly productively, got a bit of work done on a longish poem I’m working on and selected a bunch to read at the Alchemy Poetry reading Monday night.

My kids in the afternoon wore me ragged, as always, but there were some very bright, and funny moments.  To start, while I was still getting stuff out of my bag, the kids in my big kids group were assessing the board.  We have the class in a schoolroom, so there’s regular classroom stuff going on.  The one girl who is a notoriously bad reader was sounding out the words.  Admittedly, in Czech, but my feeling is ‘if you can read in Czech, you can read in English.’  It doesn’t necessarily follow, because English words aren’t necessarily pronounced the same way they are spelled (in Czech, they are), but I whipped out a copy of Fox in Socks for the first lesson, and had the kids reading it.  Her energy flagged in the middle, but I was pleased.  She is reading now.

Then, I had them all sitting down on the floor and I was trying to teach a song, and my favorite, little ADD student – seriously, I taught his brother and I also teach  his little sister and they are the most hyper kids I’ve ever met in my life.  Sweet, bright, alert and fun but absolutely impossible to control, I don’t know how their parents manage – wouldn’t sit down.  I’d told him many times, and then I screamed at him.  A couple seconds later, he’s up again, and playing air guitar, which was pretty funny, and he started strutting around the room being a rock star, to my rather tuneless version of “There was an old man named Michael Finnegan…”

In the little kids’ class, the biggest boy was still showing off his cast, but he had that from last week already so he wasn’t getting as many cool points as he thought he deserved, and the smallest boy in the class said “pffft, that’s nothing” and pulled up his shirt -and pulled down his pants – to show me the bandages from his appendectomy.  He was very proud, and the little girls weren’t bothered.

I’m looking forward to the weekend.

The big controversy today was over a guy named Casey Champagne, which I’m pretty sure is not his real name.  He is a Hillary troll who sent kiddie porn to a few different Sanders’ websites and then reported them to Facebook.  Facebook took the sites down, but restored them within a few hours.  So, Facebook might be guilty of being a bit understaffed, or a little bit slow to spot a malicious cyberattack, but  they’re in the clear as far as suppression of free speech or electoral partisanship goes.

How do we know Mr. Champagne did these things?  Because he bragged about them on his own page (his profile picture  is of him with Hillary Clinton, btw, and all his Hillary troll friends were like ‘way to go, dude, awesome, lol.’

Anyway, in a spirit  of solidarity with my  fellow Berners, and a dash of fuck you to pathetic Jimmy O’Keefe wannabe Casey Champagne, I signed up for a few of those sites.  It has helped me through the day, knowing that there are so many  people who view the world  through the same window I do, and so many of them are not giving up.  But, it has a drawback.  After a couple of comments, I went back over to my hotmail, as I do periodically throughout the day.  Usually there are 9 or 10 new messages, maybe 20 or 30 if I’ve left it awhile.  I had 365 messages.  So, quite a few messages got deleted without a thorough reading.

I’ll probably hang with those sites for awhile, just commenting less, and we’ll see how it goes.

The world is  getting more crowded to be sure, we’re up to 7 billion, maybe 7 and a half billion, and we’re going to hit that 10 billion mark soon  if  we don’t wise up.
I do have some ideas for what to do about  it (#1 – look at countries with a falling  birth rate.  Do whatever they do), but that’s not tonight’s  blog.  Tonight’s blog  is just  about me  noticing it today, in my own neighborhood.  Now, part of that is just that it’s a growing neighborhood, but every neighborhood  in this city, it seems, is growing, and Prague is no exception in that regard.

Anyway, my neighborhood, Invalidovna, is generally pretty quiet, laid back, off the beaten  track.  That’s one of the reasons we chose it.  But up until a couple of summers ago, you could walk through the park at any time and barely see a soul.

Anyway, today after work I wanted to smoke a nice, fat joint, because that is how  I like to end my day.  Normally I just go out to the balcony.  But, since we are remodeling the kids’ room, the  balcony has so much junk on it, there is practically no place to stand.  I suppose I could have rearranged a few things and found two spots to plant my feet, but I wouldn’t have been able to move, and it would have been a fire hazard.

So, I decided to go for a walk.  Plenty of quiet spots around here.  Just after I lit up, a car stopped and a guy asked me for directions.  I don’t know if he realized I had a lit joint behind my back.  He was about my age (early 60s) but that’s no indicator any more.  After that, I didn’t actually have to make  contact with anybody, but it seemed like an endless procession of nearly stumbling across mothers with strollers, joggers, elderly couples out  walking and one guy who looked like he was waiting for a ride, but also very much as if he’d like a hit,  but I was almost done by then, and totally paranoid.

It used to be an almost empty neighborhood.  Overpopulation is cramping my style.

I never quite know what to do with my gymnasium students.  They are, by and large, a clever lot, and most of them can express themselves very well in English.  There are one or two who don’t speak up much, but they’re certainly a more attentive group than in other schools I’ve worked in.

But, they are young and restless, and get bored easily, so finding a way to challenge them is difficult.  This morning I still didn’t have any kind of lesson planned and it was time to leave the house, so I grabbed some flash cards that I use with 4-7 year olds, and thought about it on the bus.

It worked out really well.  I just gave them a card, told them they had 30 seconds to speak about it (divided them into teams, because that makes it a game rather than an exercise, and also they don’t want to lose points for the team, so they’ll at least try).  One girl, who is smart and quite good at English but always giving me attitude, got very excited to deliver a speech about socks, another informed me that if you touch a butterfly’s wings they will die, which I don’t know if it’s actually true or not but it was interesting, the speech about pants led to a mini-lesson on feminism, and the girl who was talking about frogs, who is such a shy, soft-spoken, timid little girl, talked about the fairy tales where a girl kisses a frog and he turns into a prince and she added ‘I used to do that’ and I gave her team two extra points for that.

Flashcards are a Rohrschach test.  Actually, everything is a Rohrschach test.