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Of course, it’s not hard at all to find homophones is English: meet and meat, suite and sweet, I’ll meet you in the  suite and we’ll eat sweet meat, pi and pie, dye and die, know and no, won and one, two, too and to, for, four and fore, eight and ate, wood and would, the list is endless, there are probably hundreds, but few confuse me more than bass and base.

Both spellings, in fact, have more than one definition.  A bass is also a fish but that’s  pronounced with a short a, like badass without the ad, so those two, I guess, are homonyms without being homophones, which sounds an awful lot like homophobes as in the sentence: Chuck, Mike and Doug are homophones.

Base can be a staging location, as in ‘The climbers established a base camp at 3,000 meters.’  If they established a bass camp, they might cause an avalanche.  Also, you have bases in  some sports, notably baseball.  Bass Ball might  make a very cool sport, but  I don’t think it’s actually been invented yet.  Or base can  be a core group of  an organization or whatever, as in ‘Sanders’ base is young and progressive.’

Bass, on the other hand, is a musical term.  It can be an instrument, or a quality of sound, which is very  deep.  Except in the song ‘All about  the bass,’  where it apparently means butt, the part of the body at the base of your spine, and thus appeals to our baser instincts.

And the base line, if you’re talking about music, might actually be the same as the bass line.

I’m not even going to start with lie and lay.  ‘Lie, Lady, Lie’ would have been a terrible song.

I went to a different kind of reading this evening.  It was not a poetry reading, which I’m used to, and which was  my intent.  It was billed  as a comedy thing, but that’s fair enough, I took one of my more  comedic books with me to read from.

The theme, the format, the maguffin if that’s not  being too liberal  with the definition of the word  maguffin, was that each performer had precisely  60 seconds, on a  timer.  And there was an  accompanying pianist.

The thing that  really surprised me  was the  level of comedy.  I  went first, and read 4 or 5 poems from “Uncle  Willie’s Very Silly Animal Poems” and I think it was well received, you can’t go too far wrong in 60  seconds, but I was the only  person who did poetry, at all.  I was followed by a guy who did a comedy routine about getting  a prostate exam from a hot, female  doctor, and then a girl who did a mime act, set at a hairdressers, kind of funny, kind of social commentary maybe, then a guy who did a routine about  learning to walk as a baby, and it was funny  because he was a grown  ass man with  a big beard and he fell flat on  his ass, which  is theheight of great comedy, I think he got the biggest belly laugh of the night.  I don’t know how that works.  We’ve all seen people fall down millions of times, in real life and  in comedy routines, and it  cracks people up, every single time.

Then a couple of people just told  jokes, we had a recital of a Shel Silverstein poem, a song from the piano player which started off sounding like a love ballad but the line that sticks in my mind was “hairs on her butt like the branches of trees.”  There was a ventriloquist who was not polished in the sense that you could see his lips moving but his patter with his puppet was great, very entertaining.  Then a couple more people told jokes, some were really funny, I got up a 2nd time and told a couple of jokes, all together there were about 10 performers and about half of us performed twice and it was over in  about a half an hour.

Also, it was a cool location, Amaze in Tchaiovna near Hradčanska, and a good mix of people I knew but hadn’t seen  for a while, and new people I was glad to meet.  I hope we do it again.

This is the time of day when I should be able to think clearly, everyone else in the family is asleep, all of the days duties have been done except for those I decided, once again, to put off until tomorrow, and all I still have left to do before slipping gently  into the  world of  sleep and perchance some entertaining dreams is to write  this blog, and my mind is empty, which would be great if I were trying to meditate and clear my mind but is not so wonderful when you’re trying to think up a topic for a blog.

I often think that ‘meditation’ is just a fancy word for ‘thinking about stuff’ just like ADD means whacko kid can’t sit still, and  other first world ailments, but some people who are into meditation have objected to that stance, saying ‘no, the idea is to clear your head of thought’ and that just seems bizarre to me.  That’s what the head does.  It thinks.

I find it strange when I start going on a political rant and somebody says to me ‘I don’t think about politics much,’ it actually angers me a little bit, but then again, if everybody thought about politics, it wouldn’t necessarily change the left-right paradigm, or even shift the percentages, it would just increase the numbers and make the world that much difficult  for  everybody.

So, if you don’t want to vote, it’s O.K., even if you are a pretty cool person who wants a better society.  Somewhere, there is a total rightwing headcase who is also too apathetic to vote, and you and them are canceling each other  out.

There’s an old – well, I don’t actually know if it’s old – saying, which is so ubiquitous I don’t even know where it’s from, and it goes like this:  First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

I’m glad Sanders has finally moved past phase 1.  Probably skipped right to phase 3, because laughing at him?  He’s an elderly Jewish man.  He’s inherently funny.  He is a Billy Crystal routine come to life.  And that’s O.K.  He handles it well.

I’m not sure exactly, precisely what triggered the change.  Living in Prague, I didn’t actually watch the Democratic debate live.  However, when I looked at facebook today, I saw that some of my Hillary supporting friends (well, one in particular) were losing their shit.  Not just the usual “I respect Bernie but he can’t win” stuff.  No, this was gloves off nasty shit.  A rumor that he once yelled at one of his staffers 20 years ago, mischaracterizations of votes, serious invective.

Since this is the day after the debate, I’m assuming it was something that he said, and it must have been good.  I’m encouraged.  If he is no longer being ignored, if he starts to get something closer to equal coverage, then within the next month or so his name recognition will be up to saturation level – i.e.  high enough that anybody, who’s smart enough to know when it’s election day and how to get to their local polling place, will have heard of him.

Bernie leads Hillary among millenials.  He is quite popular among veterans.  He is making huge inroads into the women’s vote and the black vote, and those are two demographics which have traditionally been favorable to Hillary.  But one demographic where Sanders comes in way ahead of Clinton is among people who’ve heard of Sanders.

Now that they’ve stopped ignoring him, that group is going to grow by leaps and bounds.

Today Sam had a football tournament, which I tend to see as a lost day, but it didn’t go too badly  at all.  I took a walk around the small  town of Říčany before the action started, it snowed last night and, in fact, it was still snowing, and  I was inspired to write a poem about  trees in the snow, which I later posted to the Occasional Poems page, where I contribute regularly.  I don’t know what’s happened to our Alchemy Readings, so I’m glad to have an alternative outlet.

Fortunately, the tournament was indoor, and there  is  seating for the fans, which meant I could read when he wasn’t playing.  (They won 2, tied 4, and lost zero, placing 3rd out of  7.  Sam scored 1 goal, in a 3-0 win.  So, that was pretty good.)

I’m on book 5 of the Game of Thrones series, and there are two things I’d like to say about that.  First, while it’s an exciting story and well written, it’s no Harry Potter, it’s no Lord of the Rings, it’s not even close.  If it was, it wouldn’t be taking me so long to read it.  I’m interested, but it’s still something I read mainly on the Metro or while I’m sitting at a football tournament I’m not terribly interested in.

Second, here is my prediction:  George R.R. Martin  is going to wind up splitting Book 6 into 6 and 7, both because there’s just way too much going on, and also because 7 is sort of a magical number (especially  in  the story, because of the 7 Gods) and because that seems to be a common ploy any more, at least in movies.

And here is the spoiler alert, stop reading now if you don’t  want to  know, but this is why I think it needs to be split.  I’m a third of the way through book 5 and there are at least 4 major characters who everybody thinks  are dead but are really alive, they haven’t mentioned Arya Stark so far in this book at all which is uncool, she’s my favorite character and Martin just left her blinded and seems to have forgotten about her, also her baby brother Rickon seems to have dropped out of the story altogether.  While we’re on the Starks, Sansa is not going to be able to keep up her little charade of not being Sansa forever, and  that situation is not going to be easy to resolve without a few other dominoes falling.  Meanwhile, across the sea, Danaerys Targaryen has at least 4  men who want  to marry her, more armies arrayed against her than anybody can keep track of, and still has to figure out how to keep her dragons from eating people, at least people whom she  doesn’t particularly want eaten.

Also, despite the fearsome pace with which Martin kills off his main characters, there are several I dearly want to see dead (Cirsei, Mellisandre, Roose Bolton, Peter Baelish, fat old Walder Frey, Euron Crow’s Eye) who are still, quite annoyingly, alive.

I don’t see how he can do it all in just one more book.