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Oh, my, this you’ve got to see.  Well, you don’t actually have to see it.  You won’t die, or turn into a potato, or anything like that if you don’t click on it right now and watch it all the way through.

I’ m finding more and more on facebook that when someone says “You simply have to see this,” you probably don’t, and when they say “This will change the way you see something,” it probably won’t.

But, it is a funny bit.  It’s a couple of  mega-church,  radio evengelical type  preachers talking about  why people shouldn’t be getting so upset about Creflo Dollar and folks like them having private jets.

Their rationalizations  are hysterical.  You can’t just stand up in  coach and say “Yes, Lord, I hear  you, Lord” because the other passengers would roll their eyes and some busy body flight attendant would probably tell you to sit down and fasten your seat belt.

And besides, you have to be above the  crowd to save the world.  I mean, flying in coach is like going  into a tube with a bunch of demons.  Sure,  we’ve  all had a  seat companion now and again who was  less than pleasant, but demons?

The part that  cracked me up the most  was when the guy was talking about the  stagnation of prayer;  I’m sure what he was saying is “time for the Lord to give me a bigger, better plane.

Whatever.  Their fans keep giving them money, it’s not my problem.

To start with, to answer one question, same New Year’s Eve resolutions as every year: to write a couple of books and lose weight.  So, there’s that out of the way.

It is snowing outside, quite heavily, so this might be the first real snow of the year, which is a nice, symbolic way of opening the year.  A big change, a clean slate, a fresh start.

Mostly, though, I am celebrating the end.  Not just of 2015 – it was, on balance, a pretty good year, at least for me – but of the whole war on Christmas -New Year’s industrial complex thingie.

It is the end of ‘the days.’  The next big ‘day,’ when everybody on facebook posts exactly the same thing, i.e. ‘Happy _____day, I love you all!’ will be Valentine’s Day, or maybe the Super Bowl, I’m not sure which comes first any more.  American football, like basketball and Christmas, are trying to dominate larger and larger portions of the year, but there are limits.

Of course, the  Iowa precinct caucuses are February  1st.  As a political junkie, I’m interested in that, but most people won’t even notice that and all campaigns in both  parties have prepared some version of a victory speech if their candidate gets over 20%.

Still, it’s a major moment.  In 2012, bad results in Iowa forced Michele Bachmann out of the race, in 2008 Iowa made Barack Obama a contender.

I’m sure there will be many great moments in 2016.  There will be unforeseen inventions, there will be advances in robotics and AI, and breakthroughs in medicine.  There will be singers, and dancers, and painters and writers who amaze us and thrill us.  There will be epic sports battles, and hundreds, maybe thousands, of new planets will be discovered.

There will also be tragedies, death and destruction, but let’s not dwell on that.  Happy New Year.

Like dominoes, sometimes, it seems.  I will start with the least: David Spade, a not terribly funny comedian who was on Saturday Night Live for a while and, on the big screen, has probably sold fewer tickets than  Pauly Shore.  The only  role  I can picture him in is when he was straight man to Chris Farley in  Tommy Boy.  And, his fall from grace is not  so dramatic.  He didn’t get caught molesting children, or anything like  that.  No, just a different political opinion, but one that clearly  marks him as a moron: he doesn’t like Obama because “Obama’s always looking  for  attention.”

Obama’s the president of the United States, you  idiot.  Every  word that comes out of his mouth is newsworthy.  If the press wasn’t covering him  every day, the racist pack of braying hounds would be shouting that he’s too secretive and must be hiding something.

Much more distressing to me were the comments of Jerry Lewis: pro Trump, anti-refugee, and nasty  as hell.  The big difference,  though, is I’m a fan of  Jerry  Lewis.  He was the Jim Carrey of the 50s and 60s.  I don’t know how many times Jerry Lewis has had me rolling on the floor laughing with tears coming  out of my eyes, but there  were many.

But, you’ve got to separate the artist from  their work, etc…, and besides, he’s old….almost 90.

The worst case of all, of course, is Bill Cosby.  He actually (allegedly, of course, but it sounds like he’s guilty as hell to me) did some nasty stuff.   You don’t get  much nastier  than  rape.

I don’t feel sorry  for him.  He had  the  fame, he  had the  fortune, and he  had plenty of sex, but he won’t have the legacy.  His legacy  will  be that of a rapist.

The inexplicable part of it is, he probably could have gotten plenty of sex anyway; from willing, conscious women.  But that’s not what he did.

I had a pretty good afternoon, after Helena left with the kids (ours plus a friend of Sam’s who’s here for a few days) to an aquapark and suddenly there was silence and I could actually think in English.

There were three things I had on my list to get done while they were out. I had to proofread two chapters of an Iranian novel, which is basically just one, long festival of blood and gore.  A lot of Iranian communists and nazis killing each other during and shortly after WWII, with some honor killings, an occasional accidental death, a suicide here and there, one guy died of tuberculosis, and a few savagings by wolves.  Plus lots of ghosts and, in this latest chapter, a vivid description of a man’s leg from the point. Then, a fantasy book by a Czech author about the house where the sun sleeps at night, which is more pleasant reading, but not easier to translate.

I got all that done plus read a couple more chapters of Feast of Crows, watched a Woody Allen movie I’d never seen before (Zelig), and some stuff on Discovery about artificial intelligence, aliens, and the battle of Midway.

Zelig was kind of brilliant, typical Woody Allen stuff, of course, about his neurotic desire to be somebody else, somebody normal, but I can’t think of a single film in which he did it better.

Some might consider it a lazy afternoon, but for me, that’s actually more productive that average.

Nostalgia.  When I was younger I  often thought  about how pathetic  old  people were,  being nostalgic about Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, when we had the  Beatles  and Frank Zappa.

Gone, forgotten, and good riddance

Of course, I was aware that life is cyclical, that  everybody gets to that age and that  some day I would be just  as lame as they  were.

I don’t think  I’m quite  there yet, but I look at facebook and  I can  see that a lot of the people  my age sure  the hell are.  I see so many  posts saying “Share if you remember what  this is” along with  some device that you don’t see any more because we don’t need it any more.

Since a lot of my facebook friends are writers, I see a lot of people who are actually nostalgic about typewriters.  Fuck that.

As much as I curse my computer, I’d never want to go back to that.  It’s not just the mess of having to change the  ribbon, the  awkwardness of slipping paper, the having  to use whiteout to correct each  error separately, the lack of spell check meaning if you had doubts about a word you had to  look it up  in a dictionary – which was a book – or the necessity of hitting the  keys with enough  pressure to smack the paper, although all of those things were pains in the ass which I’m happy to see swallowed up by the oblivion of the past.

No, the main drawback was, after you finished writing, what  you were left with were words on paper; your brilliant poem, article, or short story – and to get anybody else to see it, you actually  had to show it to  them physically.  Getting one other person to look at  something was difficult.  Getting hundreds to look at something was damned near impossible.

What we have now is so much better I didn’t even  imagine it at the time.  It is a significant , quantum improvement in my life; not just a collection of physical conveniences but a whole new level of communication.

I feel as if it would  be ungrateful to the  present to be nostalgic about such  a pathetic past.  If people in  the future feel the same about what we have now, my mind boggles at how brilliant that future will have to be.