Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I can live with the insipid memes, a few words of inspiration transposed onto a meadow at sunset.  Sometimes they are inspirational, a little bit, or at least clever.  Not often, but somebody’s making the effort, and nobody  gets hurt.

Cute Puppy

I can live with  people  who post absurd  amounts of baby photos.  You’re  parents.  Some gush a bit more than others.  I usually just keep  scrolling, unless  it’s a relative or  close  friend, and then I give it a like.  It doesn’t take  any time, it doesn’t mess up my day.

I know some people get irritated (I have  read this on facebook) with people who post too many vacation photos, but I rather like those.  I know, it’s a bit like “Hey,  everybody, I’m in Japan/Hawaii/Dubai/Paris and you’re not” but their sending photos doesn’t actually  change the fact that I’m here and they’re there, and since I’m pretty happy with where I am, I see it as a vicarious trip around the world, every day.

I don’t mind photos of food, as long as they are good photos, of good food, and maybe they include a recipe, and it’s not just a picture of green carrot-jello and a caption that says “HaHa, remember when your mama made this crap for family picnics in the  ’60s?”  What, is that supposed to improve my appetite?

I’m not adverse to animal pictures, or at any rate the cute ones.  Animal rights advocates who post pictures of abused dogs and stuff really bring me down, though.  Sooner or later, I’ll defriend them.

I’m not bothered with a heated political argument, or bad language, although apparently Quora is.  Don’t worry, I didn’t get banned, or even suspended, just a warning that I was  in violation of their ‘be nice’ policy.  Maybe because I said ‘bullshit’ which I thought was part of normal conversation any more.

What I really don’t like, though, are these fake news sites.  Sometimes they call themselves satire, but they’re not.  Satire is supposed to be funny, or at least obviously fictional, and so many of them are not either.

The one that got me this morning was a headline about Sarah Palin, saying she’d said “We needed Trump before Obama, so he could have stopped the Kenyan Muslim usurper,” or  some such.

Sounds like her, and there was a predictable round of outrage, but I tried to find the site and couldn’t (kept getting ‘the page you are looking for does not exist or is  unavailable from your  computer’ and stuff  like that), and other excerpts from it seemed to be not true stuff as well.

I guess I get why they do it (many possible reasons, such as a) they are in junior high school and think it’s funny, b) they are adults who still act like they are in junior high and think it’s funny or c) they are assholes.

What I don’t get is how we can accept it.  I suppose there is little enough we can do legally, if there were laws against lying, prosecutors would have a case file backup from here to eternity, just on the dating sites.

And I’m not saying sites like this should be banned.  Freedom of the Internet and all that.

I’m just saying that maybe people who make these sites should maybe get a rash  on a part of their body they can’t reach.  May they have all the homeless people of a mid-sized American city move into their living room.  May they be caught in bed with the person, or whatever, which would embarrass them most.

AI is just around the corner.  Space travel is advancing at a steady, even if slower than I’d like, pace.  I’m sure we’ll have a space elevator one day.  I’m sure that some day, ships very much like the Enterprise will be

Us, 3,000 A.D.

exploring the galaxy, and the universe.

But, as much as I love books and movies about time travel, I do not  believe it is possible.  There’s the grandfather paradox, of course, but that would just mean if you travel back in time, you automatically start off an alternate time line, you move into a different dimension.  Which would be almost as cool as time travel, but it would not be the same.  You can’t go back and kill Hitler, because that whole episode has happened and it always will have happened.

Time is not like a thing.  Scientists can’t actually learn more about it because there’s nothing to learn.  Time has no physical properties.  It’s just a way of arranging and measuring the order in which things happened.

But, there’s another paradox, which I consider proof of the impossibility of time travel, and that is that it hasn’t happened yet.   No wayback machine has suddenly appeared on the White House lawn for future beings to step out of and say “Hey, earthlings of the 21st century, you’ve got to do something about this Trump dude, he’s going to get you all killed” or anything like that.  Since it hasn’t happened, it seems obvious that time travel will be just as impossible in the future as it is in the present, which is pretty darned impossible.

Sadly, it’s the one thing which also makes me skeptical about intelligent extraterrestrial life.  If they were common, if there were lots of super advanced civilizations with  inter-stellar travel, you’d think some of them would have visited us by now.  Maybe to help us out with a few tech boosters, get us up to speed so we could join the inter-galactic federation or whatever, or maybe just to enslave us or whisk us off to alien zoos, but we’ve got no solid evidence it’s ever happened.

Unlike time travel, however, I’m convinced that some day it will.  Because, if there are no space faring extraterrestrials out there, that means it’s all ours.  All of it.  That’s one hell of a manifest destiny, and you’d better believe we’re going.

Potential First Lady Melania Trump

Whatever else Donald Trump is, he is a new phenomenon in American politics.  It is not the first time somebody has tried to leverage extreme wealth to gain a political position.  Remember Steve Forbes?  And this is Carly Fiorina’s second attempt.  And, California residents with long memories might remember Arianna Huffington’s unsuccessful bid for Governor, in a pre-Huffington Post persona, when she was apparently a completely different person.

But this is the first time it’s come this close to succeeding.

It’s not the first time somebody has gained popular support with an extreme right wing position.  That has actually become standard among Republicans.  But never before has anyone gone this far to the right this fast.  He is so far to the right that Glenn Beck suspects he might be a Democratic plant, and Dick Cheney has said he’s over the edge.  Dick, torture is no problem, Cheney.  Dick, let’s wiretap everybody, Cheney.  Dick, we’re going to start a war and we don’t fucking need to give you a reason, Cheney.

And yet he keeps moving further and further to the right.  That makes no sense.

I see a couple of possible ways to explain it.

a) Glenn Beck is right, and he’s a Democratic party plant intended to destroy the Republican party.  That is playing with fire, though, and very out of character for the Democrats.  Quite frankly, they don’t usually have the cojones for that level of dirty politics.  If that is what’s going on, it could backfire badly.  What if Trump wins?

b)  Trump is just doing this for the publicity, to sell books, to increase ratings on all of his future television venture, and just because he really enjoys the publicity.  If he has no interest in the presidency, he might be now trying to say something so outrageous that his campaign will implode and he’ll be off the hook.  But, as he desperately gropes for the bottom, he’s starting to see that the bottom isn’t there.  The people who follow him are completely unhinged.

or c, and this is what I think is actually happening)  c is a b, but…  He started running because this would be a good way to enhance the Trump brand, but he found a winning platform and now he’s feeding on adrenaline from the crowd.

Of course he sincerely wants to be president.  Who wouldn’t?  Certainly, what narcissistic megalomaniac wouldn’t?

He is a monster that has created itself.  We should be afraid.  We should be very afraid.

You’ve all seen them.  “Share is you see the word in this picture.” “How many faces can you see in the tree?”  and so on.  The one I saw today  was “Share when you see the horse.”

Usually I can spot it; sometimes right away, sometimes not so fast.  I never share.  If I see them once, I know I’m going to see them at least half a dozen times, and probably in the next 5 minutes, so there are plenty of people sharing and I don’t need to get in that line.  But I always look at them.

If I can see the thing, it makes me feel smart.  If I can’t, I think “Eh, it’s not as if it’s an IQ test or anything.  It’s more of a vision test.”

Anyway, today, after looking at what was obviously a picture of a frog until you were told you should be looking for a horse, it struck me: they’re not an IQ test, but it is more than an eye test.  Except for the ones that are color-blindness tests, of course, which  is a whole different category.

They are tests of mental flexibility, which is just as important in problem solving as IQ, I’ll bet.  Somebody might have an IQ of 180, if they get fixated on proving one theory (It’s a frog, goddamit!) to the point where they can’t adjust even when shown new information, they’re not going to get anything done and everybody will hate them.

So, it’s an important skill.  I’ve found that the easiest way is to look away from the picture for a moment, and then look back with different expectations.  If it doesn’t work right off the bat, fuck it.  It’s only a stupid facebook test.

It’s sort of like reading Finnegan’s Wake, or doing Rubik’s Cube.  The way to win is not to play.

As many of you (I hope) know, I have a page called Poems About Paintings, which I’ve been doing for about 6 months now.  I enjoy it, and mostly it’s just a good prompt for me to write short, positive poems.

Former Glory, by Vitaly Strojnov

But also, sometimes the writing itself is educational for me, or maybe inspirational would be a better word, leading me to see the universe in a different way; maybe that’s a deeper insight, maybe it’s just an alternative view.  Either way, it’s something good.

Today was a good day.  I’d ‘liked’ the painting (Former Glory, pictured above) a couple of days ago, just to mark it, because I sort of had the idea, but today I worked it out and got a poem I really liked:

In secret gardens hidden
behind eroding walls
of buildings we abandoned long ago
forgotten or forbidden
The sun’s sweet light still falls
on places people do not even go

I  was reading another article today on how the universe doesn’t actually exist except when we observe it because of quantum mechanics and Niels Bohr and Schrodinger’s stupid cat and the Large Hadron Collider and something about tachyons, whatever they are.  I respect science, for sure, and I’m willing to entertain plenty of bizarre theories, but to me this just seems clearly, obviously wrong.

We know the Earth existed before we were born because of fossils and carbon dating and, for the last 6,000 years or so, an actual, written record.  We can be fairly certain that when a tree falls in the forest, the squirrels run away, and the air vibrates in a way we would  call sound,  if we could  hear it.  The universe does not revolve around you, me, or us collectively.  It just doesn’t.

And that’s why this painting struck me.  The sunlight is pouring into the garden, feeding the plants and creating a lovely effect, with complete disregard as to whether or not anyone is there to view it.