Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Remember, remember, the 5th of November

Gunpowder, treason and plot

I see no reason, that gunpowder treason

should ever be forgot

Today is Guy Fawkes day, aka Bonfire Night, aka British Halloween, and I apparently do not have enough British people on my facebook, or at least not enough who give a shit about the holidays, because here it is nearly midnight and I just realized what day it was.

Guy Fawkes, of course, is the guy who (allegedly) tried to blow up Parliament back in 1605, the one whose mask is worn in V for Vendetta.  I say allegedly because I’ve got a little theory* about this.

Guy Fawkes (and the other 7 or 8 guys or so – rather like ‘the Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,’ he was just the one with the coolest name) was framed.  The whole thing was a false flag operation.

Let us review.  James I had been King barely 2 years, and was not getting anywhere near the love and respect Good Queen Bess, the blacktoothed pirate Queen, had from the English people.  Quite honestly, most people thought he was a creampuff.  (Yes, there were lots of jokes about him being effeminate, but he was a married man with plenty of kids.  He wasn’t thought of as a strong leader, though.)

Like George W. Bush, he needed something to rally the people behind him.  Also, he had this weird plan to write his own version of the Bible and sell a ton of copies because he was head of the Church of England and could get away with that.

So, he concocted a plot against himself, framed a bunch of people who were known to be Catholics, and Bob’s Your Uncle, established himself as a guy who took no shit and bravely escaped death and all.

There was no free press then.  There wasn’t much press at all.  Public information was pretty easy to control.  Torture was a perfectly acceptable method of interrogation.  It was a good time to be a king.

Actually, come right down to  it, we have no idea  how much of what we are taught as history is true and how much is not.  How could we?

Anyway, that’s my rant for tonight.  I hope all my British friends had great bonfires.

*it’s really kind of a dumb theory, and I’m not totally serious, but there’s no way to prove it wrong.

First, on the Adele/Tom Waits controversy.  I listened to both songs (Adele’s ‘Hello’ and Tom Waits’ ‘Martha.’  They are similar, but I think the term ‘rip-off’ is a bit harsh.  With Waits, it’s very downbeat and  monotone, the way he is.  Adele starts soft and rises, the way she does.  I like them both, and apparently Adele is a big fan of Tom Waits as well.  (I’m no music expert, just a guy with two ears and an opinion.)

Erich Von Daniken

Secondly, apparently, they had some elections in the U.S. the other day.  Off-off-year stuff, so in a lot of places it was elections for school board and special referendums and stuff, so a lot of people stayed home, which is a big mistake.  Because the assholes always come out to vote.  Kentucky got a new, crazy, right wing governor and Houston, Texas got a brand new law about who could go into which toilets which has gay rights people furious, and justifiably so.  Also, Ohio voted down legal marijuana, but apparently it was a badly written law and even some pro-pot people were arguing against it.

It’s a bummer, and liberals need to stop being weenies and start voting, but I don’t think it’s the end times, like a lot of people on my facebook feed do.  If the Kentucky governor tries to block Obamacare (and he will), he will run afoul of the federal government, and he will lose.  No doubt, he will find other ways to fuck up the state, but it wasn’t exactly a liberal utopia to start with.  Houston’s law, as well, may eventually be ruled unconstitutional, and liberals did win a few small battles here and there.  Also, the little setback in Ohio pales in comparison to the fact that the Mexican Supreme Court just declared all laws against marijuana to be illegal.  Mexico.  That’s huge.

I was just watching a historical retrospective about Erich von Daniken and his ancient astronauts theory.  Yes, the man is a total flake, and has no idea about science.  But I sort of feel the same way I do about Alex Jones and 9/11.  Just because he’s nuts doesn’t mean he’s not right.

Here’s why:  Since there are like a gazillion stars out there, it’s statistically inevitable that some of them have life.  Since life evolves, some of them must have intelligent life.  Since many of them are much older than Earth, many intelligent aliens are technologically ahead of us by thousands of years.  A thousand years ago, human beings did not have flush toilets, or movable type.  A thousand years from now, I am sure we will be traveling to other stars.  The Earth is 4, maybe 5 billion years old.  There were probably aliens who visited before we had life, and again when we had dinosaurs, and again when we were building pyramids, and again and again.

They probably know more about our history than we do.

I enjoy my Tuesday classes very much.  It’s 4 classes back to back, so it’s enough hours to make it worth the trip, financially, it’s at a Gymnasium so the kids, for the most part, are fairly bright kids, and the school basically stays off my back and leaves the teaching to me, so it’s low pressure.

Today, with 3 of the 4 classes, I played a game I quite enjoy called “Stump the Teacher.”  Basically, it’s practice for the students in asking Who, What, When, Where, Why and How questions.  If they can ask me a question I don’t know the answer to, they get a point, if I know the answer, I get a point.

The first class didn’t really get into the swing of it until about halfway through and they were giving me easy questions like “Who wrote The Raven?” and “What’s the capital of Ukraine?”, so I actually wound up winning, which is not the idea.

The next class got more aggressive, and I learned a few interesting things. Today, I learned that there is a 13th zodiac sign called Ophiuchus, the Snake Bearer, who reigns over people born between November 29th and Dec. 17th, which is most of Sagittarius.  I guess in the alternate system all signs would be shortened.

I’m glad Ophiuchus never caught on.  12 is a nice number, and it corresponds to the number of months, so everything is in order.

I also learned that Dante was born in 1265 (earlier than I’d thought) and that Tchaikovsky was homosexual.

In the last class, the jokers in the corner ascertained very quickly that I don’t know shit about computer games and they just hit me with question after question about League of Legends, every  time their turn came around, and they laughed and laughed about how much I didn’t know.

It was a fun class, and the old saying is very true:  You learn something new every day.

A crack in the Earth has opened up in Wyoming.  A crack.  In the Earth.  Excuse the pun, but let that sink in for a second.  A crack in the Earth.

It’s over 700 meters long and about 50 meters wide.  That’s a pretty big crack.  It puts those sinkholes in Florida swallowing cars to shame.  This thing is big enough to swallow a train.

Scientists say that it’s no big deal.  But it’s over 700 meters long and almost 50 wide.  That makes it a very big hole in the ground, at the very least.  And, it’s a crack in the Earth.

It’s perfectly natural geological behavior, the scientists say.  Yeah, so are ice ages but we didn’t just see one open  up yesterday.

Happens all the time, scientists say.  Well, maybe in Wyoming.  I never saw anything in Iowa like that.  Or the Czech Republic.  And, it’s the Wyoming thing that has to give  us pause for concern.  That’s where Yellowstone is.  The Yellowstone supervolcano.  That’s some end of the the world stuff, right there.

Wasn’t there an old movie called a crack in the Earth?    I don’t remember why they made the first crack, probably an oil well, I just remember that the good looking young scientist who was in love with the girl warned against it, but the sleazy, older scientist said “Nah, nothing to worry about, go enjoy your weekend” and then he went ahead and did it and there was massive disruption around the whole world, and they had to drill a hot on the other side of the Earth to keep it even.

I just hope int doesn’t come to that.

it is a phenomenon I have sometimes noticed in my history of reading Tarot cards, (I don’t consider the use of the word history lightly.  I have been reading the cards now for 18 years (Hallowe’en, 1997), and have made thousands of readings. I have done it in pubs, in homes, in offices, at parties, in the context of English lessons, in an art gallery and along Venice Beach, but that wasn’t very successful.

There are people who keep coming back. (They are only cards, people.  They can be an aid to therapy, although  I am not trained as a therapist.  But they don’t know you personally, and they can’t predict the future with any pinpoint accuracy.)

The reader can see that to them, it’s serious stuff and there are questions they really want the answers to.  They don’t just accept the first reading  you give them, even though it was great – they are destined for money and everybody loves them, for instance, but they keep digging, asking more and more specific questions.

There’s a problem with this.  The cards, being only cards, are subject to laws of statistical probability.  That is, if you keep asking questions, sooner or later the darkest version of the answer is going to come up.  The longer you look, the darker it gets.

I was thinking about this in the car on the way home today.  We’d had a nice weekend and stopped at Hruba Skala on the way home, the leaves were falling from the trees and down into the center of that little canyon, like golden rain.  The phrase that got stuck in my mind was ‘The Deeper You Look, the Darker it Gets’ and I think that would make a great line for a poem because life is like that.

and I don’t think the use of the word history is presumptuons