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Tomorrow morning off to the cottage and we’ll do Hallowe’en there, my part is scripted and my costume chosen (I get to be death, with the scream mask and a long, black cloak and a plastic scythe, and stand up the road a couple of hundred meters at the end of a series of people in costumes and give out candy.)  After that, we’ll go back to the local community center and have pumpkin pie and stuff like that.

The Republicans are being a little bit nuts and over the top, even for Republicans, I think, with their complaints about NBC and the moderators of the debate.  They’ve actually gone beyond just a little bit of whining and bitching, which is a legitimate way of avoiding answering any questions, and severed relationships with the network (well, at any rate not going to let them host their next debate).

They say the moderators asked them ‘gotcha’ questions.  They could get away with that for a day, because their supporters will buy it and everybody else will just see it as politics as usual, but if they’re going to stretch it out, sooner or later people are going to wonder “Just what was the gotcha question?”

Was it when they asked Carly Fiorina how she figured if she was such a crappy CEO at HP, how did she figure she could be president?  Was it when they asked Ben Carson about the sleazy snake oil company he was a spokesperson for?

Because those strike me as totally legitimate questions.

I’m cheating here, writing Thursday’s blog Friday morning, it’s 6:30 a.m., and I’m not going to bother backdating, it just is what it is, and will be what it is.  Last night had a wonderful gig, reading Tarot Cards at an office party.

The food wasn’t bad, they had a singer who’d been on X Factor and all the girls went crazy over him and everybody got up to dance, drinks were flowing which would have thrilled me to death if I still drank alcohol but still, it made for a convivial atmosphere, but the coolest thing is it was on a boat.

Through dinner, we were tied up at the dock and so I thought maybe that was the way the evening would be, and had started doing my readings when I realized the scenery was passing by, all the beautifully lit, old buildings on the bank and it was a very cool sensation, like  yeah, this is elegance.  I’ve been in Prague 17 years and my experience with boats on the river has been renting rowboats a few times, occasionally taking a ferry over to Children’s Island (which I’m not sure is even Children’s Island any more) and once, taking a boat to the zoo.

The glass roof retracted, and all the balloons which were stuck to it floated up in the air and everybody said “Aaaah”

The readings proceeded in classic pattern.  Once one girl had come, others followed and from start to finish was a steady stream.  A few people were just going through the motions, but some were very enthusiastic, asked a lot of questions, and a couple of them kept coming back.

I gave a lot of relationship advice to cute, young ladies.

Didn’t make a lot of money, but when you count in the dinner and the boat trip, it was plenty.

I want to find a way to do this professionally, regularly.  It’s definitely easier than teaching, or writing.

One of the types of facebook posts I hate the most are those which begin  “12 things you should never say to a….”

You see them all the time.  Things you should never say to a single mother.  Things you should never say to a pregnant woman.  Things you should never say to a woman with children.  Things you should never say to your waiter.  And so on.

I just saw one with “What you should never say to a grieving person.”  I’m sure all of these are well intentioned, but what kind of a world would we be living in if everybody actually memorized these lists and took them to heart?  It’s hard enough thinking of what TO say without mentally going through a checklist and by the time you are done, the person has walked away from you and every chance for conversation is gone.

For instance, guys trying to think of the perfect pickup line, ( ’12 things to never say to a girl you want to get with’) and they can’t come up with anything that doesn’t violate one of the codes will fail, and some jerk will walk up and say the first damn stupid thing that comes into his head, and there they go.

In the case of the grieving person, there are some obvious things you shouldn’t say.  You don’t stand over the open casket and say “I never liked him much anyway,” for instance, or “He owed me 50 bucks.”  But the main thing, in this case, isn’t what you say, it’s just being there.

That’s true of a lot of them.  It isn’t what you say that counts.  It’s whether you say something or say nothing.  It’s tone of voice.  It’s purity of intent, rather than correct choice of words.

So, try to love everybody and talk nicely to them, just make that an embedded part of your personality, and you can say whatever the fuck you want.

So, scientists have discovered that  bacon is bad for you.  Hot dogs, too.  I’m of two minds about this.

World’s oldest person, Susannah Mushatt Jones, 116, says she eats bacon every day

On the one hand, I’ve never really understood all the whoop-de-doo about bacon, all the facebook memes fetishizing it as the sacred food of the slacker set.  It’s O.K.  I’ll eat it, and enjoy it.  It’s far from my favorite form of meat.  And the main advantage of hot dogs is that  they are often instantly available at locations where you happen to be, and they don’t cost much.  So, it probably would not be a great sacrifice for me to cut down on bacon and hot dogs.

And I don’t doubt the science.  If you eat fat, you get fat, and bacon is mostly fat.  Like with hot dogs, I never actually suspected they were healthy.  Yet, doing a quick, little thought experiment of my own, I come up with a slightly different result.  I think of all the seriously old people I know (anybody who’s more than a little bit older than me is seriously old) and most of them eat bacon.  A lot of them drink beer, too.

So, I think we should take these new findings with a grain of salt.  Oh, wait a minute.  Salt’s bad, too.

One thing that’s even more obnoxious in the Czech Republic than  the U.S. is the retrograde creep of the Christmas season.  There is no Thanksgiving to act as a buffer, and even Hallowe’en is an American import, although it is swiftly gaining in popularity.  I saw the first Christmas decorations for sale about a week ago.

However, it’s Hallowe’en I want to talk about.  I don’t care for Christmas much, it’s all commercial and about obligatory giving and the whole thing goes on too long.  I love Hallowe’en, not just for the candy, although that, too, and not just for the jack o’ lanterns, although I think it’s amazing how pumpkin carving has developed into an art form in recent years, but for the costumes.
When you put on a costume, you become a different person, you can behave differently.  It’s tremendously liberating.

But Hallowe’en, too, has begun a retrograde creep.  For at least two weeks now, my facebook feed has been full of people in costumes and people carving pumpkins (that part I really don’t get.  Pumpkins are to be carved and displayed a day or two before Hallowe’en, at most.  Once those things start to rot, they start to rot, and it doesn’t take long.)

Part of it is the influence of facebook.  Throwback Thursday now lasts all week, and everybody has favorite photos of Hallowe’ens past.  It’s the most photogenic holiday of them all, because of the costumes.

Maybe people should wait a little longer – I’ve been seeing Hallowe’en pix since September.  But, the sincere fakery of Hallowe’en is so much better than the fake sincerity of Christmas, that I don’t mind too much.