Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

There were 3 topics today I found worth commenting on, and they lead me to one conclusion.

One was your standard story  of someone who’s written a book which became popular and won awards and all, I forget the title, author and subject except the author was Jamaican, but it doesn’t matter.  The point of the story, as seems to be the pattern with all these stories, is that his manuscript was rejected by over 70 publishers before being accepted.  Why is it you never read of a famous book that, as soon as the author sent it  to a publisher, they realized it’s brilliance right away?

Like George Stephanopoulos not knowing the difference between Nepal and Tibet

The next two stories both have to do with the Democratic party’s presidential debate.  The first issue, which I’ve spent the day commenting on, is how all of the professional pundits called it for Hillary, while a focus group and several polls called it for Bernie.  We’ll have to wait for some real polls to see for sure (Any polls that depend on people calling in, or people at home visiting a website, are unscientific and inaccurate.  It’s what allowed Bristol Palin to stay on Dancing With the Stars long after she should have been knocked out) but the pundits exposed a clear bias.  Online polls are unscientific, but they (the pundits) were basing their stories on nothing at all, save their own opinions (which probably weren’t even their own). Hillary didn’t do badly.  She didn’t goof up, she looked good and she sounded smart.  Bernie got in a few more zingers, and both Webb and O’Malley had some memorable lines.

Then there was the incident after the debate, when Bernie Sanders ‘rescued’ Andrea Mitchell from being trampled by other reporters and cameramen while she  was interviewing him.  The thing is, the video, and audio, were terrible.  Body parts and the backs of people’s jackets.  You could sort of make him out saying “Are you O.K.?” but that was about it.

Every single day, amateurs with cell phones bring us vivid news reports of police killing people, people going crazy when a fast food place doesn’t get their order right, and people spontaneously breaking into dance at Wal-Mart.  Here was a room absolutely full of the nations most highly paid reporters and camera operators, and they produced shit.

The point is:  publishers, pundits and professional journalists don’t necessarily know what they are doing.  Unlike plumbers, electricians, mechanics and brain surgeons, there is no requirement that they know what they are doing, or even a certification process.  A publisher isn’t somebody who knows great literature, he (or she) is somebody who claims to know great literature and nobody ever calls them on it.

‘Pundits’ get things wrong again and again and again, but they aren’t sacked if their predictions are always wrong.  A professional athlete blows a game or two, their career is over.  An actor has one or two movies that don’t make money, they’re  done.

Journalists, our traditional defense against bad government, can be as incompetent as they like as long as they  look the part and don’t say stuff their bosses don’t like.

Fire  them all, I  say.  Either bring up the amateurs, or make it so there’s some kind of penalty for screwing up.

I had a pretty good day today.  Nothing spectacular, but good.

Since I had an 8 a.m. class, had to get Isabel to school early, and she’s cool with that.  She enjoys getting there a bit early.  It was raining, but that’s O.K.  I like the rain.  I don’t like the inconvenience of having to carry an umbrella, but I like the freshness of the air, the cleansing aspect of it.  The world gets dusty, the world gets dirty, and every so often water falls down from the sky and gives the world a shower.

The first class was uneventful, but my second class was very interesting because it’s a woman I taught a couple years ago and now she wants to start again.  She’s in a new office, right in the center, and it was lovely to walk through the streets of Old Town on a rainy day, when the streets were nearly deserted.

My next class wasn’t until 3:30, so I came home and made some lunch, including the vegetable mix that Isabel created in her cooking class yesterday, took a nap, let the rabbit out of her cage for a while, answered some e-mails, and watched a bit of the debate on CNN.  I missed the beginning, and had to head back to work before the end, so I don’t know what percentage of it I saw, but it was about an hour.

Then I had my  4 year old Czech-German kids.  It was a lot of fun, two of them like me and are very positive about learning English, so I think it’s only a matter of time before Little Miss Whiney Pants comes around.  It wasn’t today, though.  Mostly, she laid down in a corner and cried.

That’s about it, really.  Good night, everybody.

Tonight is the first of the all-too-few Democratic presidential debates.  I’m looking forward to it, but not enough to stay up and try to watch it, and catch all the live blogging and live tweeting -time zones, you know, it’ll be about  3 or 4 in the  morning here.

Also, I don’t expect any fireworks.  Bernie will continue calmly  telling the truth.  Hillary will give a couple of rousing speeches.  O’Malley, Chafee and Webb will try to justify still being in the race.

I saw one article (well, I saw the headline and  a short blurb – so many articles, so little time) that said “Sanders must win big tonight or his campaign’s in trouble.”  Fuck off.  Could you people (so-called journalists)  be any more obvious in your anti-Sanders bias?  (That was a rhetorical question.  No. No, you could not.)

Sanders campaign is firing on all cylinders.  His message is straightforward, his poll numbers are steadily  rising, he’s raising money, he’s drawing crowds like a two-headed lady, and he’s running ahead of Hillary in Iowa and New Hampshire.

If he has a mediocre performance tonight (which I don’t expect – I imagine he’ll do great), his campaign will still be doing just fine.  Hillary, on the other hand, needs a strong performance to stop the slide, to remind people that she is an intelligent, charismatic woman.

Chafee, O’Malley and Webb need a win, any kind of a win, anywhere, to make their campaigns viable.  They could get it tonight, but I don’t expect any of them to back out tomorrow morning.

So, it’s an important night  for all of them, but it’s not really make or break for anybody.  The “pundits” are full of shit.]

A friend of mine was lamenting on facebook that people’s attention spans are decreasing (scientifically proven with tests and stuff) and I have no reason to believe it’s not true.  My own attention span is shit but I can’t entirely blame the internet for that.

I have always been an impatient, short attention span person.  A book has to grab me in the first chapter or two or I’ll never finish it.  When I’m flipping through the channels on TV, a program has about 5 or 10 seconds to hook me in.  Even when I go to my poetry readings, which I love, if the poet doesn’t grab me within the first 30 seconds or so, I’m daydreaming through the rest of their set.

Anyway, in response to his worries, I wrote this little poem:

Our attention spans are fading as our fingertips get faster
we see a little bouncing dot and instantly we blast ‘er
mind or fingers, mind or fingers, which will be the master
our intracorporeal civil war is bound to be a disaster
(there’s so much information coming, our brains are out of kilter
to slow the surge of sludge we need to find a finer filter)

Admittedly, that’s trivializing what is a very serious matter.  People who can’t pay  attention to one thing for more than 10 seconds at a time are a threat to civilization because, both as consumers and as voters, they are so easily manipulated, and have so little idea what’s really going on in the world.

What’s the solution?  Read more, I suppose, but that’s an individual choice, and this problem is as world wide as the world wide web.

I see two ways it could break in the future.  Perhaps we will separate into two separate species, like the Morlocks and the Eloi.

Or, perhaps, our computer abilities will take the place of a healthy attention span.  You don’t need to really understand the American Revolution, or the life cycle of a bee, or the difference between a turtle and a tortoise: you just need to know how to look up the information quickly.

That’s kind of a depressing scenario, but it’s better than the one with the Morlocks and Elois.

None of the items in the news are of enough interest to dedicate a whole blog to.  The video of the crazy lady doing donuts at a busy intersection somewhere in the deep south (if the accent of the videographer is any indication), because she’d decided to ‘let Jesus do the driving’ was amusing, but it also shows the downside of news via social media.  Jerky, unfocused video and blindingly stupid commentary may be enough of a gimmick to interest people for a day or two, but it ain’t going any further than that.

The ongoing fight to NOT be speaker of the house is still amusing, but I think I’ll wait until they nominate somebody horrific (100% chance) and then write about that.

Today, I’ll just write about my day, my incredibly lazy, unproductive day.  It wasn’t totally unproductive, but the only things that got done weren’t done by me.  I smoked a joint in the morning, and I’ve been coasting since then.

I did start reading a new book, Terry Pratchett’s ‘The Color of Money.’  It is, of course, great.  Why hasn’t Discworld been made into a TV series yet?

I kind of had an idea for a poem and started writing it, but it’s not there yet.

Went to watch a football game of Sam’s. I do like the place he’s playing now.  They have stadium seating.  When he used to play at Stejskalove, parents stood in the parking lot and watched through a chain link fence.

The main thing for the day, the one thing that will improve my life and make my teaching job much easier, is that Helena downloaded, printed out, and laminated a whole bunch of flashcards for me, so I’ll be using them with my little kids.

I talk about something for a few weeks, and then she knocks it off in an hour or two.  That’s the way it works, u nas.