Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Just got back from October’s Alchemy Poetry Reading, and it was quite excellent, actually.  Good, big crowd, as big as I’ve seen at Alchemy in years.  Probably came to see the featured act, which was the Blood, Love and Rhetoric comedy troupe, but only a couple of them showed so they just did actor’s readings of some people’s poems, and they did it cold, but it was good enough to make me see that every poem benefits from a good reader.

There was a woman I’d never seen there before, Edie, and she was the star of the evening with a couple of breathless, erotic poems about making pasta and playing in the playground.

Somebody had a flyer lying on the table which said “Is there still such a thing as American poetry?’ or something vaguely like that, but it got me thinking – who really cares about that?  A far bigger issue is why do so few women write poetry, or is it that they write it and don’t want to perform it in public?

That’s an issue which needs to be addresed.

What the hell is going on in Syria?  I sure as hell don’t know.

The U.S. claims to be fighting ISIS, as does Iran, although there’s little love lost between the U.S. and Iran, and Russia is supporting Assad, which logically means it should be fighting ISIS, but it seems to have decided that the rebels the U.S. is actually  supporting is the greater “threat to stability,” which is the phrase used when somebody wants to support the person currently in power.

I don’t have the solution, but I hope Obama is looking at the big picture.  First, what does this have to do with Ukraine?  One of two possible things:  either things are not going as well for Putin as Russia would have wished, so he’s unloading on Syria, like the man who kicks the dog because his wife has  started fighting back, and also as a calculated political ploy of distraction.  Or, things are going very well for him in  Ukraine and the old son of a bitch  is getting greedy.

Vladimir Putin is much smarter than G.W. was, he is probably not starting two wars at once just for shits and giggles.

The other country that I think of is Afghanistan, but the Afghanistan of long  ago, when the  Taliban were the Mujaheddin and people like Reagan and McCain were referring to them as Freedom Fighters and so we armed them and they drove the Russians out.

I’m not in favor of Russian imperialism, especially living  in a former Warsaw Pact nation, but the middle east is a messed up place.  The world, and the Middle East, might be better off for their presence. If not, let them wallow in it.

As far as the West is concerned, the least action taken  in in the Middle East, the better.

I just saw a headline that said something like “New evidence from Charon reveals Plutos Violent Past” and I thought “What a strange way of putting it?”  It’s not as if I have any better suggestions, if I were writing science articles for a major website, I’d probably talk about various planets and their “violent past” too, but it sounds wrong.

When I hear “violent past” I think of a teenage kid who carried a knife, a guy who used to get drunk and get in fights in bars a lot.  Planets are large objects which sometimes get hit by other large objects.  They are not sentient, so they don’t think of it as violent.  It’s the norm, not the exception, so in the culture of planets, it’s very hard to single out a specific one and say “it had a violent past.  You should watch out for that one.”

Actually, Earth is probably somewhat blessed in that respect.  Although we had a violent past, that stage was billions of years ago.  The last world-changing cosmic event was 65 million years ago, and that’s probably about average.

Of course, a couple of contributing factors are the existence of Jupiter, a huge big brother of a planet that the Earth manages to hide behind when some of the worst asteroids are coming in, and the fact that we have an atmosphere, which burns up most of the incoming comets.

So, adding in the L (length of time necessary for a species to evolve and develop a technological civilization) factor to the Drake equation, we may well be one of the lucky very few planets in the Universe to get as far as we’ve got.

And we don’t know how long we can keep it going.

If you haven’t seen this latest little snippet of the reality show they are doing of the American presidential campaign,  you really must.  On the one hand, it’s hysterical.  On the other hand, everybody present was taking it dead seriously, and so will millions of people who see it online.

Donald Trump met with 40 evangelical leaders and they laid on hands and called down God’s blessing on his furry head.  (speaking  of furry, was that a weird trick of the light or has he started sporting a mustache?  I’m tending toward weird trick of the light, but not sure.)

The Jew for Jesus guy was particularly weird, with all of his Baruch Adonai-ing and stuff.  Does it still count as cultural appropriation if it’s done by someone who was originally from that culture but has sort of defected?  The way I see it, it counts double.

Also, I’m not buying this ‘caught on cell phone’ or ‘didn’t know the cameras were rolling’ nonsense.  He knew.  This was absolutely deliberate.  Do the math.  If each of those present has a following of only 1,000 (an extreamely conservative, small c conservative, estimate), then Trump just scored 40,000 new followers.  And what followers!  Those  who follow the words of these nutcase preachers with rapt devotion and a literal mindedness that  would  make a robot proud.

No, I don’t  think it was accidental at all.  He roped  in the racists with that one  single line about Mexical rapists, and now he’s working on the religious vote.  Huckabbe never got an endorsement like this.  Santorum never got an endoresemt like this.

Out of the three wings of the Republican  party, he’s got two of them, and he’s not worried about the money wing because he IS money.

I am a partisan.  I have political opinions (by American standards, most would consider me far left.  By European standards, I’m still fairly left) and I want my side to win, because  I think that’s what’s best for the world.

So, I try not to criticize other people on the left.  If they are people in the public eye, they get plenty of flak, most of it undeserved, from the right, so, even where criticism would be warranted, I usually refrain because it would look like piling on, and we need to stand together.  If they are just people on some facebook comment thread, it depends.  I want to stand with them against the trolls, but sometimes I’ll argue if they say something stupid.

However, the last two or three days, I’ve seen some really stupid comments from the left, and I’ve got to react.

It is not the end of the world that Pope Francis met with Kim Davis.  First, he met with a lot of people.  Second, Kim Davis is really not that important.  Third, isn’t it enough that he has made nice statements about helping the poor, and respecting other religions (and those with no religion), and recognizing climate change as a reality,,,and maybe not having so many wars all the time?  Is gay marriage really so important that you are ready to ignore all those issues?

Choose your battles, people.  And lighten up.