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It was a beautiful autumn day, mostly clear, not very cloudy at all, cool but not cold.  It was my first day back at the German pre-school after the summer vacation.

It is NOT a TUMOR!

Now, I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this class before, but just in case I haven’t:  This is my nightmare class.  It will be my 3rd year at the school.  The last two years I’ve had one boy who is an arrogant, little know-it-all.  Admittedly, his English was pretty good but he delighted in arguing with me, and defying me, and he was the class leader.  At the opposite end of the spectrum was the little girl who would start crying at the drop of a hat.  When they didn’t like an activity I suggested (which was virtually always) they would start chanting “English is bad!  English is bad!”  It was always the longest hour of the week.

On the way there, just after I got off the tram, I noticed something different in the neighborhood.  The building on the corner, which has been undergoing major renovation  and been a serious eyesore for a long time, is nearly finished and actually looks rather elegant -a large-ish 19th century villa with a little dome on top.

Prague is  famous for it’s ancient buildings but there’s always renovations going on and new stuff coming up, too.  It keeps  things interesting.  In my immediate neighborhood there are two major construction projects going on that should be finished in the spring and one just started that’s still a complete mystery.  But, it’s when you haven’t been in a neighborhood for a few months that you get that sudden surprise.

I only had one return student, and she started right in with the “English is bad!” routine and I think she was surprised that the rest of the group didn’t follow her.  I was thrilled.  I kept their  interest for most of the hour, there were only one or two instances of direct defiance, and nobody started crying.

We are off to a very good start.

We were walking through the supermarket yesterday and I saw pumpkins for sale.  Nothing wrong with that.  The pumpkin is a vegetable.  However, just to

Too Soon!

make sure everybody got the idea, there was a Jack o’ Lantern perched right on top.  (It’s starting to catch on here, but Hallowe’en is still very much an American import.)

I like Hallowe’en.  It’s one of my favorite holidays.  I love putting on a costume and going to a party, because you get to put on a totally different persona and the costume gives you a conversational opening with everybody.  But, it’s still September!  If you buy a pumpkin and carve it out now, it will be a stinking, festering, decomposing bit of orangeish-brownish putrescence long before Hallowe’en.

It’s a problem in our society.  Christmas has nearly eaten the half a year that precedes it, and even the minor holidays, like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s day, get a couple of weeks of advance publicity, reminding everybody of how disappointed everybody else will be in them if they don’t go out and buy a whole bunch of shit

Then, there are the completely unnecessary days.  International Coffee Day?  I drink coffee every day as it is.  It’s like having International Toothpaste Day or International Watch TV Day.  Completely superfluous.

Or how about Left Handers Day?  To the best of my knowledge (and nobody has more knowledge on the subject than I) I have been left-handed every day of my life.  There’s no way I can NOT observe the day.  Maybe it’s meant for right handers, that they should try to be left handed for a day.  But, that would be silly.

Let left handers be left handers, let right handers be right handers, and we can each celebrate every day with  whichever hand we like.

There are only 365 days in the year.  We need to let a few of them just be ordinary days.  And, leave off the pumpkin carving until a day or two before Hallowe’en.

It appears there is actually running water on Mars – at least, during the Martian summer, when the planet defrosts for a moment and oozes out some salty slushies, like a bad case of planetary acne, and they run down the hillsides until everything freezes up again.

Water on Mars

It’s pretty fascinating news, but it’s not going to turn Martian colonization into a piece of cake. It’s not a steady, dependable supply and it might well require a lot of processing before it’s drinkable by human beings, but scientists are jazzed because where there is water, there is life.

O.K., but since the water is only on the surface for part of the Martian year, that life has to be very good at hibernating, like 7 year locust good.  It’s not as if we’ve got little men standing in front of our cameras waving at us.

In fact, there are other places in  the Solar System -Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Titan, for instance – which might have huge, ice-covered oceans filled with weird, alien sea monsters.

Still, it’s good news, it’s another piece of the puzzle, it brings us a step closer to where we want to be, but I don’t expect it’s really going to spark the public imagination and create a surge of public opinion for Martian exploration.  Even today, on the very day it’s happening, people are talking more about the Pope and Donald Trump.

Science geeks are fascinated, but I figure the public will stay interested for about maybe a day and a half.

Which is why I’m blogging about it tonight.

A friend of mine posted this meme and at first I didn’t quite know what to make of it.  Is that something anti-semitic?   No, I thought, that’s being a bit paranoid.  Or is it a play on the fact that so many popular conspiracy theories involve some sort of a cabal of Zionists, Bankers, and the Elders of Zion, or that old Rothschild dude who looks strikingly like Mr. Burns and has like more trillions of dollars than actually exist within the gross international product.  Probably that.

But then I decided to look at it just at face value, because out of all the ways you can look at a thing, that is always one.  Information is just raw data, different points unconnected with anything, much less each other.  It’s the start point.  Knowledge, of course, when you can connect all the dots.  Nice to have, but we really have so little of it, and the people who are most convinced they’ve got it are the ones who are completely deluded.

Then you have that Magen David shaped conspiracy diagram: some dots on the lines, some at intersections, and plenty still floating out in empty space.  Well, that’s either a conspiracy theory or the actual state of human knowledge.

For example, I think 9/11 was an inside job, and lots of people would call  that a conspiracy theory.  It certainly fits this chart.  We know for a fact that Halliburton made 39 billion dollars on the Iraq War, that the Bush administration had plans to invade Iraq even before 9/11, and that Dick Cheney, who has close connections to Halliburton, was vice president on 9/11.  Those facts go on the lines, but there are plenty of facts still in the spaces, and plenty of the facts are unknown, so don’t appear on the chart at all.

So, it’s not a theory in the sense of the theory of evolution or the theory of relativity, where theory means something awfully close to fact.  Maybe conspiracy hypothesis would be a better term.

I don’t really know anything about this story beyond the headlines, but the details don’t matter.  769 people are dead.  That’s a heck of a lot of people.  It happened at the Hajj in Saudi Arabia, which is an annual event that attracts huge numbers of Muslims from all over the world because, if I understand it correctly, one of the obligations of being a Muslim is that you are supposed  to actually visit Mecca at some point in your life, it’s a religious obligation.

The Hajj

With close to a billion Muslims in the world, at an average life span of let’s assume the same as everybody else, that means every year’s annual attendance is going to be freaking massive.  And it is.

There are people who die at the Hajj almost every year.

The problem isn’t specific to Islam.  There have been people who died at rock concerts, and football games, and Black Friday pre-Christmas sales at Target.  But, still, 769 is a lot of people.

Since there are fatalities almost every year at the Hajj every year (It’s not always a stampede.  People die of heat stroke, people die of heart attacks – but stampedes have happened before.), you’d think the Saudi authorities would be all over it, figuring out more effective methods of crowd control, maybe spacing the Hajj out over a longer period of time, or setting up a few campgrounds further out and limiting the number of people walking around that big monolith time at any one point.  Maybe pass out a bit more free water to the crowd, or have some musical acts to keep people entertained.

I don’t know.  I don’t know what would be culturally appropriate.  But they should do something.

I doubt that they will, though.  They know people will keep coming, no matter what they do or don’t do.  No other Muslim nations are going to do anything more than grumble a bit about it, because Saudi Arabia is filled with American military bases for some strange reason. (It’s the oil.)

And the Royal Family (in the only country in the world where that still has its ancient significance) doesn’t care.  How do I know they don’t care?  Well, they could prove me wrong, I suppose.  But I’ll bet they don’t.