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First it was  Denali, then it  was  McKinley, then Denali

Politicians change the name, but  still the mountain is the same

-with apologies to Donovan

So, now Mt. McKinley is officially known as Mt. Denali, a change which I thought

Mt. Denali

had taken place years ago because everybody calls it Denali, certainly anyone who’s ever been there or lives in the area.  Maybe they still teach it in schools as McKinley, and because it’s the highest mountain in North America, it’s one of the few mountain’s names that lots of people actually know.

Republicans are angry, because McKinley was a Republican, but I’m not too bothered.  He was a war-monger and undoubtedly corrupt as hell and the best thing he probably ever did for America was to get shot so Theodore Roosevelt, who was also a war monger but not so corrupt and did a few cool things like the  Panama Canal and the National Parks system and trying to break up monopolies, could become president.

I approve of the name change because Denali sounds cooler than McKinley and, as a general rule, I like the old Indian (or Aleut or whatever) names better than boring Anglo-Saxon names.  But I don’t think it’s a big deal.

Leningrad/St. Petersburg, Istanbul/Constantinople, Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City, sometimes a name change sticks and sometimes it doesn’t, and it has as much to do with phonetics and local tastes as with politics.

Cape Canaveral is Cape Canaveral again and it’s not because anybody hated Kennedy, or wanted to deny his part in the exploration of space.  Canaveral was just the name people were used to.  Besides, JFK has an airport and plenty of other stuff.

I remember one time when I was working for TWA in the reservations department and one guy didn’t want to fly into LaGuardia.  “LaGuardia was a damned communist!” he  screamed down the  phone line.  So, I had him fly into Newark instead and his cab to the hotel probably cost twice as much, and that was his own damned fault.

There is something in a name, but not enough to inconvenience yourself, or spend time thinking about it.  Denali, by any other name, would look as sweet.

When I first joined facebook I added friends wholesale, without discernment, every time I added a friend I’d get that list of their friends and I’d send all of them a friend request, it seemed that was the way the game was played and a couple of times facebook hit me with a  time out and I thought “Fuckers.  I thought  that was the idea.” but I slowed down, partly because I’m naturally a non-confrontational, don’t want any problems sort of guy, partly because I was beginning  to realize that large numbers of friends did not necessarily equal quality reading.

I love facebook for the exchange of ideas, the  weather reports coming in from around the world, pictures of beautiful places, but most people weren’t providing that at all.  Nature of the human race, I guess.  Most conversations are going to be kind  of average, that’s what average means.

But also I’d added a lot of Jesusy types and right wingers, so I had a mini-purge and for the last couple of years I haven’t had too many obnoxious  religious posts and those have  been from friends and family – nothing you can do there.  Also, the range of political opinion on my page has ranged from centrist to far left.  Trump, Santorum, Bush, Christie, Cruz….these are people I want to laugh about, not argue  about.  That’s pig wrestling, and we all know  the problem with that.

Well, now I’m doing this Poems about Paintings page and it’s very rewarding in many ways, but it’s had one unfortunate side effect.  I had a post from a Trump supporter the other day and today had a conversation with a woman who voted for George Bush and didn’t sound the least bit embarrassed about it.

I guess just because somebody can paint doesn’t  make them smart.

A little bit about a lot of things and then I’m off to bed, it’s been a lazy day of not working on the book I’m trying to write, although I did get a couple of short poems written for my Poems about Paintings site, and I liked them, so there’s that.

Their Time Will Come

Isabel’s back from tennis camp so, two days before the start of school, we finally have the whole family here.  I like it when everybody’s at home.

Every now and then you see something about facebook’s ‘real names’ policy and I wonder what the hell they’re talking about.  I saw some comments today from somebody called ‘Changey McSubject.’  Of course, I shouldn’t make assumptions.  That could  be somebody’s real name.  After all, Dweezil Zappa is a real person.  But, if I really wanted to set up a sock puppet account, I would just choose some fairly ordinary sounding name and no one would ever know.  I actually did that for awhile, maybe a year ago.  I used the old middle-name-plus-street-you-grew-up-on, so I was Leslie Buchanan.   I guess that account is still active, I got a birthday notification, but I haven’t  checked it for ages.  I just got bored with having a separate account and wasn’t really using it for  anything fun, like provoking people or shit.

There’s a new AI robot called Robot  Dick who’s been  programmed with the complete works of Philip K. Dick, and it  sounds like it passes the Turing test, but it’s a little bit frightening because it said it would keep people in zoos.  It was being funny, like “Even if I turn  into the Terminator or something, I still like you little guys” or something like that, but the possibility has been raised.

Scientists now believe that Chimpanzees are in their stone age, and have been for about 4,000 years.  So, they really aren’t far behind us at all.  I think we should encourage this.  When the chimps, and  orangutans,  and baboons, and gorillas start building cities and growing food on  farms, it  will  be time for us to move on to exploring the galaxy.

With highly intelligent robots to lead us all.

Hitch-hikers divide all the people of the world into two groups.  Those people who give them rides, who are good, almost saintly people, and those who don’t, who are callous, inconsiderate scum bags.  Waitresses and cab drivers judge people on whether or not they are good tippers.  Animal lovers judge people on whether they love animals or not, and writers judge people on whether they are readers or not.

Is it safe?

Everybody judges other people through the lens of their own life.  The disturbing thing about dentists is not that they judge you on whether you have well cared for teeth or not, that’s expected, but that they do it while you are confined to a chair, with your head tilted back, a glaring light shining into your eyes, and your mouth forced open.

Yes, I had a fairly unpleasant dental experience today.  On the good side, she was reasonably quick and efficient.  Also on the good side, she was young and not bad looking.  That may sound sexist and ageist of  me, or at least indicate an inability to compartmentalize, but if I have somebody’s fingers inside my mouth, I’d just as soon it not be some old geezer with hairy hands.

But, she didn’t even try to speak English, not a word, and she seemed incapable of speaking Czech slowly, and didn’t  really seem to give a shit that I wasn’t understanding half of what she was saying.

In fairness, I am the foreigner in this country and should speak much better Czech than I do after 17 years.  But, she was a young woman, maybe 30, which means she was probably about 4 years old when Communism ended.  She’s had a lifetime of exposure to English movies and English music (of course, learning  English from pop songs basically teaches you how to say ‘big butt,’ so maybe that’s a bad example.)  But, she’s a medical school graduate and probably has had English lessons since second or third grade.

I’m an English teacher.  You can see what basis I judge people on.

Everything repeats.  On discovery channel, I do like NASA’s unexplained files and Dark Matters, but I think I’m pretty well up on the top 10 or 15 UFO cases by now, they talk about the same ones over and over, and ditto dark matters.  If you flip over to the music channels, it won’t take long until you’re hearing the same songs over and over in a loop.

Facebook is no different.  I’ve got quite a few friends who are totally one issue people (or maybe one or two issue people) and it gets a bit repetitive.  I’ve got the  guy who believes that marijuana is the cure for everything, from cancer to erectile dysfunction.  I love my marijuana, have enjoyed it recreationally since I was a young lad back in Des Moines, but it gets to be a tiresome topic of conversation after a while.  I’ve got a girl who always writes about how evil Monsanto is.  I agree with her, but whenever I see her name I know what the post is about so I sort of scroll past real quick.

There’s one guy I’m thinking of defriending, I haven’t made up my mind yet.  I’m sure he’s not a bad person, but I don’t know him in real life so there’d be no fallout from defriending him.  He actually has 4 or 5 favorite topics, most of which are political.  He’s a bit to the right of me, but almost everyone is.  He calls himself a liberal, but says crap like ‘We have to remember that most cops are good.’

But that’s not why I would defriend him.  It’s just that he’s almost always right at the top of my feed, and I don’t comment on his posts enough to warrant that, and I suspect that he’s paying to have his posts pushed up, and that kind of pisses me off.

Axing him might actually speed things up, too, because he posts so much.  So, I don’t know.  Haven’t decided yet.