Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I am not generally a fan of elderly comedy.  I didn’t like The Golden Girls, for  instance.  I like Betty  White O.K., and I liked George Burns, but they are genuinely funny – their humor  doesn’t depend exclusively on  jokes about  men not able to get it up, people falling down, wrinkles, incontinence, and dying.

Judi Dench played the well adjusted one

Sort of the same with ethnic comics, or  fat comics.  If they can’t transcend that, after a while it’s just not interesting any more.  It’s sort of why Jeff Foxworthy was only funny the first couple of times you saw him, and then it was over, why Paul Hogan’s fame was limited to one character.

My wife, on  the other hand, loves films about old people and their relationships.  It’s one of the many ways  in which we are different.  Opposites attract.

So, she’s been bugging me for about a week to watch a film with her, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, about a bunch of English  senior citizens who  retire to a hotel in India, which  is kind of a dump, but a lovable dump.

Surprise, surprise.  I loved it, she fell asleep.  I don’t know if I would actually love India.  The noise, the crowds, the dirt, the smells, the poverty.  But in a film it’s a riot of color and smiling children and multiple, comic, human, very human, inter-reactions.

I  don’t want to recount the plot, or give spoilers, but suffice it to say that every single one of the main characters will surprise you in some way – well, not so much Dev Patel, you know in the end he will wed the lovely girl just like in Slum Dog Millionaire because he is so innocent and earnest, but all of the old folks.

In the end, their stories all serve to prove the theme of the movie, an Indian saying that gets repeated several times: “Everything will be all right in the end, and if things are not all right, then it isn’t yet the end.”

Ashley Madison.  Wow.  What a ginormous screw-up.  Here are the basics, and then some thoughts on the subject:  Ashley Madison is a dating site for married people, who would very much like to ‘date’ somebody they are not currently married to.  Hackers got into their database, and have published a list of the client’s names.

First, I hope they catch the bluenosed puritan (or bluenosed puritans) who did this.  I hope they publish his/her/their name.  They would not be safe anywhere on Earth.  What a rotten thing to do!  They are worse than Republicans as far as trying to discourage people from having sex.  This is the world’s biggest cockblock ever, a party poop of epic proportions.

What will happen?  It won’t be as universally devastating as some think.  For one, there is information overload.  There have been, I believe, about 34 million names published.  Hot damn, that’s a lot of people.  Many husbands (or wives), who have no reason to be suspicious, will not even bother to look.  Despite the results beingt published, a lot  of people will flat out get away with it.  Others will have spouses who don’t care.  Some couples will catch each other – that will be awkward.  Some spouses will get angry, but will decide they can live with the anger, rather than end the marriage.  Some people will lie (I was just doing research for a novel I was writing, honey, honest!).  Some of those will be believed, and some not.

Sites like this may step up security, or start using psuedonyms.  Sites like this will not go away.  How do I know? 34 million users!  That is a huge number.  And that is in addition to all of those who are cheating the old fashioned way, without any cyber help.  That means there are hundreds of millions of people (out of 7 billion, it’s not everybody, but it’s still a lot more common than I would have thought) who are cheating on their spouses, or want to.

So far, the only famous name that’s been mentioned in the news is Josh Duggar.  No real surprise, there.

I predict that Ashley Madison will roar back, buoyed by the publicity, stronger than ever.  If not, some other site doing the exact same thing.  Secrecy is dead and it doesn’t matter.  The urge to get a little bit of wild and crazy sex on the side is stronger than the need to conceal it from one’s spouse.

QE will be D.  That’s my prediction.

I don’t really know what to write about tonight, so here’s a poem I wrote a couple of days ago:

I do not stand up on the stage

to scream primeval pain and rage

about how life is meaningless

and freedom’s just a bigger cage

It may be valid art, I guess

but I’d prefer you were impressed

with the actual words I choose

and the thoughts that they suggest

Perhaps intended to amuse

or maybe to express my views

but what the poem is all about

is in the words I choose to use

It’s not the voice, there is no doubt

that when the words are written out

a whisper can become a shout

a whisper can become a shout

I’m not sure I succeeded 100% witgh this one.  It sort of hearkens back to a conversation I had one night at The Tulip, which was our venue for poetry readings at the time, and we were standing on the stairs between the basement, where the readings were, and the bar upstairs, and Eric Cummings said to me “It’s not the stage, it’s the page” and that’s always stuck with me.

Also, though, it’s about the  difference between a poem as sound, and feeling, and one where the words are expressing a more concrete thought, which I, personally, like them to.

There’s more to it than that, too, but I find that as I try to explain it in non-rhyming terms, it comes across sounding even weaker and more banal than the poem itself.

Another political post tonight.  I apologize, but it’s  one wild shitshow and I can’t take my eyes off it.

Evangelist Wackadoodle Mike Huckabee

On the Republican side.  Yes, Mike Huckabee’s statement was reprehensible.  He was talking about the 11 year old girl in Paraguay who was raped by her stepfather and forced to carry her baby to term.  Huckabee said that was about right, just because the poor girl was raped by her stepfather was no reason to abort the baby, and neither was the fact that she was only 11.

The thing is, Huckabee had no reason to comment on the incident at all, since it happened in Paraguay, which is not the country Huckabee is trying to be president of.  That hasn’t stopped him from making ignorant comments about Israel, either.  Or going there for fund-raisers.

Leaving the foreign entanglement aspect aside, it would seem like it was a bonehead thing to say, but I imagine it won’t hurt him any.  It’s the reality of the Republican race.  Trump is leading, with one insane, racist comment after another.  The other Republican candidates have realized that they have to make outrageously ignorant, callous comments even to keep in the news, much less win the primaries.

No comment is too stupid.  Expect more, and worse.

On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders dealt with a bad question from one of my favorite journalists in brilliant fashion. The journalist was Ana Marie Cox, who was the Wonkette girl back when Wonkette was funny.  The woman has a sharp, and wicked sense of humor.

She asked something about the coverage of Hillary’s hair and his hair and did he think it was all fair, and he said (I paraphrase) “Fuck off.”  Actually, he was much politer than that, he even prefaced his remarks with “I’m sorry to be rude,…” but he laid down the law, said he wanted to talk about serious issues and didn’t want to bother with  stupid questions.

So, still love and admire you, Ana Marie.  But Bernie don’t play that.

Had to get up early this morning to drop Isabel off at Day Camp, which is not really a camp because it’s at a school, and up until last night I thought it was at the school just across the street from us, but noooo, that plan got nixed because they didn’t have enough kids, so it was clear the hell out in some neighborhood I barely know, Metro to Smichovske Nadrazi (can’t get the Czech keyboard now for some reason – the computer just arbitrarily shuts different shit down when it feels like it.  Artificial intelligence is here but it is a somewhat malevolent, poltergeist type intelligence), then a bus about 6 stops.

“Take the umbrella,” Helena said.  “Nah,” I said. “It’s barely raining at all.”  And it wasn’t.  It was still only drizzling lightly when we got on the bus.  Then we noticed it was coming down the windows in sheets, big fountains were created whenever a truck passed by, and traffic was moving at a snail’s pace.

Between the  bus stop and the school, I got totally soaked.  Isabel had had the presence of mind to pack a raincoat.

Anyway, got home, took a hot shower, changed into dry stuff, and spent most of the day working on a proofreading, in between bouts of facebook.  It’s a difficult book to proofread.  The  author changes POV with each paragraph, and mixes tenses as randomly as salad ingredients.

Then, I had a lesson this afternoon, which I was quite looking forward to because this student hasn’t had a lesson since April.  His vacation, my vacation, various other things happening, and so on.

This time I took the umbrella.  It wasn’t really raining all that hard, I could have lived without it.  But, that’s the way.  If you take it, you won’t need it, if you don’t take it, you’ll need it.  Really, I should know that by now.