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It rained last night and it rained today, a good solid rain, so the air in Prague feels the way the air in Prague should feel in August: pleasantly warm, not uncomfortably hot, and not unbearably dense.

Bernie Sanders

So, I cannot blame the heat for my laziness.  I only did about half the pages I was supposed to proofread today.  That’s O.K.  I have tomorrow.

As for tonight’s topic, I have a prediction, about the upcoming (come on, it’s still over a year away) U.S. presidential election: it’s going to get ugly.  Real ugly.

Maybe not right away.  Bernie Sanders has said he intends to  take the high road and keep it positive.  His supporters aren’t bound by that, and I’ve seen plenty of Hillary bashing, but it’s coming mostly from Republicans.  For her part, Hillary has not been directly attacking Sanders, because that would be silly – she doesn’t want to draw too much attention to the fact that she’s just borrowing all of his programs.

What Chafee and O’Malley and Webb are up to, I’ve no idea.  Barring a massive change, they are out of contention, but they are not dropping out.  I suppose once your in, you might as well hang in there and hope for a miracle.

But, it’s early stages yet.  If Sanders wins Iowa and New Hampshire and Hillary sees the nomination slipping from her grasp, she is likely to get every bit as vicious and negative as she did in 2008.  And that’s just the precursor to what the Republicans will do in the general.

They will try not to sound bigoted (well, maybe not if Trump is the nominee), because really, political correctness is important, if you don’t observe it at all, you become….Donald Trump.

They will try, but they’ve got nothing on Sanders.  They can’t touch him on the issues, because most people agree with him on the issues.  They can scream “Socialism!” at the top of their lungs, but they’ve been screaming it at Obama since 2008, and nobody gives a shit any more.  They might make a few snide remarks about Bernie’s age, but nobody really cares about that.  He’s in good shape, and obviously still sharp mentally.

So, they are going to try and find increasingly unsubtle ways to remind voters that Sanders is Jewish. That’s what I mean by ugly.  They will remind people that he grew up in New York, because to many of their base, ‘New York’ and ‘Jew’ just go together, it’s a phrase that trips off the tongue.  They will talk, ad nauseum, about Christ, and about America being a ‘Christian Nation.’

They will do everything except say it out loud, and some of them might say it out loud.  That will be awkward for them, as they try to be huge pro-Israeli hawks and still run a campaign based on anti-semitism, but they’ll manage.

Republicans don’t worry  about self-contradiction much.

I had a good, and interesting day of Tarot reading today – mostly women, a few repeat customers, and a much more respectable take than Thursday – but there were still large gaps of time when there was nobody in the  shop at all, so I finished Game of Thrones, the first book in the Saga of Ice and  Fire series, the one everybody is talking about even though they are all talking  about  the TV series  I haven’t seen, so I’m kind of going about it backwards, but, what can I say?  I’m a book person.

Daenerys Targaryen breastfeeding baby dragons

When you finish a book  on Kindle, they ask you right away to rate it (I gave it 4 stars, which  is pretty good, I think) and wrote about a 3 sentence review, which didn’t take because they said  I was over by  46 characters.  So, they don’t want a review, they want  something like a tweet.  Fuck that.

That’s why I have a blog.  First, it was an exciting, entertaining book, with complex characters you really start caring about,  plenty of sex, and absolutely massive amounts of violence.  I don’t rate it quite as high as Harry Potter, or even Lord of the Rings, but very few books  do rate that high, so, fair enough.  It’s the best new thing I’ve read in years, I’ll give it that.

I intend to read more of the series, I’ll give it that, too.

But, I didn’t care for the ending, so if you intend to read the books, or haven’t got past Series One in your TV viewing, stop reading this now, because I’m going to bitch about that for a little bit.

Throughout most of the book, Martin creates a very believable world (except for the variable lengths of the seasons, which would require an irregular orbit of the planet, which doesn’t happen).  The animals are like animals which exist, or have existed, people die when stabbed, or hung, or thrown from great heights, or at least are seriously injured, people have appetites and desires which we clearly recognize in our own culture.

There is some talk of magic, and the supernatural, but the smartest characters dismiss it as old wive’s tales.  Then, at the very  end, Daenerys manages to hatch out 3 several-thousand-year-old dragon eggs by laying them on her husband’s funeral pyre (it hadn’t worked when she’d just tried an ordinary fire) and throwing in a lot of horse blood and a (not completely innocent) human sacrifice.

Of course it works.

Then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, the final scene is one of her breastfeeding the baby dragons.  BULLSHIT!  Dragons are not mammals, they are hatched from eggs, and therefore do not drink milk.  They wouldn’t have milk if their mother was a dragon, because dragons do not have tits, so why should they be so eager to slurp down the trans-species milk?

Things like that irritate me.  Otherwise, a great book.

One of my facebook writer friends was speaking of writing the perfect murder and bemoaning the fact that the more she wrote, the more she realized that there was no such thing.  I responded, flippantly I must confess, with the old quote “We don’t know what we don’t know” and realized as I hit send the extreme truth of it in this case.

There might be lots of deaths which are classified as a suicide or accident and never investigated further which were actually murders – very few police departments actually have an Adrian Monk – and any of those would be a perfect murder.

However, that would make for a poor novel.  Maybe.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

I’ve been reading Tarot cards for about 18 years now but I got a surprise this morning.  I was reading the cards for someone I thought I understood pretty well and it was coming out a pretty bland reading until I got to the six of swords, which has a child on it – and I tried to picture him as a child, and his adult motives suddenly came clear to me.

We talked a bit more, I didn’t want to dig too deeply – I’m not a psychiatrist, I don’t want to dredge up things I don’t know how to deal with – but he sort of confirmed that I was right.

We don’t know what we don’t know.

I don’t actually know how this works.  Outside there is a nice breeze and the air has cooled down a bit.  Here, in the flat, the heat wave is still on.  So, I go out, I cool down, I come back in and sit down to write and I start sweating again.

I hope this means our heat wave is over.  Today was a very slow day at work, and when I say work I mean my ‘job’ as Tarot reader in an art gallery, which I do for donations, so it’s sort of like busking, just the gallery gives me a table and it fits in with the theme, it’s a one-artist place, and it’s all magic and fairies and mystical creatures in the woods.

The girls who work there, and the owners, seem to think business will pick up when it cools down.  I don’t see the correlation but they’ve been there a while, they have a better idea than I do about what is normal.

Even though I made almost nothing today, I enjoy being there.  Reading Tarot is fun, I get to meet lots of people and, with the tourist clientele, I meet people from all over the world and get to practice speaking in different languages a bit.  I gave a couple of readings in French today, which reminded me of how much French I don’t know, but they were tolerant about that.

I told them to be careful as they purchase a new house, which is kind of no brainer advice, but people take it a bit more seriously when it comes from a fortune teller than when it comes from a real estate agent.

I also like it because I’m surrounded by beautiful art.  That may get dull eventually, but she’s so prolific that there are often new things.

One other good thing is that when it’s not too busy, I can always read a book.  I’m on the first book of the Game of Thrones series, and I’m getting into it. Most of my favorite characters are named Stark, but I also quite like Tyrian Lannister, and Danaerys, and you know that some of these characters are going to kill, or at least try their damnedest to kill, some of the others.

It’s as if Tolkien had written half of the chapters in The Lord of the Rings from the Orcs point of  view.

a new poll shows Sanders leading Clinton in New Hampshire, 44% to 37%.  Now, it’s still half a year until the New Hampshire primary and I’m sure a lot of people are sick to death of reading politics, politics, politics every single day, and I kind  of agree with that, but this is big news for a couple of reasons.

Even though the poll sampling was only about 450 people, that’s about all they usually are, so it’s accuracy isn’t really om question.

It’s New Hampshire, the first primary state (Iowa doesn’t have a primary.  They have a series of caucuses.) so that’s significant.

He didn’t just squeak ahead of her.  Last time we all looked, he was behind and suddenly he’s ahead by 7 points.  That’s a BaBOOM moment.

From now on, any time  we see an aritcle that talks about Hillary’s role as front runner, we get to say “Now hold on there a second, snooty fancypants pundit.  She ain’t first in New Hampshire.  And, if we are feeling partgicularly cruel, we can include a link.

The Donald (I saw one girl suggesting today that ‘Donald become the official girls’ word for period, as in the sentence “No sex tonight, honey, I’ve got my Donald.”  I thought that was funny.) has started to attack Sanders, which is fine. It shows that Sanders is being taken seriously.