Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

The double Yurchenko Pike – I know nothing about gymnastics at all, but it just sounds hard. Apparently, it is hard. So hard that no female gymnast before Simone Biles had ever done it (a few men have done it, but not many). It’s a double back flip off the beam, but at some point between the run-up and the flip she has to turn her body around front to back. I’ve watched the video a couple of times. It happens so fast I can’t see it happen. Her body is faster than the eye. She is like a full body magician. She is magnificent, stunning, awesome, a freak of nature, a person endowed with super powers.
The judges gave her a 6.6. I guess, as far as the double Yurchenko Pike goes, they reckon it was only fair to middling. Not that any of them could have pulled it off. That’s not their job. They’re job is just to sit on their judgmental asses and judge.
It’s as if people watching at home, in July of 1969, had said “Eh, as far as moon landings go, this one wasn’t all that great.”
To her tremendous credit, Simone Biles is being very cool about it all. “That’s on them, that’s not on me” she said. Very reminiscent of Jim Thorpe, after being stripped of his Olympic medals for once having played a little minor league baseball, saying “I know I won those races.”
As an athlete, she is absolutely without comparison. Greatest of all time is an understatement. As a human being, she is a class act.

Well, this: https://www.facebook.com/IlhanMN/photos/pcb.3838176869624244/3838175932957671/ It’s a cute bit, nothing world changing, and probably was really easy to put together, so it says very little about the politician presenting it, and if it was a politician I didn’t like, I would probably accuse them of being shallow and pandering.
After all, it doesn’t take much to put a pair of glasses on a pit-bull mix and have it be cute. That’s automatically cute. The only thing cheesier than using animals in this way is using children in this way.
But, I like Ilhan Omar, I like her ideas and I think she’s doing a great job. And this is original, at least until everybody else starts copying the format, because it’s easy to do and, as the last couple of decades have proven, something that people absolutely never get tired of: cute animal photos. It may win her a few votes, and if it does, I’m happy about that.

Last night I watched a hockey match between the Czech Republic and Belarus. I was quite relieved when the Czechs won (in overtime) because we lost the first two games (to Russia and Switzerland) and I was worried we wouldn’t even make it past the group round.
I wasn’t even thinking about the hijacking, which just goes to show that more than one thing is happening in a country at a time, and even though Belarus is apparently a nightmare dictatorship now, some people are playing hockey, some are watching it, and others are doing other normal, everyday things.
But Roman Protasevich, blogger and journalist, is going through hell there right now, and it’s kind of bizarre. He was not actually in Belarus. He was flying over it, on a commercial flight, headed for Vilnius, Lithuania (from Athens). Belarusian air traffic control contacted the pilot to say there was a bomb on board (that was a flat out lie) and they should land in Minsk. They sent up a couple of fighter jets to emphasize the suggestion.
On the one hand, everybody should be angry that Belarusian dictator Lukashenko is arresting a journalist just for saying he’s a dictator, and most of the nation’s (with the notable exception of Russia) of the world are condemning him for that, but also for claiming there was a bomb on board.
Air traffic safety is kind of a sacred thing. Pilots everywhere need to know that when they are contacted by air traffic control, they are being told the truth. This erodes that trust.
It’s like pulling a fire alarm to get out of school, it’s like calling 911 just for a laugh. It’s wrong, it’s dangerous, and it is not any more acceptable because it was the government doing it. In fact, that makes it worse. Much, much worse.

One of the first things I saw when I opened up my Facebook this morning, because that is my usual morning ritual, coffee and Facebook, was one of those word search thingies. You know, the ones that say “The first 3 words you see define your personality” or “will determine your life for the coming year” and the words are all things like connection or harmony or love. They are fairly harmless even though they are obviously bullshit, somewhat like astrology or even Tarot, which I dabble in occasionally.
But for some reason this morning it triggered me, I think it was the phrase ‘will determine your life for the coming year.’ These are just words that somebody put on paper. Sure, ‘love’ or ‘money’ or ‘family’ will be important in the coming year to almost everybody, and that’s why those words are included. It’s just a game, though, and the ubiquitousness of these games is an indicator that billions of people do not have anything truly important going on in their lives, and look for meaning in things like this.
In an interconnected world, the things that will have the greatest effect on our lives are the stability of our atmosphere, whether or not humanity is destroyed in a nuclear war, or sentient robots taking over the planet and eliminating us all so they can live in peace with the trees and the flowers.

This is in response to a statement I read today that “Capitalism breeds innovation.” We’ve all heard that one, along with “War breeds innovation.”
Actually, both statements are true, but not a good argument for keeping either capitalism or war. The truth is, almost anything can lead to innovation.

Whoever first figured out how to use fire did not make a dime. They did it for the good of their tribe and it might have made them very popular, but there was no economic incentive. Ditto, whoever invented the wheel. Not only didn’t they make money, but it wasn’t long before others borrowed, and improved upon, their invention. We don’t even know their name.

Kids innovate all the time, or used to, at any rate, making guns and swords out of sticks, and dolls out of old rags. Life is more pre-packaged now, but I doubt if the old instincts have completely died. Athletes will innovate to win games, actors will innovate to steal a scene, and survivalists will innovate to survive. As a teacher I have innovated, sometimes mid-lesson. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but money is not the motivating factor. Around the world, there are millions of garage tinkerers, amateur gardeners, and stay at home chefs who are innovating all the damn time, and they don’t expect anything out of it except maybe a few words of praise.
Innovation is a deep instinct in our species and it predates capitalism by thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years.