Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Of course, no one knows, exactly, what dogs think.  That dog whisperer guy on TV probably has a better idea than most, but nobody knows exactly.  They are a different species.  It is inevitable that in some ways they think differently than us.

Pistol and Boo: Not welcome in Australia, but their owners knew that.

One thing is, they have not had the ‘human experience’ in life.  When you dress a dog up in a costume and put it on YouTube, lots of people may think it’s funny and cute, but the best you can say about your dog is that they put up with it.  Dogs have never heard of YouTube, they could care less how many likes you got.  A ‘like’ is not meat.

Do police dogs understand that they are police dogs?  I doubt it, they are just trained to recognize the smell of drugs (quite possibly by being given drugs).  I imagine they are aware they are doing a job, and they probably love their handlers and seek their approval, same as dogs who herd sheep or pull sleds.  But I doubt if they have a great concept of the role their owners play in society.

And I’ll bet that celebrity’s dogs do not realize their owners are celebrities.  Johnny Depp’s dogs are not aware that Johnny Depp is Johnny Depp.

They also are not likely to be impressed with going on a faraway vacation.  A regular human being, whose home is in Los Angeles, might be very excited about a trip to Australia.  They might be looking forward to seeing kangaroos, and hearing Australian accents all around them, visiting well known sites like the opera house and Bondi Beach, and uploading lots of pictures to make their friends jealous.

Dogs don’t give a shit about all that.  They’re looking at several hours in a dark, cramped space.  Although they might miss their owners a bit, they’d probably prefer to be left at home.  It’s not hard to find dogsitters.

Especially not if you’re Johnny Depp.  So, as much as I enjoy his movies, I’ve got to side with the Australian government on this one.  They have laws against bringing dogs into the country.  Depp (more specifically his wife, Amber Heard, but I’m sure he knew about it and don’t quite understand why they haven’t both been charged) needs to pay the fine, and shut up about it with the small exception perhaps, of apologizing to the Australian nation, which has very good reasons for not allowing people to bring dogs into the country, and apologizing to his dogs.

It being the middle of summer, the season of school being out, I’ve got a hell of a lot of time on my hands and less than a steady income coming in.  Proofreadings are occasional and sales of books have not yet reached Stephen King proportions, I have been casting around for some project which could ameliorate this situation.

Starting Monday, August 3rd, I will be the Tarot Reader in Residence at Marie Brozova’s art Gallery, which is in a little pasaž not far from Old Town  Square, I’ll announce with the actual address closer to the day.

I love reading Tarot Cards.  It is a way of getting into  the lives of people whose lives you are not part of at all.  It gives one license to be a psychic peeping tom.  Right or wrong, the reading is going to tell you something about their lives.  If you guess correctly that  they had a recent break up and are looking for a new love, they will deluge you with  questions about the road ahead and, as long as you keep your answers a bit vague and generally upbeat, they will be thrilled.  You can say anything you want about the future.  If it’s bad, they’ll forget it, if it’s good, they’ll probably forget it, too.  People have short memories.

On the other hand, if they say “No, I’ve been happily married for 10 years, there’s no possibility of a breakup at all,” then you know that they have been happily married for 10 years.  Without Tarot, it can take a long time to get that much information.

It’s not magic.  It works for some, because it’s a bit like therapy, if they give you lots of information about themselves, you can give them some advice for the future which, inspired or not, is relatively objective.

I haven’t been doing it much lately, not even among friends and family, and I’m looking forward to getting back into it.

I took Isabel to see the Minion movie today, and it was about as expected.  Some very funny moments but basically a one joke thing, an exploitation of their popularity in Despicable Me.  Isabel said she really enjoyed it, but there were only 4 or 5 points which elicited spontaneous laughter, and there was never an uproarious wave of it sweeping through the cinema.

Dracula’s Birthday Party – part of a very funny montage

I liked the opening, the explanation of their evolution.  It explained a lot, and was funny.

I thought setting it in 1968 was inspired.  Of course, it had to be sometime prior to 2010 or so, it was, after all, a prequel.  But there wasn’t so much to make fun of in the ’70s, the 80s and the ’90s.  1968 is to years what bananas are too food, what farts are to bodily functions, what Jewishness is to ethnicities, what monkeys are to animals, what grandmothers are to relatives – it’s inherently the funny one.

There were lots of hippie jokes, and London fashion scene jokes, and even a little dig at Richard Nixon.  It also allowed for a lot of great music.  One of my favorite scenes was when they were breaking into the Tower of London to steal the crown and hypnotized the very overweight guards into stripping down to their underwear and performing a dance number from ‘Hair.’

Of course, nobody had vanity plates in 1968 but a family of villains with Luv 2 Rob was just unavoidable, and I’m sure nobody in their target audience spotted the historical anomaly.

The King Bob scene was a brilliant bit of self parody, as the whole long speech he gave in Minionese elicited no more than puzzled looks but all he needed to do was shout “King Bob!” to get a rousing cheer.

The coronation of Scarlett Overkill was, it seemed to me, pretty much stolen from Johnny English but there were a lot of Minion touches.

Overall, worth seeing because it will keep the kids entertained for an hour and a half.  It’s just a spinoff from Despicable Me and probably doesn’t deserve a sequel of its own, but there’s no doubt in my mind it will get one. Maybe several.

Scott Walker is in the running now, which was expected, promising to do to the country what he did to Wisconsin.  On the Democratic side, Jim Webb made what I consider to be an absolutely horrific statement, saying that all the Confederate Flag whoop-dee-doo was an attack on Southern White culture, conveniently forgetting that the impetus for all that Confederate Flag whoop-dee-doo was that a product of that culture murdered 9 black people in a church.

Still, my internet friend who is 100% pro Webb was not dissuaded and there were plenty of people on that thread who thought it was a totally reasonable statement.

The thing is, you just cannot change people’s minds.  Events can change people’s minds.  Dylan Roof proved that.  Circumstances can change people’s minds.  People vote differently once they’ve got a bit of money than they do when they don’t.  But just words, and logic, and examples don’t do it.

I’m no better.  I read what people post on the internet and I either agree or disagree, and I post my comment accordingly.  Sometimes I’m flippant, sometimes I’m rude, (I try to avoid those, it doesn’t usually end well, it never ends with them won over to my point of view for instance, but sometimes the temptation to let fly with the zinger is just too great), sometimes I make what I think is a brilliant, coherent argument, but it doesn’t matter.

For instance, somebody posted today that “There is no such thing as a stupid opinion.”  I felt obliged to respond, since I felt that was, itself, the stupidest thing I’d seen posted in a long time.  I wasn’t rude or anything, I just pointed out the very obvious fact that there are stupid opinions.

It’s obvious, really.  There are stupid people.  They have opinions.  It’s  logical that a certain percentage of those opinions are going to be stupid.  Hell, I’m a smart guy and I’ve held a few stupid opinions in my time.  I can remember thinking that James Woods was a great actor, for example.

He wrote back and said “That’s just your opinion.”

See?  No reasoning with some people.

Somebody posted a news article on my facebook page today about how scientists are using multiple mice brains to create powerful, organic computers and I decided that was pretty gosh darned fascinating because on the one hand, if they can plug multiple mice brains into one giant mouse mind, then they can  do the same thing with humans, which  is both  thrilling and terrifying, in a weird sort of dystopian sci-fi sense.  On the other, it might be flat out embarrassing if we find out it doesn’t take that many mice to achieve a human level of intelligence.

So, I decided to write  tonight’s blog on that subject but when I went to google to try and find the article there I found out that  this is not a new concept at all and there were tons of articles about multiple-mouse brain computers, and mouse-human brain interfaces, and human to computer brain interfaces, and it seems like the future is here.

So why is it the world is still so messed up?  If we can put all of our minds together and have all of the information in the world, about the inter-reactions of different chemicals and the patterns of the weather and what foods people need and all of the new inventions and which ones work and which ones still need work, why can’t we figure out solutions to all of our problems?

I don’t know.  I suppose when multiple minds connect, like literally connect and not just chat with words, they probably still exchange the electronic, or deep neuron, version of cat pictures.