Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I didn’t get much done today, but it was a nice day.   I did maybe a page and a half of the seven page proofreading I promised to finish this weekend, and put off the book review I intend to write until tomorrow as well.  I did write two poems, but one of them was just two lines:

The nicest thing about little towns

is that there’s country, all around

But the key event of the day was just sitting around a lot, while Isabel danced for a television  show.  No idea yet when it will air, but they said they want her to do it again and they’ll let us know when.  We’ll see.

It’s a very cute show

It’s a program on a kid’s channel that she likes a lot.  They have two professional dancers (although the guy does all the talking -I’d like the show better if they’d give the girl some lines) and they teach the kids a few dance moves and it’s really cute.  Isabel often stands in front of the TV and dances along.

The  first delay was that all the other kids had shown up with special dresses and we never got the memo on that.  She was dressed in jeans and a T shirt.  No problem, they found something for her, but it made me nervous that we were standing around in the hallway and all the other girls (there were about 8 girls and just one or two boys) were already in makeup, getting their hair done.

Once it started, the parents could only sit and watch it on TV, and it got boring real quick as mostly there was a lot of standing around and repeating the same lines over and over again.  We went for breakfast in the canteen, and then went back, and then out again just to wait in the lobby.  It took about 3 hours.  I was real proud of her, though.

So, she wanted to go out for lunch and we all like KFC so we called a friend and met him for lunch at a food court at a mall near where he lives, but we got lost along the way, several times, driving through a hilly, wooded neighborhood which was quite pretty but it was getting more and more frustrating with each wrong turn.

When we finally got home it was late in the afternoon.

We’ve all seen that little box about why Denmark is the happiest place on Earth (which I think is less than completely scientific – how can you measure happiness?) and they list all the reasons why, like health insurance and stuff (my wife thinks it’s because they have Legoland).  We’ve all seen the memes about how Iceland jailed all the bankers and Germany and Norway have free Universities, and how American police kill as many people in a day as British police do in a year.

They seem like a pretty reasonable argument that these social policies work and the USA should learn from them a bit.  They do to me, anyway,  and I think they do to most logical, reasonable people.  But right-wingers, progress blockers and moaning defeatists always object: “But those countries are much smaller than America and they have different cultures.”

Well, the different culture thing is partly true, but that’s sort of the point – their cultures are superior.

They say “America is so much bigger.  Those things just wouldn’t work.”  I don’t see what size has to do with it.  If country X has 10 million people and country Y has 100 million people, and they tax their citizenry at the same rate, country Y will raise 10 times as much revenue as country X, so they will be able to spend 10 times as much on social programs, which they will need to, because they have ten times as many people.

They say “But the USA is such a diverse country.”  So what?  No matter how diverse people are, everybody needs the same vitamins and minerals and daily number of calories.  Everybody has two arms and two legs and takes up one seat on public transportation.  People may have different races, religions, and tastes in  music, but we all have the same basic needs.

They say “America has a gun culture.  We can’t give that up.”  Culture, shmulture.  When you have a culture that actually threatens the lives of the people living in that culture, then that culture needs to change.

James Tate is dead.  He was a famous poet.  It’s sad that he’s dead, and he apparently meant  a lot to a lot of poets and I’m sure to his family and friends.  He was 72.

I don’t really know much about him.  I know very little about modern poetry.  I call myself a poet, but we’re not really talking about the same thing.

But, today he died, and today he’s being eulogized, so a lot of my poet friends have been sharing snippets of his work so I paid more attention  to James Tate, and learned more about him, than I did when he was alive.

3 or 4 of them attached their favorite James Tate poems, so I read those.  There was little thing about Jesus waking up after a nightmare, having a good stiff cup of coffee, and loving everybody, which was a nice, little Christian feelgood piece but I felt really more of a piece of flash fiction than a poem.

Then there was “I am a Finn” which was interesting to read, in the way that a Wikipedia page about Finland is easy to read, but I can’t really say it moved me, or changed my  life.

Then there was something about a toad, pet the toad or something like that.  Like the Good Morning Jesus poem, I felt it was more of a story than a poem, but I’m not sure what it was about.

But, enough about that.  He added to the body of literature.  His work meant a lot to a lot of people and even if it isn’t exactly my cup of tea I can at least, after reading these, get why other people loved it.

RIP, James Tate.

The thread started innocently enough, a meme with a long list of Obama’s accomplishments, and normally I would have ignored it (having seen it dozens of times before and generally being in agreement with it) but I was going through the comments and came across a guy saying Obama doesn’t deserve credit for the rising Dow, or for drops in unemployment, because those are factors beyond his control, and Obamacare has been a failure (which I take issue with) and that he didn’t end two wars (which I take even stronger issue with).

I actually wasn’t sure if he was writing ironically or not (note to liberals – if you’re trying to satirize conservatives, you’ve got to go WAY over the top – just sounding a little bit nuts is not going to be enough) because he said ‘Obama is the worst president since George Bush’ which is technically true and a little bit funny.

So, I responded with my objections to his post but included that I was not certain if he was joking or not.

He responded that he was most definitely not joking, and that he had voted for Obama twice (which I don’t believe) and was very disappointed.

I responded that if he wasn’t joking, then he was lying.

The way I see it, we are no longer spending billions of dollars a day in Iraq, we are no longer razing cities like Fallujah and using white phosphorus, American troops are no longer posing for photos as they abuse civilian prisoners at Abu Graib and Bagram, so even if there are some nasty left over side effects of the war in Iraq (such as Guantanamo, and ISIS), the actual war is pretty much over and Obama gets credit for that.  Even more so Afghanistan.

The originator of the thread said that he tries to keep the conversation civil and my accusing somebody of lying was not conducive to a constructive conversation.

Maybe I shouldn’t have called him a liar.  Maybe I should have just called him an asshole.

One thing a lot of the cool kids are doing on facebook is posting albums of memes, as if just seeing one of the damned things at a time wasn’t bad enough.

You go online, hoping to find some intelligent conversation (perhaps I am expecting too much), and you see an endless display of platitudes on posters, it’s the parents’ kitchen from hell.

Occasionally, of course, you see a clever one, just as occasionally you see a clever bumper sticker, a clever T shirt, or an intelligent piece of graffiti.  As crazy old Ross Perot used to say “even a  blind pig finds an acorn now and again” and considering the quote came from Ross Perot, you kind of have to say QED on that one.

But the way I see it, posting those memes is cheating.  It’s not your own idea, not your own thought, not your own words.  Of course, it’s something you agree with, but that’s not interesting.

Also, because these  things get posted again and again and again and again, there is a real good chance that, whatever it is, I’ve seen it before.  I am sick of seeing that stupid “If you want to ban guns maybe we should ban spoons for making people fat” hardy har har, to which I have replied “That is a very poor analogy and even using it makes you sound like a moron” several times, but the meme keeps coming and I’ve already said my piece, so what can I do?

I don’t know.  I suppose I’m in the minority, but I’ll keep on limiting my status updates and comments to things I actually thought up myself.  I may make an exception now and again, if one is just overwhelmingly appropriate to the conversation, but feel free to call me on it if I do.