Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

(Yes, I am cheating again and writing this on the morning of the 6th(Happy D-Day Day!)because the internet crashed on me last night at midnight, as it is in the habit of doing lately, but I am going to backdate this in order to keep things orderly)

Bob Graham was a Senator from Florida and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time of 9/11, so he knows a thing or two about that bullshit, cover-up report.
One whole chapter of that report has been redacted. That’s not like a black bar on the page where you know a name has been left out, that’s not a sentence which might reveal the location of a secret base which is vital to national security, that is a whole fucking chapter.
Graham says it shows (or would show, if anybody were allowed to see it) that the Saudis financed 9/11. Not like a gang of 16 crazy people who were Saudis (as most of them were), but the Saudi government. The Saudi government, that the U.S. gives billions of dollars to every year, in the shape of fine Boeing products. (which is not anti-Israel somehow, because we give even more free weaponry to Israel) The Saudi Government, whom George W. Bush was particularly cosy with.
As my internet friend who posted the article said, (and I’m paraphrasing) when I raised the possibility of 9/11 actually being an inside job “without bringing conspiracy theories into it, at the very least it means Bush covered up for the people who killed 3,000 Americans.”
At the very least.
It also brings back the old question of who allowed all the Bin Ladens to fly out of the U.S. on 9/12. We never did get an answer to that one. Never forget.

Having read this story, it’s not that big of a deal, but the headline is cool and, by itself, indicates some very strange possibilities. NASA has built a flying saucer.
Never mind that they are ferrying it up to over 30 miles in the sky before letting it loose under it’s own power, and then it’s only mission is to go a little higher, before parachuting back to Earth. It’s a flying saucer.
Never mind that it’s ultimate mission will probably be just to be a Mars lander, and not to visit nearby star systems. It’s a flying saucer.
Never mind that they chose a really lame acronym. Low Density Supersonic Descender is a bit technical and lacking in magic, but LDSD sounds like Mormons on acid. Maybe that wouldn’t be lame at all if it was deliberate, but I suspect it’s not. But never mind all that. It’s a flying saucer.
Never mind that it bears little relation, except for shape, to any alien flying saucers which have visited Earth. They have crossed many light years of empty space, and we are still piddling around with the inner planets of our own Solar System. It’s a flying saucer.
There’s no real need to be excited. It’ not anti-gravity, it doesn’t use that new-fangled accidental warp drive. But it’s saucer shaped, and it flies, so it’s a flying saucer.
Why? Why do we feel the need to emulate that shape? Of course, time passes, design evolves, and mankind could not have been reasonably expected to shoot penis darts out into space forever. I suspect there’s more behind it, though.
Maybe NASA is convinced that flying saucers are real and we are emulating them, like some high-tech cargo cult. Maybe NASA actually has the remains of one (I wouldn’t be surprised if that were being kept secret) and has been doingsome reverse engineering.
Who knows? But I hope this upcoming test is a huge success, because it is kindof a cool thing. It is, after all, a flying saucer.

One thing I like about my Wednesday morning class (when he doesn’t cancel, which he does a lot)is that he likes to finish on the dot at 9 a.m. which means it’s not too hard to make my next class on time, even stopping to pick up a cheese roll (9 kc, not really a full breakfast but certainly enough to tide me over until lunch).
It was a bit unusual today, because usually their regular classroom teacher leaves very specific demands about which chapter she wants me to study with them and I hate it. The book is sickeningly British, and teaches absolute gobs of irrelevant vocabulary. She made me teach the passive voice for 3 weeks straight and if I were in charge of syllabus I’d spend maybe 15 minutes on it. Maybe.
Also, they’d thrown two classes together, and everybody was in a ‘fuck it, summer’s almost here’ mood. So, it was kind of a fun class, but not really a productive one.
Then, because I have a one hour break, I went for a walk in the park. It’s not really a park, just sort of a wild, undesignated area, but there are a couple of paths through it. I went down the low road, and was surprised to see that the hillside opposite was also covered in woods. Technically, this is still the middle of the city. I reached the end of the ‘park,’ went up the hill a bit and came back via the path along the ridge. So far I had seen only one jogger; the place does not attract many visitors. There are no tennis courts, no playgrounds and the grass does not get mowed.
So, I was just walking along, daydreaming, and there on my left was a lady. Nice looking lady, with her back to me and talking on a cell phone, and naked as the day she was born.
It’s a pebbly path and makes a crunchy noise as you walk but I don’t think she even noticed I was there. Still, it would have been stalkerishly weird and more than a little rude to linger, hoping for a better look, so I just kept walking.
But, damn, I love this town.

Let me be clear from the start (so you take any sarcastic comments further down with a grain of salt) that I am a social liberal, and believe that everybody should feel free to do whatever they want with their life, with their body, and everybody else should respect that, as long as they’re not hurting anybody.
Bruce Jenner is now Caitlyn Jenner, and we have to refer to her as her and I can deal with that, even though it seems a bit odd to me. The last picture I’d seen of her before today was most definitely him. Then comes the Vanity Fair article and BOOM!, it’s Caitlyn, looking just as female as if she’d been born that way. She’d said she was transitioning, but this was no gradual

transition. It looked like she stepped into a gender changer machine, fiddled with a couple of dials, and came out as a woman. Modern technology is amazing.
There are a couple of points I don’t understand, though. First, is this a lot more common than I thought it was? Caitlyn Jenner is not the first person to do it, not even the first famous person. Chelsea Manning and Chaz Bono come to mind. Then, as I read through the comments on facebook it seems like a lot of people ‘have a friend’ who’s either transitioning or has transitioned. They are more common these days than people who are allergic to gluten, it seems. So, I want to know. Just how common is this nowadays?
Secondly, I don’t understand the psychology of Jenner herself. She is 65 years old. She will never experience the fun of being a young woman (although, I must admit, for a 65 year old woman, she is smoking hot), she will never have the experience of child birth or breast feeding. Is it really worth all the hassle just to be able to dress up in women’s clothes and go out for brunch with the other old ladies.
Also, for someone who has always identified as a woman, she’s got some very manly accomplishments under her belt. College football, Olympic Gold (in a men’s event), spokesperson for Wheaties, actor (in some very manly roles, father to a whole slew of children, step-father to a whole bunch more.
So, why now?
I suppose, in the end, that’s nobody’s business but Caitlyn Jenner’s.

We had the last Alchemy of the season last night. Now there will be a summer break and hopefully, it will be back in September. It was a pretty great session. A couple of new and relatively new people, 3 or 4 poets who actually rhymed instead of just me, and a good crowd; about 30 people, some of whom were girls, and some of whom were real cute.
All male readers, though. That’s a problem. Too many poems about shit. At least 3. When I announced that I’d finished a book, I cringed a bit when I realized the title (The Shit Guru (an Expat’s Story) was lending to the theme. A few people said they would buy it, though, which was great.
I realized when I got home that with Alchemy done for the season, and my book done forever, the writing pressure is off. No deadlines. (O.K., a bit of proofreading to do tomorrow, but there is always proofreading – that is a minor irritation)
It feels great.
I am working on creating a page (facebook page) of Ekphrastic Poetry, but there’s no pressure there. It gets done when it gets done, I can add to it at will, and most of the material is already written.
I might also have enough conventional poems collected for another book.
I’d like to start on a second novel, but don’t have the idea yet. That will either happen someday when I’m walking down the street and suddenly say ‘OMG, I should write about that!’ and I’ll miss my tram stop and be late for work, or somebody will come to me and say ‘Hey, you should write about _______,” and that would be cool, too. Either way, I’m not going to rush it.
The pressure’s off.