Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Journalists have a job, which is to tell the story, history as it’s happening, the work in progress that is the story of mankind. That’s the way it used to be. Or maybe not, you can find partisanship in newspapers at pretty much any point in history when there’s been newspapers. Thomas Nast was not exactly objective. In fact, it may have been entrenched politicians offended by his work that led to the word ‘nasty.’ (I just made that up and it probably has no basis in truth whatsoever.)
Anyway, in theory, that’s their job. That’s the way Walter Cronkite saw it, that’s what I was taught back in journalism school.
There’s still a difference, though, between those who say they are being objective but subtly choose language which is more advantageous to one side than another (one columnists freedom fighter is another’s terrorist) and those who are blatantly partisan and don’t give a shit who sees it.
The reason I’m discussing this is Martin O’Malley. He has announced his candidacy, it’s official and I’ve seen several news outlets saying “O’Malley Challenges Clinton for Nomination.” That is slipping into blatantly partisan and don’t give a shit who sees it territory. The headlines should either read “O’Malley Seeks Democratic Nomination” or “O’Malley Challenges Clinton and Sanders for Nomination.”
They make it sound like Hillary Clinton already has the nomination and it must be wrested from her grasp, which isn’t true at all. No caucuses or primaries have been held, no delegates selected.
But, we can see that she has the press on her side.

For a long time I have dreamed about getting a place in the country to use as a language school. Partly because I’ve been frustrated as a teacher and blame, perhaps falsely, my students’ difficulties in learning English on the fact that they have one or two lessons a week, for an hour, which leaves them a lot more time to forget what they’ve learned than to learn and therefore, my theory goes, if I could get them for a week, learning all day every day, speaking English in the evening before going to bed and starting over again first thing in the morning, I might be able to force enough English down their throats that it would take them so long to forget it that they’d wind up remembering it.
We’ve had a few “English Weekends” here and there, renting a place and doing the best we could. 3 or 4 were successful, and 3 or 4 weren’t so much, and we haven’t done that for awhile.
Now the “The Shit Guru (an Expats Story) has been published, and the agreement between myself and the principal character as far as spending the profits is that all will go to setting up such a place, except that I would call it “Watson’s School of English” and he would call it “The Meditation Center of the Guru Sharab,” but that’s cool, a place can have more than one function.
It could happen. If everybody who reads this blog orders a copy and convinces twelve of their best friends to buy a copy, and they convince 12 of their friends to buy a copy and….we’d be able to set it up.
We went to look at a place today. It belongs to a friend of his who didn’t so much buy it as got stuck with it. It’s a totally derelict building, looks like it hasn’t been lived in for a decade, at least. There’s no glass in half the windows, the ceilings all look like they’re ready to fall in, there is mold on all the walls, the yard is full of trash, there are ladders in a couple of places there should be staircases, there is a balcony nobody dared step out on, and there’s no water or electricity.
I’m jazzed about it. It’s massive, it’s isolated, there’s enough yard space for a nice garden, and it’s in a pleasant, little town in a lovely area. We will see.

One of Newton’s Laws (or two, I’m not sure how they’re classified) is that a body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion remains in motion, unless acted upon by some outside agency, unless somebody or something comes along and stirs the pot.
Of course, Newton was in the mid 17th century, he’d never heard of a particle collider and even Einstein was about 300 years from being born, so what Newton didn’t realize was that damned near nothing, not even a rock, could be at complete rest, because mass and energy are the same thing.
Even going macro for this thought experiment, the stillest things in this world – which are rocks, I suppose – occasionally fall from a mountain.
And once one thing interacts with one other thing and that with something also, pretty soon the whole world is jumping up and dawn and totally excited – or not.

It is late and I am tired and don’t really care what’s going on in the world; thousands dying of heat in India, and Texas ravaged by floods (there’s a strange sort of symmetry there), Hillary inevitable (I wish they would just stop saying that), and more shit about the Duggars (I think Dan Savage might be overplaying his hand on this one. “To Duggar” doesn’t need to be a verb. ‘Child molestation’ or ‘kiddie diddling’ are perfectly adequate), so I will just focus on writing about my day.
I had my usual 7 a.m. class, which does not take that long to get there even though it’s fairly far because it’s a straight shot on the Metro and then the bus is usually right there, and then it is an easy one hour conversation with a totally pleasant student.
Got home about 9 a.m. and made myself a to do list, which is usually a totally futile gesture, but today’s just turned out to be a bit over-optimistic, but I did get most of the stuff done.
I copied out the stories we need for our monthly student newsletter, Watson’s World News. I started figuring out how to set up a page because my next project, now the the book is finished, is a page called willie watson’s poems about paintings (mostly), or maybe just Willie’s ekphrastic poetry. I proofread a few pages of stuff for Helena’s job. And, of course, I put up a couple more posts about my new book.
When I write it all down like that, it doesn’t sound like all that much. But, for me, that counts as an active and productive day.

Yeeehaw! The book I’ve been working on for the last year and a half, “The Shit Guru (an Expat’s Story)” is done, done, done, and should be available to download on Kindle at quite a reasonable price by this time tomorrow, and as a real paper and ink model via Amazon.com in approx. 3 business days, so I expect by next Tuesday at any rate.
If you’re in Prague, I’ll be walking around with copies pretty soon, and will try to get them into Shakespeare and Sons in Malostrana.
I think it’s a good book. It has lots of interesting stories, some are funny, some are interesting, some are a bit hard to believe, it takes place in some very exotic settings such as Prague, Shanghai, Kaifeng, Italy, Egypt, Amsterdam, and the American midwest.
Come to think of it, it would make a damned good movie.
It’s my first actual book, and by that I mean not a collection of poetry, and I hope to write more, but the poetry is cranking along at a goodly pace, too.
I’ve been seriously working on the poetry for the last 15 years and the pace just seems to be increasing. I hope to get out a book or two of poetry by the end of the summer, but I’m also looking for another novel to write. Poetry doesn’t pay.