Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Hillary Clinton is expected to announce her candidacy on Sunday, to the surprise of no one. She could really set the world on its ear by announcing that she’s NOT going to run. That would open the race wide up and make for a seriously interesting political season, but the chances of her doing that are somewhat less than a major asteroid striking the Earth between now and then.
I’ve got mixed feelings, of course. (Does that even need to be said? Don’t all of us have somewhat mixed feelings about almost everything? It is the nature of the mix, what ratios of which contents, that is interesting.)
I have made it clear on this blog many times, I believe, that I don’t want Hillary to get the nomination. On the other hand, I want to keep the debate civil, because there’s a real possibility we’ll be stuck with her and I’d hate to damage her chances in the general election where she will, no doubt about it, be running against someone who is a truly dangerous sociopath.
So, here are some good things about Hillary: She’s smart. She’s crazy smart. Everybody who’s worked with her, or against her, agrees on that. It’s a plus. I’d rather have a smart president than a Cruz, Paul, Santorum or Huckabee any day of the week.
She’s a woman. That is a plus. It would be good to have a female president. It would set a precedent, it would break a barrier. I don’t think she’s the best woman for the job, but Liz Warren is not running. She’s said it enough times that we just have to accept it.
She is a Democrat, at least nominally. Even though she voted for the Iraq War and supports fracking, she is not likely to appoint any neo-fascists to the Supreme Court, which any Republican candidate would.
So, it’s game on. I think there are at least a half dozen good Democratic candidates who could steal the nomination from her, and I hope one of them does, but the main thing is to keep the debate civil and intelligent.
The Republicans are the party of stupid. Let’s keep that distinction clear.

I do seem to be posting a lot about aliens lately, but so be it. I’ve been seeing a lot about aliens, it seems something is in the air, and so I take it in and put it out again, here, hopefully with some value added.

Aliens in, aliens out.
One problem, though, with reading and commenting on every alien story out there is that occasionally you come across something which really is so absurd it is mockable, and you don’t know if that means it all is and this example was just so egregious, or if you have spotted the one bogus article out of all the serious ones, or if somebody is trolling and trying, deliberately, to muddy the waters, to jam the signals, to deliberately mangle the message.
Seriously, Arianna Huffington. Why even have a science page if you are going to headline it with stupid articles like this one.
“Aliens Might Be 8 Feet Tall and weigh as much as Polar Bears.”
Of course they might. They might also be short with really big heads, the way they are usually pictured. They might look like elephants, who have fingers at the end of their trunks, I saw that one in a science fiction book once. They might look like devils, that was in Childhood’s End, by Arthur C. Clarke. They might have one side of their face white and one black to serve as a parable for racism. They might look like (and, in fact, be) robots, sent out to explore the galaxy, which would raise the question of what does the species who built them look like. They might have green skin but look super hot.
They might look like anything at all because we just don’t know. They just might.

I saw this headline today and wondered “How can they predict that?”
How can they be so certain that we’ll find extraterrestrial life, or strong evidence thereof at any rate, within the next 10 years?
Then I thought, actually, that sounds a lot like they already know, and are just preparing the public for the shock. Maybe these ‘fast radio bursts’ they’ve been studying for the last 8 years are already definite evidence, and just don’t know how to explain it yet. It actually would be quite anticlimactic – “We’ve discovered an extraterrestrial intelligence, but they probably weren’t contacting us specifically, just sending out a message into space the same way we have, and they’re still hundreds of light years away. We can respond or not respond, but nobody alive today is ever going to see them.”
Maybe the Roswell crash, or one of the other famous encounter stories, is real, and they know that with the advances in social media – where anybody with reasonable hacking skills can get into government files – the truth is going to come out..
Then I actually read the article, which is inevitably a big mistake. Facts are so much less interesting than wild speculation. Although NASA scientists seem positive that there’s life out there, they were quick to add that we’re likely to find microbes or bacteria before we find anybody looking like Klingons or Bajorans.
On the one hand, killjoys.
On the other hand, that’s still pretty amazing. When we discover living organisms outside of the Earth,even single-celled, the chances of intelligent life outside of Earth zoom up from 50-50 to nearly a dead certainty.
I’m still pretty jazzed.

A Las Vegas casino buffet is a beautiful thing. Even the mediocre ones have enough of a variety of food that pretty much anybody can pig out on several things which aren’t a part of their normal diet.

You can, if you are greedy, starve yourself for half a day before going and then take your time while you are there, pigging out for 3 or 4 hours, although they do sort of frown on people who try to stretch it over more than one meal period. “Sure,” they think, as they send evil thoughts your way, giving you voodoo indigestion, “you’ve paid for it, you’re legally entitled, but you’re still a fucking pig.” They will call you Mr. Creosote behind your back.
So, when John Noble, who looks like a man who enjoyed a ridiculously large meal when he could get it, won free meals for life for him and a guest at the M resort buffet in Las Vegas, he was pretty darned pleased with himself. He would bring his mother in every day for a meal, and got to be so he was on a first name basis with all of the waitresses (who are often just cashiers. It’s a buffet, you go get your own food. Much more efficient than waiting for a waitress, who doesn’t share your ravenous hunger or your insatiable greed.) He would bring them gifts – often something he’d got for free in some other resort promotion.
They thought he was kind of creepy because, in fact, he was. Not necessarily evil. He never hurt anybody. But definitely creepy.
In 2013 the buffet kicked him out for being too stalkery.
On Sunday, he walked in, pulled out a gun, and shot himself dead.
He left a 270 page suicide note, talking about how evil the hotel was.
Actually, I think the hotel screwed up. Don’t offer something for life unless you’re really prepared to give it for life. I can see how maybe the hotel would have trumped up the stalking charges just to shed him as an unwanted and unprofitable customer. I don’t think that’s what happened, but I do think it’s a possibility nobody’s talking about.

Got back from the cottage/Easter weekend today and I am glad that is over with for another year but the highlight of the weekend for me was the IQ park in Liberec, lots of fun exhibits for the kids, most of which had nothing to do with IQ at all but funny visual tricks and stuff like that.
As soon as I got back I glommed onto facebook because I am such a fucking addict but soon realized that I hadn’t been gone long enough, not even 48 hours, and hadn’t really missed anything. A couple of friends trying to get me to join a new site which is like the Icelandic facebook but I just got a ‘this page not available’ notice so I’ve given that up for now.
Since I haven’t watched any Epic Rap Battles of History on YouTube for a while I decided to check them out and see if there were any new episodes posted, which led to an hour or so of binge watching.
With the first couple I kind of thought “Eh, the franchise has lost its magic, this is getting a little threadbare.” The best line in Ellen Degeneres vs. Oprah Winfrey was “you’re going to get licked by a lesbian” and Bonnie and Clyde vs. Romeo and Juliet was pretty lame, too.
It’s hard to compete with such classics as Abe Lincoln v. Chuck Norris, Albert Einstein vs. Stephen Hawking or, my all time favorite, Mr. T vs. Mr. Rogers (Your name is Mr. T because your too dumb to spell). I understand.
Then things picked up, though. William Wallace vs. George Washington was good, with both getting in some good jabs, but Edgar Alan Poe vs. Stephen King was brilliant – I’m certainly a fan of both artists, and I’m not sure who won the rap battle.
Then there were my two favorites. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs. the Italian Artists they were named after. The old masters went first and the rhymes were poppin’, I thought they were unbeatable until the Turtles came on.
The very best, though, had to be Lego Thor vs. Lego Zeus, with all sorts of jokes about mythology, “shape shifting rapist something something Swan shlong,” plus lots of Greek and Scandinavian jokes. We don’t hear enough of those.
If you love mythology, and aren’t the type to be bothered by a serious streak of filthy language, it’s one of the funniest things you could watch on YouTube.
I think these would be a great way to teach kids about history, but I’m not going to be the one to tell them about it. This is the kind of thing they absolutely have to find out about behind their parents’ back.