Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It was a reasonably productive day today, from a writer’s point of view.  I spent most of it working on my book, and finished my first read through.  All of the names that need changing are changed, there are no glaring errors in continuity, and I would be more or less ready to go to press right away, but there are a couple of incidents that I was not quite clear where they belonged that I still have to peg in, but I am close, very close.

About 4 o’clock I decided to take a break from that, because it was driving me nuts, fiddling with little details.  Basically, it’s written and now it’s an editing job.  So, I said I would start again at 5:30, and asked my son to remind me.  I checked my e-mail, looked at facebook, got into a couple of arguments there which is always fun, and then remembered that tomorrow is the monthly Alchemy Poetry Reading, and I had nothing.

So, I started scrolling back through my activity log, hoping I’d written some comments in rhyme which would be worthy, and it was pretty slim pickings indeed.  But I found a couple that are not completely worthless, one I might be able to expand on a bit, and I’ll round out the set by reading an old one.

Sam reminded me at 5:30, but I said I was extending my break to 5:45.  He snickered.  Little booger knows me too well.  I never did get back to the book.  That’s a job for tomorrow, and Tuesday.

What I did then, though, is I made another video for YouTube.  This is my second one, just me reading my poems.  I don’t know.  There’s so much stuff on YouTube that’s actually good, great musical acts, dance acts, funny kid stuff, animals doing impossible or incredibly anthropomorphic things, that it’s a bit intimidating.  Who cares about poetry?

On the other hand, though, I’ve seen worse.  So, check them out.

This is  an interesting article.  Some clever folks at NASA with a bit of spare time on their hands decided to  draw up travel posters for distant planets, of which we’ve now discovered over 1,000, with new discoveries coming in a few each week.

It’s great because it combines a couple of things I like.

I enjoy travel and tourism very much.  It’s a beautiful world we live in, with great cities sprinkled with spectacular buildings, and miracles of nature everywhere you look.  I have lived, for the past 16 years, in a European city that many people only dream of going to some day, a city of castles, museums, statues, and great parks.  I love watching travel shows on TV, to get a nice, safe view of places I’d still like to go.

I’m also really interested in space although, realistically, I don’t ever expect to be able to visit another planet.  Also, the exoplanets are seriously far away.  Unless someone discovers a way to become immortal, then nobody who is alive today is ever actually going to see one.

So, this is about as close as we’re  going to get.  It’s more than just entertainment, though.  This is a neat, attractive, concise and informative way to represent the little we know of these places so far.  Very educational.

I look forward to seeing more.  They should do a book.

I was having a fun little argument on facebook and I should know better, they say never wrestle with a pig, you’ll just get dirty and the pig actually enjoys it, but sometimes it’s irresistible.  Sometimes somebody (and this one  guy in particularly is that somebody more often than anybody I know) just says something so glaringly stupid that you have to fire back.

The  subject was global warming, and he was pulling out all the bullshit arguments abut how some scientist once said that the Earth was actually cooling, and how it’s a natural cycle, and stupid scientists get it wrong all the time because once upon a time people thought the Earth was flat.

So, I posted the cartoon I’m posting here, because it really seems bizarre to me that anybody would argue in favor of polluting the world’s air, and water, and soil, and yet they do.

He was still not convinced, which is actually unsurprising, because these people never, ever change their minds.  But, other people on the thread started jumping down his throat (in varying degrees of tolerance for his idiot opinion) and, in the end, he was reduced to a series of very short comments that all ended in Yada Yada Yada.

Yada Yada Yada or Blah Blah Blah are not words.  They are an admission that you have nothing more to say, that you have run out of thoughts and arguments on the current topic.

How does one respond to that?   It’s not a yes or no question.  It’s not even a question.  It’s not a comment with any substance or meaning.  And, since nobody  responded much to that argument, he probably figures he won.

Thursday is my busiest  teaching day, but I like it and especially now as Christmas vacation just wound up being too long for my taste, I was without gainful employment for two weeks + and starting to get bored with sitting around the house getting stoned all day.  Yesterday was my first day back at work, and Wednesdays I’m finished by 1:30.

Thursday morning starts at 7 a.m. which means I get up at 5:30 and it’s still dark out when I arrive at my first class.  That’s an easy lesson, though, one student, pleasant, easy to talk to, and when I leave there at eight it is light and the day is just beginning.

I  have an hour and forty minutes to get to my  next class and it takes about an hour but there is a mall right there and a McDonald’s in that mall and I do like their breakfasts, so that has become part of my routine.  For metro, tram and McDonald’s time I am currently reading Norman Mailer’s “Armies of the Night,” which I should have read four decades ago, when it was relevant, but it’s a nostalgic look back, a reminder that nothing has really changed, and better late than never.  I think it’s a bit pompous of old Norman Mailer to write about  himself in the 3rd person, like Bob Dole, but it’s different and it works for this book.

That class is at a school and it is four classes back to back, two of them are absolutely beautiful experiences with bright, imaginative, participatory  students.  The other two, blessedly, are small.

After that, I just have time to nip back home and grab a quick bite for lunch before I’m off to my pre-school ‘class,’  which is down to 3 students and today there were only two.  I thought it might go smoothly because just the two girls were there, but they had their minds set on misbehaving right from the get go.  They are 4 and 5.  It’s no surprise but, still, it was a bleak spot in an otherwise pleasant day.

Then met Helena at our favorite Italian restaurant for dinner, and here we are.  Another blog written, another day gone.

It would be wrong not to write tonight about what happened in Paris today.  The latest thing I heard is that the police have suspects and I’d like to hear more about that, it sounds like two of them are brothers (same last name, anyway) which brings back memories of the Boston bombing.  That’s good.

I hope they’ve got the right  guys.

Of course, there is never a good time and place for a terrorist attack, but when you  attack a comedy magazine, you are coming out as anti-humor.  Anti-humor.  That is even worse than  anti-science.

People need to laugh.  People need  to cry.  People need  to be able to walk around and mingle freely without hiding under a portable tent.  People need to sing, and dance, and relax on the beach.  Some people even like to have a glass of wine once in a while, not to mention the bacon  sandwiches.

People do not need religion.

Another story I’d like to talk about tonight is the bomb in front of the NAACP building in Denver, and the way the story was ignored by the media until it spread through social networks.  Of course, it was overshadowed  by the slaughter in Paris, but they’d already been ignoring it for a while before that story  broke.

Also, nobody was hurt.  It bleeds, it leads, that’s the rule of the news.

But it’s not the first story that has been pretty much ignored by the media until social media got  in there.  Occupy, Ferguson, and more.

Go, social media!