Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

“These 50 years have shown that isolation has not worked. It’s time for a new approach,” Obama said in his speech today, announcing that fine Havana cigars will soon be available  over the counter at fine tobacconists all across the United States.

It’s pretty amazing.  Soon, hordes of American tourists will descend on Cuban  beaches, reminding  them all of why they wanted to get rid  of us in  the first place.  We will exchange diplomats and a  few entrepreneurial types will carve out a niche  for themselves.

The last 50  years  will start  to fade into memory.

There are three ways in which I think this is a wonderful thing.

First, I think it will be good for Cuba.  The tourist dollars won’t hurt, but  the relaxation  of trade inhibitions will do wonders.  They would probably have a thriving, vibrant economy today if we  hadn’t been blockading them damned near since I was born.

Second, I think it will be good for the United States, although less so.  The U.S. is huge.  Only a tiny minority of people, most of whom live in  Florida, will be directly affected.  But, it’s one more conflict  we won’t need to worry about.  One problem solved.  The next time some smart ass right winger makes a comment about Obama’s Nobel Prize, you can mention this.

The third great thing about this is in the quote above.  If something hasn’t worked for 50 years, it’s time to scratch it and start a new approach.  Going by that same, beautiful logic we should also end the war on drugs.

I was just scanning the  science section in the old Huffingpaste, when I came across this  gem of a headline: Why Does Time Move Forward?  I am not going to link to the article, and I didn’t  bother reading the article, because hey, come on, really.

Time moves forward because if it moved backward then we would call that forward and, in fact, that might be the case.  You only can relate to your own environment and we are stuck in  this one, moving the way that time moves in this universe.

If there were some sort of Merlin/Benjamin Button/the  Jonathan  Winters character in Mork and Mindy effect  going  on, then it would seem perfectly natural to us and that’s  how  we’d relate to it.

But I think we can  go a step farther.  As Descartes said “I think therefore I am,” so it follows that not only can we trust our basic sense of existence as proof of  existence, so we can  trust the evidence  of our senses that the universe around us is, at least in the ways  that affect us, more or less as it seems.  Flowers bloom in the spring, the dawn precedes the day, we are small when we are born and  get a bit older every day.

So, time  is moving  forward.  Which is exactly what we demand of it.

Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have both responded to the Senate Torture Report, which  proves that American soldiers acted like war criminals, and they did so with the full support of the U.S. government, by saying “Bush knew it!  Bush authorized it!”  I find that very curious.

He did it, too!

Why?  I guess they’re a little bit nervous, although I’ll be really surprised if they ever have to answer for their crimes.  But, how does this exonerate them?

I guess what they’re saying is that they were just doing what the  boss told them to do, just following orders.  Slime.

No decency.  No compassion.  And no loyalty.  None whatsoever.  Somewhere in Texas, the former president pauses in his portrait of puppies, holds the brush in the air, gets a faraway look in his eyes and says “Et tu, Turdblossom.”

I think they should arrest George W. Bush.  Put him in one of those interrogation rooms, like you see on T.V., where people can look in but you can’t see out, and tell him all his friends are ratting him out and he’s going to end up like Rudolf Hess if he doesn’t start co-operating and then you bring in the good cop who tries to understand him and offers him a shot of whiskey and then we’ll find out everything, the whole lot of them can go to jail, and we can put this dark chapter of our history behind us.

Unfriending somebody on  facebook is not really as harsh as it seems.  You don’t know them in real life, anyway.  Well, sometimes you might but I have never actually unfriended anybody I knew personally.  I’ve been tempted a couple of times, but the possibility of running into them in real life and having to explain it has always been way too daunting.

I’ve been unfriended a couple of times, too.  One friend from Prague went to teach in Saudi Arabia and I couldn’t help myself from making sarcastic comments re his intention to convert to Islam, which he took very seriously.  He would talk about spiritual clarity  and a feeling of togetherness and I’d mention beheadings, or women being banned from driving, or slave labor.  I guess he got sick of the conversation because he unfriended me.

I could understand why he did it.  From his point of view, unfriending me made sense.  It didn’t wreck my life, or leave me feeling unloved.  In a way, I was kind of relieved.  And, if I ever see him back in Prague, we’ll go out for a cup of tea somewhere because he’s a decent guy even if he chose a religion which is kind of nuts.

Last week, I defriended somebody.  One of my writer ‘friends.’  Well, he was talking about Sonnets so I figure it would be a good time to mention my book ‘155 Sonnets’ which I think is quite relevant to a conversation about Shakespeare, and anybody who has studied Shakespeare should get that just from the title, but he blocked my comment.

So, I unfriended him.  The main reason I am on facebook, the main reason I use the internet at all, is self-promotion.  I’ve written some kickass books, I want people to read them.

I play fair.  I don’t interject them at random.  I don’t belabor the point.  And I leave a link where they can be read for free. (top bar, this page.  click on poetry.)

My page, he said.  Not really what we were talking about, he said, when I asked if he’d blocked me.  So I unfriended him.

I haven’t missed him.  Not even a little bit.

I just saw a headline that said something like “Isis Rocks Iraq” and misinterpreted entirely, for a second, because of two diametrically opposed definitions of the word ‘to rock.’

A Rock

There is the positive sense, like “The band was awesome.  They totally rocked the house.”  And that’s the way I read it at first.

Then there is the negative sense, like bombing and shooting shit up.

It’s not surprising it’s a word with many meanings.  I remember a B.C. comic, one of the under-rated classics of comic history, in which the psychic said he could guess what the guy was thinking of and the guy says O.K., go ahead and try and he says “a rock,” and that was it, because as was explained via thought balloon in the last panel, ‘what else is there.’

So, a rock is a stone, and to rock can mean to affect positively, or negatively.  To rock is also a motion, something you do in a rocking chair, or to a baby in a cradle.  From our very first days upon this earth, we rock.

It is a bit of cocaine, perhaps a diamond, or a person who is a tower of strength.

The amazing thing about a word that means dozens of different things like that is that the meanings almost never get confused.  Sure, it would be possible to contrive an ambiguous sentence, which is why puns tend to depend upon extremely contrived sentences and situations.  But, in almost all cases, the context is clear.

The world we live in is made up of so many disparate worlds, different cultures, that no two conversations are ever identical, but meanings remain distinct.

If any of that made sense.  Good night.