Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It  was a lovely day  today.  My  morning student had canceled, which left me kind of high and dry, I was expecting to  get paid for the month and be solvent again, but I was  glad with the free time, time to get some writing done, which I did.  Not the writing I wanted to do, but something I needed to do, thus freeing me up for the stuff I want to write.  Keep moving down the list.

Today was my first day back, after a 3 month break, at the children’s center in  Vinoř (pronounced Vinorrzhhh), and I was quite looking forward to it.  I caught the bus  on time and then pulled a bonehead move.  The next stop was Vinořsky Hřbitov (Vinorrrzzhhsky Hrzhbitov) and I figured well, that’s right around the corner and it’s a lovely day for a walk, so I got off but it was a different bus than I usually take and I was still out of town, walking on the shoulder and the verge, with long, expansive fields on either side and couldn’t even see the town.  Still, at a brisk pace but not really sprinting, I arrived at class just a minute or two late, and the kids were really excited so it all worked out O.K. in the end.

As far as the classes go, the kids were in high spirits, to say the least.  I had to start off both classes with running around games, because they weren’t going to stop running around anyway and somehow “The Wheels on the Bus” wound up as a game of “whack the teacher with the big blue inflatable thing with a face on it that you can sit on and bounce around the room”

But, I got paid for 4 weeks in advance, so my cash flow problem is solved.

And I hope to get a lot of writing done this weekend.

35,000 walruses are gathered together on a beach on Alaska’s north coast, hanging closer together than Hippies at a rock concert.  This is a weird thing. Walruses, this time of year, are usually  out hanging out on the Arctic ice, and it’s more or less a solo pastime.

But, this year, in a stark reminder that global warming is happening in horrifyingly real time, there is no ice.  The poor seals have never seen anything like this before.  I see the photo of them sitting there on the beach, and imagine a big thought bubble above the collective, with one simple question: WTF?

This Sucks

They have no idea that the problem is caused by human industry; by our factories, our cars, our airplanes, our inefficient homes.  They may just see it as a natural phenomenon.  They might think it’s just a couple of bad winters, and optimistically believe that it’s going to be better again.  Maybe it’s best they don’t know.  They would be pretty ticked off.

Ditto for the honey bees.  As small as they are, as focused on things inside the hive as they are, and as single minded in pursuit of pollen as they are, bees probably don’t even realize that humans exist.

They also may not realize how important they  are to the world, or that there is a ‘world’ and their relatives are living in almost every place across it.

They certainly don’t realize they are going to die out.  And they don’t  realize that  they’re taking us down with them.  They just know that they flew through a stretch of air that smelled really horrible and they’re all going to die.  They must wonder what’s going on.

It isn’t fair.

It is true that there has been a lot of  racist shit aimed at Barack Obama recently: the watermelons on the White House lawn, the witch doctor photos,  the million misspelled signs.  This cartoon is bad because it actually got space in a newspaper, and not just on some wannabe Archie Bunker’s blog.

But how is this funny, or insightful, or relevant to what actually happened?  I do confess, the first time I saw it I didn’t see the caption below, and so didn’t catch the reference to the White House intruder.  “Who’s that man and what is he doing in Barack Obama’s bathtub?”

Still, no great joke there, that’s just a drawing of the news item.  “Guy gets into White House!”  A good comedian, of course, could make some jokes about it.

The editor says the cartoonist ‘doesn’t have a racist  bone in his body,’ which must just mean that he is an absolute dumbass.  Because that’s a watermelon joke.

They’ve been around longer than empty chairs

If the cartoonist has never seen the well known racist watermelon meme before, then he is too completely detached from the rest of the world to be drawing cartoons about the important issues of the day.  He needs to get out more.

That’s it for me tonight, good night.

When people send me those texts that  say “Nobody ever pays any attention to what I post so here is a test, respond with  one  word about how we met, or whatever” I do not respond.  It’s not much  of a fun game even if you do know the people, and usually you don’t.  So, in most cases I am hoping they carry through on their sometimes implied, sometimes overtly stated intent to defriend non-compliants.  I don’t think they usually do.  If they did, my  number of friends  would be dropping daily, and it’s not.

Just  came back  from  Chess Club.  A week from  tomorrow I’ve got my poetry reading.  Why do I get involved  in  activities where most of the participants are old men?  Actually, there are a couple of questions there, that I’ve never been able to figure  out the answers to.  Why don’t women like chess?  (Yeah, yeah,  Polgar sisters, bla bla bla, I know.  They were an anomaly.), and why don’t more women write poetry?

In the case of poetry, my perception  may be skewed by my participation in the readings – assuming that women who write poetry want  to read  it in  public.  Maybe they’re  all just sitting at home writing poems like crazy but, whether out of shyness or misanthropy, they feel no urge to read  in  public.

Maybe their poems are great and I need to read more.  Maybe it’s a vicious circle reaching critical mass type situation.  A slight predominance of male poets intimidates some women out of performing, which means thee are more male performers, which becomes even more intimidating, and so on.

Maybe it will change some day.  But we still have a long way to go.

There has been a lot of talk about ‘hoaxes’ recently, more than usual.  Is this a serious problem?   On the one hand, I hate the spread of misinformation.  It makes intelligent debate more difficult.  On the other hand, sometimes it’s actually kind of funny, and  not malicious at all.

Do NOT mess with Emma Watson

So, like graffiti and some of the milder sorts of sexual misconduct, I think the important thing is to separate this into different categories.  The story of the three breasted woman which, I confess, I believed at first, was harmless and kind of funny.  It could have been true.  I’m sure it’s within the reach of modern technology.  If they can give people cochlear implants, if they can give people artificial legs that make them track stars, then certainly they can give a lady a 3rd tit.  And, seeing as how there  are people who get horn implants to make them look like a devil, it’s not too much of a surprise that at least one crazy woman out there would want to be Betty Three Boobs.

Ditto the story about the artist who was raking it in hand over fist by painting ‘invisible art.’  Maybe not quite as plausible, but still, just a harmless joke.

The stuff they print in The Currant and a couple of other sites like that is less funny, and a  bit more malicious.  It’s clear they are trying to pollute the commons, to insert so much bullshit into the free market of opinions that the whole place will stink and nobody will want to shop there.  I wish they could be rooted out, exposed, and driven from the scene, but on the other hand, they are still protected by free speech.  Even morons are protected by free speech.  Even devious, little weasels like them are protected by free speech.

The Emma Watson nude pictures hoax is in a 3rd category, which isn’t really a hoax at all.  It was a threat, an attempt at coercion, and not funny.  As a threat, it turned out to be empty.  It’s entirely possible that no nude pictures of Emma Watson exist.  At any rate, the creep who said he had some had no such thing.

And, he was just trying to hype his site, to generate traffic by stirring the shit.

So, maybe it was a hoax from his end, but I’d say from a legal definition he could still be charged with attempted extortion and blackmail.

“I was only joking” makes a poor defense in court.