Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It is late and I am not going to stay up all night waiting for the results of  a referendum in Scotland.  It’s not that I  am unconcerned.  I am, indeed, intensely curious.  However, there’s no way my opinions  are going to affect the outcome and I have looked at both sides of the issue and can  come to terms with it, either way.

My topic for tonight is sort of an extension of last night’s.  Last night I suggested that law enforcement would be improved if the police just outsourced the investigative work  to people on the  internet, partly because the amazing power of the world  wide web has proven so effective at actually locating  criminals, but  because  the police suck so badly at it.

Tonight I want to talk about ‘naming and shaming.’  I just saw a sight about airline passengers behaving egregiously, people would send in their photos, like a white haired, rather chubby  gentlemen sleeping with his  shirt  off and a baby pooping in the middle of the aisle, stuff like that.

I have an internet friend who actively pursues plagiarists on-line (Ira Lightman – he’s been written up in newspapers for it, so I guess it would not be a breach of  etiquette to use his name)  He gives them a warning and, if they don’t apologize and change their ways, they get named, suffering disgrace in the poetic community, fwiw.

All sorts of bad behavior gets outed  on the  internet.  The problem is that, just as in real life, the people who behave shamelessly are impervious to shame.  They see their pictures on the internet and think ‘Hey, I’m famous!”

A couple of evenings ago in Philadelphis, a group of guys and gals were out for an evening stroll after a pleasant dinner together at a restaurant, when they bumped into a gay couple and a couple of the lads in the group decided to start beating the hell out of them.  Being as there are apparently some social circles still in existence where gay bashing is considered socially acceptable, no one in the group tried to stop them, although it’s almost certain that some of them will use the old tried and true “it wasn’t ME” defense in court.

Anyway, they probably would have totally gotten away  with it if somebody hadn’t got video of the incident.  Once it went up online, the networking began and soon other people soon found photos of the group earlier in the evening, names started to be attached to pictures, and all of the culprits were identified.

How often did this kind of thing happen in the PSM (pre-social media) era?  Pretty damned often, I’ll bet.

Ditto Ray Rice.  He is most certainly not the 1st pro football player to punch his girlfriend.  In fact, it’s been happening since human beings came down from the trees, and even before.  Now, that kind of shit gets caught a bit more often.

It’s happening all over.  Crime, and all sorts of general nastiness which would have previously gone unnoticed, now gets exposed.  Nothing to do with the police.  They are just as incompetent as ever.  But, technology has changed and it’s having an effect on society.

One negative side effect of this is that the burden of proof has shifted, perhaps to a totally unreasonable point.  If there’s no video, the event gets treated as if it didn’t happen.  Like the Palin family bar brawl, which didn’t actually happen in a bar, but close enough.  It was a party at somebody’s house, but alcohol was being served.  We’ve got multiple eye witness accounts of Bristol punching the host in the face (mean right hook is no doubt an exaggeration, as she hit him several times and he just kept repeating ‘you have to leave the party.’  I imagine it was more of a rain of ineffectual blows from a hysterically angry, but not particularly threatening, woman.  More than one person heard Sarah say “Do you know who we are?”, more than one person saw Todd with a bloody nose, more than one person saw Track flipping people the fuck you finger as they came out of the party, but nobody, apparently, got any video of it.

It can happen, still, I suppose.  Not everybody in the world goes to a party with the preconceived plan of getting something incriminating that they can then upload to the internet.

So, the incident will fade into oblivion because there are so many other things where video DOES exist.  The Palins are going to get away with this one.  No video.  Forget about it.

Back in 2011 V.S. Naipaul (full disclosure, I’ve never actually  read anything by V.S. Naipaul) pissed off women the world over with two statements.  First, that he didn’t think there were any  women writers, living or  dead, who were as good as him.  Second, that he could tell if the writer of a book was a woman within a couple of paragraphs.

Nicholas Sparks (if you believe that)

Well, I thought, the first statement is outrageous arrogance.  Mary Shelley was a revolution in literature, she pretty much invented science fiction.  Ursula LeGuin wrote The Dispossessed, which was brilliant both as sci-fi and as social commentary.  I liked all of Jean Auel’s books.  And, of course, there is J.K. Rowling, who I practically worship.

But, I wasn’t so sure about the second statement.  The way I see it, it is not sexist to point out that there are differences between the sexes and, if the man says he can spot a woman writer within two paragraphs, maybe he can.  Certainly, he’s  somebody who knows a thing or two about the craft.  I didn’t think I could do it, though.

Anyway, in response to the controversy, a quiz soon popped up on facebook: can you spot which of these passages was written by a woman?  So, I had to take the test.  I only had to discount 2 or 3 of the passages because of actually knowing them, but out of the rest I got almost a perfect score.  I don’t know how.  I was guessing wild, totally by feel, but the score was beyond a fluke.  It definitely is possible to tell if something was written by a woman or a man.  We don’t write the same, any more than we think the same.

Now, I have another confession to make.  I choose my reading materials pretty much the same way I eat, and the way I used to drink back in my alcohol loving days, i.e. pretty much anything that’s put in front of me, without a lot of premeditation or discrimination.  Which is why I’m reading a book by Nicholas Sparks.  My wife loves him and she uses my kindle more than I do, so that’s what’s there.  I swear, it was not my choice.

But, in reading this novel  (The Rescue, about a single mother with a special needs child and her trouble finding a good man) I came to a surprising conclusion.  Nicholas Sparks is a woman.  It’s probably  actually Nicole Sparks, and she just hires a random actor dude for the cover photos.  Or, maybe he is technically a man, in possession of male body parts and such, but he is totally a woman inside.

It was a conversation between two men, best friends, in a bar, that made me realize it.  Guys just don’t analyze their  emotions in that much depth, unless one of them is a psychiatrist.  It was like that facebook meme where they transcribe a woman’s conversation and then have two very hirsute men reading the lines.

I  don’t know what I’m going to read next.  But it won’t be Nicholas Sparks.  I get the stories told to me anyway.

Every day, it seems, we discover new exoplanets, they are apparently as common as litter on a city sidewalk.  Likewise, every day, it seems, we discover some ancient shipwreck, or the bones of a previously unknown dinosaur, or the ruins of an ancient city which was thought to be mythical.

They’ll need to actually dig it up to see it in more detail

It is no surprise.  Space stretches out, on and on, almost forever, as far as we can tell.  And the past stretches back, and back, and back.  A shipwreck from 1899.  The body of Richard III under a parking lot.  The tomb of Alexander.  Ruins of an ancient Greek city on the floor of the sea.  The extensive underground ruins of Stonehenge.  Dinosaurs.

For hundreds of millions of years, life has been leaving litter all over the place.  A little here, a little there, but it’s been adding up and now it’s pretty much everywhere we look.  The world is really not that big a place and we have pretty much blanketed it with stuff.  Most of which we’d thought was lost forever, we were living without it just fine,   and it’s kind of  bizarre to find it again.

One find I’m particularly excited about is the Stonehenge thing.  Apparently, there are lots of stone formations, just under the ground, all around it.  A lot of archaeologists, of course, are still talking about its ‘religious significance,’ and talking about it as an ‘ancient temple’ but it seems to me that’s what they say about everything.  It sounds like an ancient city to me.

Like the Nazca lines.  I was watching Discovery Channel once and they were saying that they were an ancient well worn path, as if people had had frequent religious processions along these routes, and I thought, “well, or else they were actual streets.”

Sometimes things have a mundane explanation.  More often than not, I suspect.

Anyway, with Stone Henge I think what they ought to do is go whole hog,  dig up the whole  area.  A few farmers will lose their fields,but sheep can be moved.  A small price to pay to unearth, and recreate, a full blown ancient Celtic (maybe) settlement.

It could be awesome.

There is no doubt the police in the United States are completely out of control.  They shoot people for jaywalking, they shoot people who are holding a toy rifle in the toy aisle at Wal-Mart, they invade the wrong homes because they either can’t read a map or can’t read an address, and then beat the hell out of everybody inside, they pepper spray people who are sitting down, they shoot people in wheelchairs and old men, they beat the shit out of little old ladies, they taze and abuse just for shits and giggles, they throw stun grenades innto baby’s cribs, and they get away with it damned near every time.

Danielle Watts

Perhaps today they stepped over the line, because they arrested a celebrity.  Not a huge celebrity, but a celebrity.  Danielle Watts was in Django Unchained and is currently in a TV series.  She is black.  Her husband is white.  They were kissing.  So, police thought she must be a prostitute.  Silly police.  They got angry when she wouldn’t show them identification, although you are definitely not required to, and there was no evidence of any crime.  So, they handcuffed her and forced her into the back of a police car.

Eventually, they realized their mistake.

But, it was a mistake.  Not only had no crime been committed, there was no reason at all for them to think a crime had been committed.  No one was dead or injured.  No property was missing.  There was no reason for the police to even approach the couple..

If only the police in real life were like the police on TV, chasing down bank robbers  and murderers, spending lots of time at crime scenes examining clues, being fearless and upright and diligent and conscientious, there would be almost no crime and everybody would love the police.

So, here’s a suggestion, dear police people: be more like that.  If nobody’s hurt and nothing’s been stolen, just keep on walking.  Nobody needs you to worry about jaywalking, or two people kissing, or pretty much anything other than actually assaulting somebody else or stealing.  You can spend all day riding around doing nothing, or hang out for hours in the donut shop.  It’s O.K.  Make things easier on yourselves.

And leave people the fuck alone.