Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Water is the 2nd most critical human need there is, after air.  If you don’t get water for a couple of days, you could die.  Definitely, you wouldn’t last a week.  That is why the situation in Detroit is so critical.  By cutting off water to thousands of homes (about 2,000), the city of Detroit is threatening the lives of the people who live within.

So, they took to the streets in protest, as anybody naturally would.  It’s actually a fairly mild response, when your government is trying to kill you.  A lot of the protesters were arrested.  Will they give them water in jail?

Of course they will.  So why not avoid all the expense, the hassle, and the long term ill will, and just leave the damned water turned on.  Of course, the reason for the cutoff is because they hadn’t paid their water bills, but the reason they hadn’t paid their water bills is because they don’t have any money.  Yeah, they’re poor.  That doesn’t mean they deserve to die of dehydration. In a city with a lake.

Once upon a time…

Remember how once upon a time, probably up to somewhere in the mid 70s or even 80s, there were drinking fountains everywhere?  Schools, offices, shops, parks, pretty much everywhere you went, if you were thirsty, you could find a water fountain and have a quick, free drink.  It didn’t destroy the economy.  People still drank alcohol, and soft drinks, and lots of other stuff they paid for.

Then, bottled water started to be trendy.  People started carrying it everywhere.  And the water fountains, here and there, began to be disappeared.  The capitalists had won.  But was it a step too far?

Detroit is the first.  If they get away with this, more cities will try it.  Today, there were protests.  Some day, there will be riots.  Parched, enraged mobs with nothing to lose.  The end of civilization.

It doesn’t have to be that way.  Water is plentiful on Earth, and the means to purify that which is polluted and desalinate that which is salty exists.  It’s not even a complicated or expensive process, just a bit energy intensive. Energy is also plentiful on our fair planet.  From the sun, from the wind.  We could easily provide clean water for all the people of the Earth, for drinking, for bathing, for swimming, for watering gardens, and even for industry, which uses a hell of a lot of water, and it would cost far, far less than fighting the battles which will ensue if we don’t.

One of the reasons I started writing a blog is that I am an opinionated individual.  Any news article I read, I have an opinion on it.  But blogging revealed some surprising things to myself about myself.  I frequently have contradictory opinions.

Like on this little stunt.  My immediate feeling was that it was like something out of Jackass.  Maybe this was a fairly controlled experiment, but should it catch on, become a fad, somebody’s going to get hurt.

But still, it’s original, and kind of cool.  I couldn’t help but call Sam over to show him the video, before telling him he should never do anything like that.  So I’m not just a contradictory blogger, I am also sending confusing, mixed signals to my kids.

Then I got into a facebook discussion about it and, after a few comments on helmets, the talk turned to other possible applications, like instead of trams why don’t we just have a constant stream of pallets, jump on, jump off, no waiting, and clean, fresh air and sunshine instead instead of being cooped up with a large crowd of people, besides which, it would be a lot of fun.

But, never getting a seat would be a drag after a while, so maybe you could put seats on those pallets.  Still, you need a means of propulsion, so maybe pedals.  It would be good exercise, and a pleasant and unique way to get from point A to point B, and original, so fun for tourists, at least on sunny days.  In the summer.  Or in more southerly climates.

I suppose you could enclose them somehow, for the winter, and have a continuous stream of comfortable little cabins, but that starts to add in a lot of stuff that’s not just a pallet with some wheels screwed to the bottom.  Might as well just take the tram.

I don’t have much to write about tonight, it was an ordinary day and that’s O.K., politically, I won’t change any minds, no matter what monstrosities I find.

A teabagger in Kentucky, an elected public official, said (I paraphrase, I’m not going to look up the quote) “Of course, all of us academics agree that Mars is the same temperature as Earth, so therefore global warming is a hoax and we can burn all the coal we like.”  There is so much stupidity packed into that one statement that it would sink a boat.  Nonetheless, I am certain no right winger will hear it and say “Gee, maybe the liberals are right, maybe the people we keep electing really ARE stupid.”

Kaizlovy Sady, where many of my poems have been written

So, I’ll just tell you about my day.

It was brutally hot, right up until the sky broke open and the rain poured down, complete with hail, but that stopped and then it was hot again.

Went to the post office in the morning, we walked there, took about 20 minutes, and it was a very rare experience.  There was nobody there at all, no line.  We took a number and it popped up on the screen and we were served.  The package we were there to pick up was, as I expected, a delivery of my books from Create Space.  I am particularly happy about Pink Snow, the cover is beautiful, thanks to Daniela Safrankova.

Picking up the books and just scanning through them, as I do, I was embarrassed to find an actual error in a poem written many years ago (before I was married), which has existed, undetected, all this time, which sort of shows how many readers I don’t have but, to be fair, few people would have noticed it (the word ‘I’ should have been at the beginning of a line.  It still makes sense, but it throws the meter off.)  I like reading my old poems.  I am a very appreciative audience.

Stopped at a playground on the way back, in Kaizlovy Sady, which the kids were calling Hajzlovy Sady and thinking they were really funny.  I yelled at them a little bit, but on the other hand, it was a pretty good pun.  Also, not my language, so my authority in the matter is limited.

Bummer about Brazil.  Congrats to Germany.

When I first saw this on my facebook page, I thought it was bogus.  It looked like something they would have written in The Currant or The National Report or one of those professionally lying sites that are springing up more and more on the internet.  But it wasn’t.  There was an article on it in The Huffington Post and this here article I’m linking to from Slate.  Obama haters are modifying their trucks to emit thick, thick clouds of black smoke as they’re rolling down the road, the thicker the better, the darker the better, just because Obama wants cleaner air and Mooshell wants   everybody to eat their vegetables, so SCREW THEM!

What kind of knuckle dragging, pscyopathic, pig fucking, guntoting, bible thumping Class A Moron does suck a thing?  How warped do you have to be to prefer dirty air over clean air, and to be willing to spend money, time and effort to make it so?  this could not possibly be an actual thing that people do.

Whatever flaws the HuffandPuff might have, they are not, like the above mentioned Currant or National Report, in the business of just making shit up to fool people, and I generally quite like Slate, so I read a bit deeper.  Even the article doesn’t really say what the headline says it says.  Sure, there are morons who get of on violating emissions laws and get a charge out of deliberately polluting the air and, sure, most of them probably hate Obama – it goes with the territory.

But that doesn’t mean they’re doing this as a protest.  If you read down a bit, you realize that they are doing it for fun, because there’s something about spewing huge clouds of black smoke that just makes people feel great, even if it does cost them a lot of money and violate several laws.   Been doing it for years. Which brings us back to the original question: What kind of knuckle dragging, psychopathic, pig fucking, gun toting, bible thumping Class A moron would do such a thing?  The politically apathetic kind, we can only hope.

I’m not going to link to them, because I do not want to feed the trolls, but you can find lots of videos of trucks pouring out black smoke and redneck fuckwits laughing about it, if you don’t believe me.

It was a beautiful weekend at the cottage, and I am using the word beautiful literally.  The flowers in front of the house were in high bloom, I would regale you with a list of names if I knew flowers’ names.  There were roses, of a couple different colors, and some big violet things which may have actually been violets, like I say, I don’t know the names of flowers, and nine or ten other kinds.

The cherries, gooseberries, red and black currants, and raspberries were all just waiting to be picked so I did a couple of hours of that just after arriving and there is no activity I find more relaxing and better for contemplation (an older word for meditation) than picking fruit.  There is so much on every tree, on every bush, that it makes me wonder how world hunger is possible.  It is a horribly mismanaged world we live in.

Apples and plums are still a bit in the future, maybe next time.

After that kicked a football around with my nephew Patrick,who is 7, and then jumped in the pool, one of those little above ground pools that kids love so much,  and all of the kids were in there and were going nuts. Then Helena and I took a walk up the hill past the village, saw a deer and picked some wild flowers for the table.

We went to bed really early, like nightfall, because what else?  Which meant that I was up early this morning, my favorite time of day, city or country, walking around when no one else is up. Went down to the pond, one neighbor has 4 horses who were never there before, then came back and picked a bucket of cherries and a basket of red currants before anyone else woke up, then some more time in the pool, a bit of badminton, super fresh trout with butter sauce for lunch, and then home.

Highlight of the weekend:  my wife’s grandmother, who had a stroke last autumn and was in really bad shape for a long time, went out for a walk.  With a walker, and with my father in law, and they probably didn’t go far, but still, it was great to see.