Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Happy 5th of July!  Living abroad, the fourth sort of passed and was gon. I had  lots of facebook posts from American friends about fireworks and backyard BBQ’s, but it’s all good.  I love the cookouts, but we’ll probably dine out of doors tonight, around a campfire, because we’re going to pick up the kids from their grandparents’, where they’ve been for a week, and that’s the way they do it up there.  The fireworks are not that big a deal to me, I enjoy watching lights in the sky but I have become jaded.  For small children it is a fascinating and amazing thing to see.  For me, it’s like “eh, seen that before.  Show me a triple rainbow, show me the aurora borealis, show me a UFO, show me something I’ve never seen before and can’t explain, then you’ve got my interest.  One thing about the 4th I’m glad I’m well away from is the coast to coast blanket of flags, flag themed shirts, flag themed towels, flag themed swimwear, and sunglasses, and everything.

Every country has a flag.  Most country’s leaders have used their flags to rally their people to hate people of other countries.  In every country, the people most eager to wave the flag are the ones who understand the least about it.

Sure, there are a lot of things to be proud of.  America began as a noble experiment.  So did Soviet Russia.  So did Athens.  So did Liberia.  Some noble experiments pan out better than others.

America, for hundreds of millions of people, has meant a chance to start a new life, a place which welcomed outsiders and where everybody had a chance.  Now, America is a place where fat people waving flags yell at poor children from other countries on busses, who are already in a terrifying situation.  Whatever your views on immigration law, yelling at kids is just mean.  Cruel.  I don’t like it that cruel people are waving that flag.

America has given the world jazz, blues, rock and roll, country, and gospel music.  America is Hollywood.  America is where the internet took root.  America is the land of Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, Jack London, Jack Kerouac, Tom Robbins, and Dr. Seuss.  Although many other countries have fine literary traditions as well, I think we’ve got them all beat as far as the sheer volume of words on paper.

And yet, lots of Americans are nearly  illiterate.  Just look at the shit they post on facebook.

It’s inevitable, really. Americans are people, people from all over the world.  There are stupid people everywhere.  There are racist people everywhere.  Many of them made their way to America.  In search of a better life.

That’s my blog for today.  Be back Sunday night.

I must say, marijuana is by far my favorite drug – if I had to give up that, or chocolate, or coffee, it would be either chocolate or coffee and that’s saying something because those are two consumables I love dearly.  I enjoy marijuana and I advocate marijuana, and certainly legalization, at the very least.  But, I must admit, it makes me lazy as sin.  I have just had a whole week of almost solid free time and I have gotten virtually nothing done.

A bit of tinkering with my book, but precious little real writing, at least not the kind that actually left then confines of my head, passed through my fingers to the encoded keys and been stored forever, but I’ve got a great deal of the book written in my head.

On a scale of 1-10, I’d give it about a 7.5

A couple of short proofreadings, as they came in, but no advancement on any of the 3 or 4 things I really should have been working on, should have taken the time to do.  And now, it’s Friday.

We’re heading off to the cottage tomorrow morning, and picking up the kids, so the vacation’s over.  So to speak.

Just watched a Toni Collette film called Japanese Story,  with Helena.  It started off slow, but the characters were interesting, and it was a nice, little Australian travelogue, with lots of scenes driving down really long roads, and visiting really nasty open pit mines.  Then, about 3/4’s of the way in, it took a sudden and Fargoesque twist which absolutely ended any chance of it counting as a romantic comedy with a happy ending.

I’d rate it as worth watching.  Mostly for Toni Collette.  She goes from terrified to mortified to a weird combination of grieving and being awkwardly embarrassed

So, I will write another blog tomorrow morning and then one Sunday night when we get home, because there are often technical difficulties in the backwoods of Cesky Raj, and I don’t want to spend the weekend obsessing over it.

O China, land of contradictions, Dragon of the East.  Fastest trains in the world, but the streets of every city are clogged, cars, bicycles, mopeds, and most people aren’t getting very far very fast.  A booming, economic superpower poised to take over the world, yet millions live in poverty, in crowded, crumbling buildings just outside of the gleaming skyscraper zones, and in remote villages without electricity or modern plumbing.  Not to mention the sweat shops.  The pollution is so bad in most cities lots of people wear surgical masks and in Beijing, they show sunsets on a big screen for the gathered crowds, because the real thing is totally obscured by smog,* but yet they can build something like this.

Prosposed Phoenix Towers in Wuhan – the big one is over a kilometer high

It is an extremely cool project, I’ll give it credit for that.  The system of letting the water rise through a series of filters and then reused to create an urban green space, a garden tower, is downright poetic.  It flows, it is cyclical, it is water, air, and a bit of earth and fire.

They say it will be totally self-sustaining, scrub pollution out of the air with it’s special coating, and provide energy to the surrounding community.  If that’s even 2/3rds true, any two out the three thirds true, it will be a major step forward for urban design and the future of the human race.

I’m glad to see it built, but I suspect that China’s environmental concerns are secondary.  If they wanted to do something good for the environment, there are a lot of smaller projects which they could have done for the same amount of money, which might have produced greater and more widespread results.  But then, they wouldn’t be able to say they’ve got the tallest building in the world.

That’s what this is about and I must admit, despite being somewhat stunned at the pettiness of the mindset, I am impressed.  I thought Burj Dubai would hold that title forever.  But China said no.

What China is announcing by building this building is “anything anyone can do, anywhere in the world, we can do better, or, at least, bigger.

Game on.

* I read that somewhere.

There’s nothing terribly new in this article. Meteorites are being found all the time.

There’s one show I watch about two guys who hunt meteorites, and they go out into the desert, or some farmers field, and walk around with a metal detector, and dig up a rock and say “Ooooh, isn’t that a beauty, I’ll bet we get a thousand, maybe two thousand dollars for that,” and I think “Dudes, that’s not even going to cover the cost of your trip, do you have real jobs, or are you getting paid a lot for the TV program, or what?”  I enjoy the programs, I’d a lot rather watch guys digging up rocks from outer space than a bunch of guys in creepy, fake country western outfits and mustaches fight over the contents of a stupid storage garage.  It’s just that the math doesn’t add up.  First, I’m a little bit surprised that such a thing can be purchased at all – it seems they should all belong to museums, or high powered science labs, not sitting on some collector’s shelf, somewhere.  But, since they apparently can, I’m surprised that they aren’t worth millions, and not thousands (or even hundreds, the smaller ones.)

Anyway, the article touches on the old argument that life on Earth did not originate on Earth, but came here on board a comet, or asteroid, or rogue rock that eventually became meteor, meteoroid, and meteorite.  I’m not convinced.  Life could have evolved on Earth because we’ve got water and sunlight, and that seems to be all it takes, and we’re not even so sure sunlight is required, any more.  Life could also have evolved on other planets and come here on an asteroid.  I’m ready to go with Occam’s Razor on this one, until proved wrong.

That doesn’t mean I think we are alone in the universe.  I believe other, intelligent, technological species are out there and some day we will find them.  If we don’t, we will just boldly go colonizing the galaxy until we do.  Whether we originally evolved on Earth or as a space bacterium of some sort, evolve we did.

And there’s no limit to where we are going.

I’ve been living outside of the U.S. for over 15 years now, so Hobby Lobby is a store with which I have no personal experience.  I cannot comment on the quality of their goods or the fairness of their prices.  But they sure messed up, didn’t they?

Maybe.  Sometimes boycotts work, sometimes they work but it takes a long time, and most often they don’t.  On the one hand, most people don’t pay any attention at all to the employment policies of the stores where they shop, and a lot of others might have their heart in the right place but suffer from boycott fatigue.  If you are concerned about the environment, and health, and worker’s rights, the list of companies you could boycott is virtually endless, and is comprised of about 90% of the places you could conceivably shop, and it doesn’t usually work, so it’s sort of like signing non-stop petitions.  There is a third group, who actually approve of what Hobby Lobby is doing.

On the other hand, especially if my facebook page is any indicator, women are seriously pissed off about this one, lots and lots of women.  So, maybe this boycott will be effective.

One point that seems to be missing in this debate is that there are two large groups of people who have a direct and compelling reason to want women to have easy and affordable access to contraceptives.  The first group, of course, is women.  The second group is men.

Seriously, guys.  Think of how hard it is to get laid even in an enlightened era, and then imagine if most women didn’t have birth control.  Quite simply, they’d stop having sex with us, and then we’d be back in the sexual dark ages, in ‘our parents’ time’ or, in the case of most of you ‘in your grandparents time’

It was a bad era.  Women never took their clothes off, there was no rock and roll, and everything was in black and white.  What kind of a jerk would want to go back to that?

So, guys, join the Hobby Lobby boycott.  Or you may never get laid again.