Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

There are many reasons people become teachers, and some are more noble than others.  One of the less noble reasons is the appeal of being the boss, the leader, the dictator over a whole roomful of people.  Problem is, the kids in my classes don’t do what I say any more than my own kids do.  Like Rodney Dangerfield, I don’t get no respect.

My 5th grade class was typical today.  I vacillated terribly between trying to use humor and cajole answers out of them, and screaming at them that they were supposed to be human beings, in possession of a brain, and therefore more intelligent than a house plant, but that tirade was met with a blank stare.  I was quite shocked that not one of them knew when the Velvet Revolution took place –  some of them off by more than a century.

Then I headed out to my little kids’ classes in Vinoř.  There was a gypsy violinist in front of the Metro at Vltavska and I stopped to listen to Frank Sinatra’s “Something Stupid” and what I think was “Cielito Lindo,” and that lifted my mood a bit.

It was a gray and windy day, colder than it should be for May.  I always get there about a half an  hour early, that’s the bus schedule, so I go for a walk by the village pond.  It was just ridiculously green and lush, all around.  Still, I was wishing it would just go ahead and rain already.  The thickness in the air is oppressive.

The 1st class  was just 3 little girls (sometimes there are 4 or 5) and they were bored with everything I suggested.  I actually nodded out while reading The Cat in the Hat, which I’ve pretty much got committed to memory, and snapped to to realize that not only wasn’t I on the same page I was reading, but that I was speaking gibberish – I don’t think they noticed.

Then came the boys and all hell broke loose.  There are these huge rubber balls that they keep stored, rather ingeniously, on a clothesline type contraption near the ceiling, well out of children’s reach.  Normally, I like to keep it that way.  But, I had already given up on  the day, so I indulged their wish and got a few balls down.  Every game and exercise I tried to get going after that failed, because they were just having too much fun bouncing around on the balls, and hitting each other with them.

But, you keep trying.   Then, I had all the kids stand behind a line (yeah, right – that line was really flexible) and put one at a time against the far wall.  I would quiz that one –   count to ten, touch your nose, clap your hands, name three animals who eat grass, easy stuff like that – and if they missed one, or were just too slow, everybody else threw the balls at them.

They loved it.  Sometimes you’ve just got to let the kids do what they want.

I just saw a headline that made me laugh.  It said “Jane Fonda, 76,  Looks Better Than Angelina Jolie in  Dress.”  That may be true, but I’ll bet Angelina looks better out of a dress.  But that’s not tonight’s topic.

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, especially if it happens in an elevator and there’s no audio to accompany the security camera footage.  The incident of Beyonce’s sister, Solange Knowles, going apeshit all over Beyonce’s husband, Jay Z, will remain unexplained.  They have issued a joint statement, (or a group statement.  Can you say joint if it’s 3 people?  I don’t know.) which totally failed to satisfy those inquiring minds that want to know.  It was just full of diplomatic language and gobbledy-gook like “both of them have admitted their  share of responsibility in the incident,” which makes me think Jay Z must have said or done something seriously offensive prior to boarding that elevator, because from what I saw on the video, the responsibility was all on Solange.  This was not a quick slap across the face.  This was a class A ass whoopin’.

The statement also said “we are ready to move  on as a family.”  This says two things (in addition to saying they are ready to move on as a family.  It says that however much Jay Z might piss Solange off, Solange knows which side her bread is buttered on, and she’s prepared to calm down rather than get cut off and, 2) it says they’re not saying any more.

So, the great elevator brawl, which was the  best fight  in Vegas  since Mike Tyson bit off Evander Holyfield’s ear back in 1997, joins MH370, 9/11, the Kennedy Assassination, Jimmy Hoffa, Amelia Earhart, the Marie Celeste and the gunpowder plot (I think Guy Fawkes was set up. Think about it:  King James had enough power to pull it off and cover it up, because this was back in the day when the king could have journalists hung, drawn and quartered, if journalists had even been invented yet, and he had two powerful motives: increase publicity for the sale of his stupid bibles, and a desire to crack down on the Catholics, or maybe it was the Protestants.  The gunpowder plot was a false flag that gave him the excuse, one way or the other.)

My guess is that Jay Z tried to come onto her, and she wasn’t having it.  But that’s just a wild guess.

Of course, when things go to court, you can never predict what will happen.  A lot depends on the bias of the judge, the whim of a jury, who has the best lawyers, and so on.  Justice does not always prevail.

So, I’m not making a prediction here, I am just saying that in my mind this is an absurd, frivolous lawsuit without any merit whatsoever and I hope it gets thrown out of court right off the bat. (Oh, damn, I still can’t do links.  Which means I can’t attach pix, either.  Never mind.  I’m sure you’ll be able to find the story.  And you, like everybody else on the planet, already know what Scarlett Johansson looks like)

She is suing a novelist, and the novelists publisher, for using her name and her image  without her permission.  Well, not exactly her image.  A description of her image.  The book, called La  Premiere Chose qu’On Regarde (The First Thing We Look At) is about a struggling young model who happens to be a dead ringer for Johansson, and that causes her all sorts of problems.

First, let me state that I am a big fan of Scarlett Johansson.  I think she is gorgeous, a great actress, and I have no reason to believe that she is anything other than a fundamentally  decent person.  I just think this lawsuit is ridiculous.

For one thing, she should be flattered that the writer chose her.  He could have written a book about a struggling young model who looked exactly like Julia Roberts, or Natalie Portman, or any other woman in Hollywood who is famous for being beautiful and it would be the same story.  (It all sounds a bit like fanfic, but it is a best seller in France and the author, Gregoire DelaCourt, had another bestselling novel which is going to be made into a film)

But, she’s not flattered.  She’s pissed off.  Or maybe just greedy, but I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt on that one.  That’s O.K.  She’s entitled to be pissed off.  She’s not entitled to money, and she’s not entitled to force a retraction of the book.  That would be ridiculous.

The article I read about it had a picture of Johansson right at the  top.  Did they expropriate her image?  Basically, she’s saying that people aren’t allowed to talk about her.  (There’s an easy way to make that happen, if she really wanted to.  Just stop making movies, appearing on talk shows, or giving interviews.  In a year or two, the public would forget about her.)

I think the law is pretty clear on this (although it may be complicated by the fact that the novel is in French by a French author so I don’t know if the case will go to court in the U.S. or in France, and I don’t know what difference that will make)  If the author didn’t say anything about Johansson that was untrue and/or malicious, then no harm/no foul.

I will be following this  case with a great deal of interest.  Might even read the book, once it gets translated into English.

O.K., my link thingie is apparently broken, or else wordpress.com is fucking around again, changing stuff up that doesn’t need to be changed.  I was going to write about a poem called ‘Look Up’ which I saw on facebook, but without offering you a link to it, that’s not much of a topic.  I liked it because it rhymed and far too few poets do that any more (which, I am more and more convinced, is because they can’t) and it had a consistent meter throughout and it actually made sense, but I actually thought the message of the poem was a bit trite, that we all spend too much time on facebook and staring at our phones and not interacting with other people and it seemed ironic to me that I saw the poem on facebook, which pretty much undermined its entire message.  It’s like watching a TV program about how horrible television is, or calling up a friend to say how much you hate talking on the phone.  The medium is the message so when you use the medium,  you are endorsing the message.

So, I considered switching topics and writing about another thing I saw on facebook, a list of bizarre correlations, completely unrelated things where the charts lined up exactly, like the number of films Nicolas Cage has been in and the number of people who drowned in backyard swimming pools.  Year on year, 99% correlation.  It was comical, but it just stood as proof that correlation is not the same as causation, if you compare thousands of charts, some of them  are going to be identical, they are actually less random than snowflakes, probably because of fewer variables.

So, I’m going to write about the NASA report that all the ice on the western side of Antarctica is going to melt, mostly from below so one huge iceberg is going to plop into the ocean in a few years and there isn’t a goddamned thing anybody can do about it, we’ve already passed the tipping point, pumped too much carbon dioxide into the air, loved our cars too much and voted for too many ignorant, corrupt, oil friendly politicians.  As it melts, the level of the world’s oceans will rise a whopping 4 feet, that’s about a meter and a third, which means we could very well lose Florida, which is a brutal kind of poetic justice as no place on Earth has a higher concentration of global warming denying politicians, and the Seychelles and the Netherlands, which is just fucked up.

I have, of course, a solution.  It may  be too late to stop an iceberg the size of New Zealand from falling into the ocean, but maybe by putting some powerful ships to use, we could noodge it in the direction we would like it to go, i.e. some southern location which could use a massive source of fresh water, put it to good use, like maybe Australia, or Chile’s Atacama Desert, driest place on Earth. 

Of course, it’s massive and I haven’t done the math and  know little about the physics, but it’s size would be somewhat mitigated by the fact that it’s bobbing around in the ocean and it’s going to float one way or another even if left alone.  So, it’s a thought. 

In any event, if the ice shelf’s collapse is inevitable, we need to shift our thinking from how to prevent it to what to do about it.

p.s. can’t add a photo, either.  hope to have this problem fixed tomorrow

I am generally a freedom loving kind of guy.  I like smoking marijuana and riding a bicycle without a helmet.  Note that I said bicycle.  Intellectually, I can accept the anti-motorcycle helmet law argument that the government shouldn’t be telling people what chances they can or can’t take as far as splitting their idiot head open is concerned.  In practice, however, motorcycles scare me, even as a passenger.  I prefer safety and comfort to thrills and spills.  I like trains.

Yeeehaw! Fuck archaeology!

But, while I feel that anybody should be able to do pretty much anything they want to, as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else, that doesn’t mean they should be able to do anything they want to whenever and wherever they want to, because that’s going to run up against that “not hurting anyone else” proviso.

Yesterday the gun toting, neo-Confederate morons who’ve been hanging around the Bundy Ranch in Nevada, pointing guns at law enforcement officers and providing comic material for John Stewart and others  since early April, decided they’d protest against a certain trail on a park in Utah being closed to ATVs (all terrain vehicles).  Now, let’s leave aside for the moment the reason that trail is closed is because it  runs by an archaeological site, with lots of easily damaged Navajo stuff.  Parks are generally places where people like to go to get away from the noise and pollution of the cities for a nice, quiet afternoon in a natural environment.  Even city parks fulfill that function.

So, it is entirely reasonable that that road should be closed to vehicles whose main purpose is making a fuckton of noise and causing maximum disruption to a calm and peaceful environment.   I also think such vehicles should be banned from art galleries, children’s playgrounds, churches and mosques, cemeteries, airport runways, hospital parking lots, and flower shows.  Golf courses can be up to the management’s discretion.