Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

For anybody who thought racism was dead in America, today gives us three big, up-the-side-of-the-head style reminders that that is not the case.  First off, Cliven Bundy.  After getting a following, of sorts, for saying dumbass things like “I don’t even believe the United States government even exists,” and refusing to pay his bills despite repeated court orders, and after getting a huge national TV audience, at least on right wing TV,  he opens his illiterate yap to start saying things about how all black people are lazy and just sit on their porches all the time and do nothing, whereas in the good old days of slavery they were all perky and happy.  Then, this morning he went on CNN to defend his statements and maybe he thought he was walking them back, because he’s a dumbass, but his spiel about how Rosa Park (that’s what he said) shouldn’t have gone all the way to the front of the bus, that’s not what Dr. King asked her to do, 3/4 of the way to the front would have been fine, or she could have stayed at the back, that would have been fine, too, and black people shouldn’t get so upset when you say stuff like ‘black boy’ and ‘negro.’

V. Stiviano- Has She Just Launched a Film Career?

I felt a bit bad for the old racist (who said, emphatically, that he is not a racist) and wondered how long it would take the media to find someone to distract the American public from Jivin’ Cliven.  Well, I don’t know if you’d call it a distraction, or just an example of the old saying: Things happen in threes.

You remember Frazier Glenn Cross (aka Frazier Glenn Miller), the guy who shot and killed 3 people in Kansas because he thought they were Jewish (they weren’t), and it turned out he was a member of the KKK and another paramilitary group called the White Patriot Party?  Well, more details have emerged.  Apparently, the reason he changed the name from Frazier Glenn Miller to Frazier Glenn Cross was because he entered the witness protection program, which is a bit of an eye opener for me.  They don’t conceal your identity any better than that?  I put more effort into changing a password.

But (get ready for the funny part) he didn’t go into the witness program because he’d found Jesus or had a big change of heart.  No, he went into the program because the cops had nailed him dead to rights on a lesser charge.  They caught him in flagrante delicto, as the saying goes, with a prostitute.  Who was black.  And a man.  Seriously.

Now, full disclaimer on my part, I’ve got no objection at all if somebody wants to pay to have sex with a handsome, young, black man.  Go for it, God bless ya, have fun.  But it sure would have damaged his credibility with the Klan, so the whole situation is rather humorous.

Then, there is the case of Donald Sterling , owner of the L.A. Clippers basketball team, which, like every NBA team,  is over 50% black.  A tape has emerged of him berating his girlfriend, V. Stiviano, who is as young and hot as he is old and rich, for posting a picture of herself with Magic Johnson on instagram.  Like Bundy, he claimed to not actually be racist (Stiviano is half black and half Mexican), “you just don’t have to advertise it, O.K?”  She was calm and collected on the tape, while he was drunk and cretinous, and I suppose she was the one who recorded the conversation and released it, so my guess is she’s decided to get out of the relationship while she’s still young, and take whatever she can get, which will be a lot.

Three such examples in one day.  We still have a long way to go

O.K., there’s nothing in the news I really feel compelled to talk about (Stephen Colbert has issued the definitive statement on the Cliven Bundy case, and nobody needs to say another word), and here is a story which is probably totally irrelevant, (with video) so that is enough of a confluence for me.  A zonkey (half zebra, half donkey) has been born at a zoo in Mexico.

Different, but Loved

This kind of thing happens occasionally in the natural kingdom and we think it’s cute.  There are ligers (lion/tiger offspring), grolar bears (grizzly/polar), and dogs have been known to interbreed with wolves, and dingoes.

If it happened with  humans, we’d probably think it was pretty gross.  Stalin wanted to breed humans with chimpanzees but, of course, Stalin was a psychopathic maniac.  It didn’t work out.  First, it proved difficult to find human volunteers.  Of course, for Joe Stalin, that was less than an insurmountable obstacle, but there was the problem that it just didn’t work.  There’s only about a 1 or 2% difference between human and chimpanzee, but that 2% is  significant.

Apparently, zebras and donkeys, polar bears and grizzly bears, and dogs and wolves are apparently closer than that.  Also, they don’t have the judgmental mindset that humans do.  The zebra who is the mother of this little stripy socked cutie is apparently totally happy with him, and doesn’t give a shit what anybody thinks.

It makes me wonder what other species might be able to interbreed, and if this could bring any advantages to the human race.  I know there have been attempts to breed cows with bison, just to have bigger beef cows, but I don’t know if that’s been successful, or why beef farmers aren’t just trying to breed more bison.

Maybe this could be the solution to the bumblebee problem.  If they could interbreed them with, say, for instance, houseflies, which are far too numerous to ever go extinct, it may be the thing that saves mankind.

So, not a completely irrelevant topic, after all.

Vladimir Putin’s an ass.  Ex KGB, authoritarian, hates gays, corrupt as fuck.  If he were American, he’d be a teabagger.  His actions in Crimea were totally out of line.  He’s like the little kid (I was like this as a little kid, too, but I outgrew it) who perked up in history class when it came time to study Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, and thought “Someday I’d like to conquer the world.”

Chaibagger

The fact that he’s getting away with it doesn’t make him any less of an ass.  There was no real need for Russia to take Crimea.  They had a naval base there already (as we have one in Cuba, which is even weirder), and their commercial shipping had plenty of access to Ukrainian ports.  Nobody was threatening to shut that down.  Russia gained nothing, except the thrill of conquest.

Now this.  He wants to start up a new internet, a Russian internet, because he thinks the Internet is a big CIA plot.  Good luck with that.  If he succeeds in setting up a Russian version of the internet, it will only be visited by Russian speakers.  Admittedly, that’s a pretty large number of people, but compared to the number of people who use the real internet it’s small potatoes.

Russian scientists are still going to want to use the real internet because, despite Russia’s great contributions to science over the years, the vast majority of the world’s scientists are not Russian.  Some are American, some are British, some are Brazilian, and Indian, and Korean.   If Putin doesn’t want Russia to fall behind in science, he’ll have to continue to allow access to the real internet.

Russian cat lovers are going to want to stay on the real internet, because there are so many cute photos of cats.  Putin may have a point that the CIA is using the internet to spy on everybody, but even the CIA doesn’t have the manpower to keep up with the sea of crap that is facebook.

Also, if he wants to separate Russian users from the rest of the world, he will be depriving thousands of hot, young, Russian women of gainful employment in the porn industry.  A loss for Russia and a loss for the world.

Putin’s past actions have shown that he may be enough of an ass to actually try and pull this off, but I’d rate his chances of success as doodly-squat.  Sure, a couple of countries – Iran and North Korea are the examples that spring to mind – have placed limits on the internet, but one should note that those countries are not doing so well in their international relationships.

Give it up,  Vlad.  You didn’t invent the internet, and you don’t control it.  The CIA doesn’t even control it, although I’m sure they’d like to.  If you try to turn it off, a whole lot of Russian people will be seriously pissed off at you.  Not to mention the rest of the world.

Since I’ve got a book out called ‘155 Sonnets,’ it’s pretty clear I’ m interested in Shakespeare.  Sure, there are lots of scholars out there who know more about his life than I do, but I’m interested enough that I would be remiss if I didn’t dedicate this blog to his birthday.

First of all, we don’t actually know if it is his birthday.  The first sonnet in my book is called “April 14th”, and it’s a birthday poem for Shakespeare, so obviously at the time I wrote it (sometime in the early 90s) I thought that was the date.  What we know is that he was baptized on the 26th, so the 23rd is a fair guess and it makes a nice story, dying on his birthday, a bookended life, so that’s the day people seem to have decided on.  Basically, his birthday is April 23rd at the latest.

Why does this matter?  It doesn’t, much.  If he was born on the 23rd, he was a Taurus, if he was born a day or two earlier, he was an Aries, but that’s not really relevant.  We have his work, and if we can’t figure out his personality from that, knowing his birth sign isn’t going to help.

Actually, there is a lot we don’t know about Shakespeare.

I celebrated the day by going to a seminar given by my friend, Alex Went, who has studied the man in far greater depth than I have, and it was pretty interesting.  He talked a bit about some different theories – was Shakespeare gay, was he a secret Catholic, did he ever visit Prague? – showed some slides, and then we had cake.

We don’t even know if this is really what he looked like

I’m pretty convinced, based on Sonnet #20, that he had sex with at least one man:

A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion

a woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted

with shifting change, as is false woman’s fashion

In other words, I like having sex with you because you look like a girl but don’t go all crazy and shit the way they do.

He may have been a secret Catholic.  My understanding of Elizabethan history is that she had sort of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy with regard to that.  He certainly wasn’t an overt Catholic, since that was a good way to get your head chopped off, but he clearly wasn’t a fanatic Protestant, either.  (His wife was, but he didn’t like her much.  Their relationship stands as historical proof that the phrase “Behind every great man is a great woman” is nonsense.) I suspect he wasn’t any more religious than he had to be.  It certainly isn’t a major theme of his work.

As to whether he ever visited Prague, that’s something the literati living here like to talk about, but there’s no real evidence for it, or in fact that he ever left England at all.

In any event, he would be 450 years old today.  Or maybe at some point in the last couple of weeks.  Happy Birthday.

First, Elizabeth Warren says, without any ambiguity, that she is not running for President.  That’s O.K.  There’s still lots of time for her to change her mind, for the moment it’s good for her to concentrate on doing her job in the Senate, the election is still over two years away, and there’s nobody, on either side, who has definitely said they are running.

Senator Elizabeth Warren (Democrat, from Massachusetts)

Still, we can make some good guesses.  Hillary is running.  Maybe Joe Biden.  They’re both a little on the old side, but there’s no law against that.  There are 5 or 6 other Democrats who may jump in if they think they’ve got a shot.  On the Republican side, Rand Paul will run, Marco Rubio will run, and Rick Santorum will probably run, giving us all another chance to laugh at him.  Ted Cruz wants to run, but there’s a serious question about his eligibility and I’m pretty sure the answer is no.  He was born in Canada, to Canadian parents, which puts him in exactly the same boat as Arnold Schwarzenegger.

So, the Republicans are in for another joke of a primary season and whoever gets the Democratic nomination will win the presidency.  Which makes that Democratic nomination a really important goal.  Here are a few of the reasons I think Elizabeth Warren  is the best choice.

She has just written a book, called “A Fighting Chance.”  Writing a book, of course, is what originally brought public attention to Barack Obama, so maybe writing a book is the new prerequisite for the presidency.  I’m O.K. with that.  If you expect to manage the most powerful country in the world, you should be able to write a lousy book.  Hillary Clinton, of course, wrote a book, too.  But “A Fighting Chance” is a much better title than “It Takes a Village.”

Warren would satisfy two key groups within the Democratic Party.  Women who just want Hillary because she is a woman (which is a big part of Hillary’s base), would be able to rally around Liz Warren.  She is, in fact, a woman.  Also, Warren would appeal to people like me, who think that Democrats should stop being fucking wimps and start being Democrats.  A bit less like Obama and Bill Clinton and a bit more like FDR.

Republicans are  geared up to fight against Hillary, to wage a nasty, personal campaign and a Warren candidacy would leave them with nothing except “She’s really, really liberal” which they were going to say about any Democratic candidate anyway.

So, ignoring for the moment that there is a crucial congressional election happening this November and that a million things can change between now and 2016, I am going on the record now: Warren should run.  She would win.