Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

People on facebook talk about their kids, and that’s easy when they talk about how wonderful their kids are.  That’s 90% of the conversation, and it can be a bit over the top sometimes, but it’s not as chronic as the cat photos.  I  mean, kids are cute, but hey, they’re not cats.

It’s when people are having problems with their kids, and saying “What should I do?,” that I am at a loss.  So, I’m generally hesitant to offer an opinion, for a couple of reasons.

A Practical Approach to Child Rearing

First, there’s a whole lot about the relationship between another person and their kids that I don’t know.  And, however well I know them, I know their kids barely, if at all.  These are fragile human beings.  I’d hate to give advice and be wrong, and I’m about as like to as not.

Next, and more importantly, I don’t even know what to do with my own kids, so I sure can’t advise on anybody else’s.  Basically, just do your best not to  screw them up and good luck, because a lot of it is out of your hands.

Just had a look to try and find my book on Amazon.com.  If you just type in Willie Watson, you get about 20 or 30 entries before mine.  I am apparently not the best known Willie Watson in the world.  That is my goal #1, to change that.

I’m currently behind a few musicians, a Scottish  footballer, a cricket player, and another poet, but he’s from the 19th century and he goes by William, not Willie, so what is Amazon’s problem, anyway?

Of course, if you type in Willie Watson Prague you’ll get a list of almost all my books, and if you type in Willie Watson Sonnets, you’ll get two or three of my titles.  Of course, if you type in the title 155 Sonnets (by Willie Watson), it’ll go right to it, but you won’t see the other books.  So, a few glitches in my marketing system, I’m trying to get those worked out.

Comedian David Brenner is dead.  He was 78 and we haven’t heard much about him lately, although he was still performing right up to the end.  I remember him from back when he was doing fairly regular appearances on the Carson Show.  He made me laugh.  A lot.  Thanks, David Brenner.

As to all of those teaser headlines saying that Fred Phelps’ is ‘near death,’ just stop it; stop getting  my hopes up.  Let me know when the nasty old fucker is gone, that’s all.

The news everybody seems to want to talk about is the missing Malaysian airliner, which I guess is fair enough, it’s human nature.  The less we know about a subject, and the less we can actually do about a subject, the more we want to talk about it.  We can’t do a damned thing about the weather, or the lame  endings TV writers give to our favorite series, so we talk about them excessively.  There is very little the average guy can do about politics, when everybody else seems to be pulling in a different direction, so we talk a lot about that, too.

Anyway, ‘authorities,’ whoever  the hell they are, now think it was a hijacking, but it’s a  pretty strange form of hijacking, as no ransom has been demanded, no group has claimed credit.  I’d like to think it was a hijacking, which would allow for some possibility that those people are still alive.

And, as long as we don’t know, everybody should keep looking.

I suspect, however, that we will no more find this plane and its survivors than Amelia Earhart’s plane and its survivors.  First, it might have been a hijacking AND a crash.  That has happened before.  Then again, if the hijackers landed in some country they didn’t plan on landing in, they might all be lost forever inside of a weird Burmese prison somewhere.  If the plane crash landed in the mountains, they might be trying to hike out, losing people one by  one to tigers, cobras, and sudden, unexpected waterfalls.  Or, they may be inside China, or Tadjikistan (I just use those for examples – I am not making any comment about their political systems), and to keep the hijacking covered up, they can’t release the passengers.

Or, they were abducted by aliens

But, then, why hijack in the 1st place?  Maybe they were just after a couple of guys?

I don’t know.  Just speculating.

In Crimea, they’ve had their referendum and voted to align with Russia.  It sets a bit of a bad precedent, but I don’t see anything anybody can do about it at this point except to bitch and moan about how unfair it is, which many Ukrainians and plenty of anti-Russian people around the world will continue to do for a long time.

The Palestinians are still lamenting what they lost in ’48, the Scottish are still lamenting what they lost in 1707, American Indians would like reparations for what they lost in 1492, and if there were any Neanderthals left alive, they’d be suing the rest of the human race, and they’d have a case.

But, borders change.  Time moves on.  It’s not the end of the world.

Today was Isabel’s first chess tournament.  I didn’t really know what to expect – a dozen kids in a classroom or a thousand milling little monsters in a cavernous hall.  Would there be refreshments?  Would the kids all be little grand masters, way over her head, leading to humiliation and tears? Or would they be a bunch of little brats corralled by their parents into chess when their only true desire in life is to sit on the couch and watch video games?

The truth turned out to be pretty much right down the middle.  I was still a bit groggy when we got out of the house at 8 but we had no trouble getting there, a light rain started as we waited for the bus at Kačerov, but the school turned out to be right next to the bus stop.  So, if it rained harder later, I don’t know.  We had stepped into a different, self-contained universe.

There were 108 kids in the tournament, each with at least 1 parent, some with a more extended entourage, so it was pretty crowded.  There were refreshments.

She lost her first 3 games.  But she was totally focused, she played competitively, and acted politely. I couldn’t have been prouder.

I saw a  little boy in tears, begging to go home.  I was just glad she  wasn’t acting like that.

She won the next one, drew two, and won the last one.

She was pleased, she was going  over the moves with our friend the chess expert, she’ll probably want to do it again, so it was a great experience.

3.141592653

It has been calculated

out to several trillion places

but that’s all you’re going to get from me

mmmmm, Pi

Today, the 14th or March, or 3/14 as they’d write it in the U.S. of A., is Pi day, for the obvious reason, and somebody on facebook pointed out the really cool coincidence which will occur next year at almost half past 9 in the morning on this date, when it will be 3/14/15 9:26.53.

Pi Pie

Another of my friends, who I know in real life even as well, knows pi out to 50 places, which I think is pretty damned awesome.  I can only remember it out to 9 places, and that only by the expedient of that little rhyme above.  Rhymes are mnemonic, you’ve got to give them that.

Pi is just an amazing concept, though.  To calculate the are of a circle, you have to use a number which is totally inexact.  Perhaps that’s why human being like straight property lines, why we live in straight walled houses instead of domes and teacups, and I think it’s all a little bit of a shame that we’re rigid that way.  But, I can understand.  If we tried to draw all the property lines and national borders in circles, there would always be a little bit left over, the lines wouldn’t match up, and there would be room in world politics for a character like Richard Pryor in “The Toy” or at any rate I think it was “The Toy,” who figured out that nobody was claiming that quarter of a penny that everybody’s salary was rounded down, and he could just transfer that over to his own account.

Pi is a reminder that Base 10 is a human concept, totally arbitrary, based on the number of fingers we have, and the laws of nature are not the laws of man.

Yesterday’s blog got a bit of a debate going, at least relative to the number of comments my blogs usually draw (an average day is zero – or or two is fairly common) and one of the comments was a phrase which I’m particularly sick of hearing.

So, even though I don’t generally care for lists, I decided to bluff my way through tonight’s blog with a list of 5 things I’m sick of hearing, or seeing, online, and by online I generally mean facebook.

1.  The phrase that set me off was “would you like a tinfoil hat?”  All that really means is “you’re crazy!” and “you’re crazy!” is a seriously weak argument.  Who do they expect to convince?  They’re not going to make me think I’m crazy, because I know better.  There might be some lurkers on the thread who are swayed, at least until I come back with the clever counter-argument “no, you’re the one who needs a tin-foil hat!”  So, let’s just drop the tin-foil hat phrase.  If you can somehow demonstrate that my argument is, in fact, insane, have at it.

2.  ‘Wake up!’  or, worse, ‘wake up, sheeple’ is just as bad as the tin-foil hat thing, but I think it has already gone somewhat out of fashion, if it hasn’t died entirely.

3.  ‘What you see after you click on this link will blow your mind!’  Dude (or Dudette, as the case may be)  I’ve done LSD, Peyote, Mescaline and pounds and pounds of the finest marijuana and hashish ever grown anywhere on this vast Earth.  I have stood at the top of the world’s highest buildings, I have walked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back out again, I  have stood at the edges of continents, I have watched flaming sunrises and sunsets on endless oceans.  I have children, for goodness’ sake.  You have no idea how far you have to go to blow my mind.

4.  Things I’ve seen a million times before.  Admittedly, this is not any individuals fault, it’s the way facebook is set up, and I’m not sure what the solution is.  We all see things at different times, a lot of our friends think the same things are cool as we do, so I’ve seen that (semi-debunked) Swiss garden co-op thingie about a hundred times.  Maybe it’s my fault.  If there’s a setting that can block something after you’ve already seen it a dozen times or so, could somebody tell me where that is?

5.  People who say they are writers and their posts are banal as shit.  If you’re a writer, write!  Use your adjectives.  Make your words spit fire, let your sentences flow.