Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Petr Kellner, the richest man in the Czech Republic, worth over 15 billion dollars, died yesterday. In a helicopter crash, in Alaska. My wife thinks I’m horrible for pointing out that this is no loss to anybody. She’s a more tolerant person than I am.
Of course, four other people died with him, and the deaths of the pilot and their local guides is a tragedy. But the death of Kellner himself (who, I admit I knew almost nothing about until today outside of the fact that he’s a billionaire) is nothing but a benefit. From all accounts, he gained his fortune by charging poor people excessive interest on emergency loans. He has ruined lives. He has caused suicides. I’ve seen only a few people commenting on his death. Some, just as a news item. “Hey, did you see this super rich guy just died in a helicopter crash?” and a couple of others, cataloguing his misdeeds. Nobody has any reason to love a billionaire.
When famous actors die, or musicians, or writers, or even athletes die, people mourn. We leave comments about how much they meant to us, how they entertained or even inspired us. How their lives were a bright spot in our own. And that’s true even if they did have some personal flaws. You’re not supposed to worry too much about that, after somebody is dead.
But, people who are only famous for being rich, that’s another matter.
There is the bitter envy factor, I suppose. I wonder how he was able to charter a helicopter to go skiing on a glacier in Alaska when most Czech people can’t even leave the country. Come down to it, it seems that wealthy and powerful people do tend to die in violent accidents, which might make some people a bit more sympathetic. Princess Diana, JFK Jr., Sonny Bono, Buddy Holly, James Dean. They have access to fast cars, private aircraft, and can go skiing in places that normal people don’t go. Sometimes, that’s fatal.
There is also the ‘trickle down’ factor. Of course, trickle down economics doesn’t really work, the money never trickles down all the way to people who actually need money, but this is a lot of money. All of his relatives will now be billionaires, and everybody in his corporate circle will move up a notch. They will mourn him publicly, but I’ll bet quite a few of them are already figuring out how they can take advantage of this.
And why not? It is, after all, exactly what he would have done.

This is a small thing, a trivial matter. It is of no particular import in the political struggle going on today, and will not affect the future a bit. A broader minded, more tolerant person than myself might never even think twice about it. Nonetheless, it is a thing which pisses me off and I am going to vent.
My name is not an unusual name, and it is not hard to spell. Admittedly, there is more than one spelling. Willy Wonka is spelled with a y, and Willy Brandt, the former Chancellor of West Germany, back in those ancient times when Germany was more than one country. But I can’t think of any others.
Still, I can understand how someone who has not seen my name in print might take a guess and use the wrong spelling. I’ve done that myself, with other people’s names. Mark or Marc, Eric or Erik, Isabel or Isabelle, Ann or Anne, Jon or John, Willy or Willie. If you don’t know you take a guess, and if the person is bothered they can correct you, you can apologize and life goes on much the same way as it did before.
But, if they are replying to a comment I made on the internet, my name is sitting there, in bold print, right in front of their stupid face, spelled exactly the way I choose to spell it, the way I have spelled it my entire life. And they get it wrong.
Is it blind ignorance? Is it deliberate? Not sure, but I suspect that people who misspell it under such circumstances are the same ones who misspell common words and when they are called on it say “Hey, you knew what I meant, it was a typo,” as if there were no way of editing your posts, no way of correcting a typo. Do they actually think the massive number of red and blue underlines on all of their posts are decorative? Have they not realized that a right click will provide them with the correct spelling? Maybe not.
Maybe being stupid is a little bit like being poor. Once you’re in it, it’s really hard to get out.

For some reason, I find the current fate of the cargo ship Ever Given very humorous. It is stuck sideways in the Suez Canal and screwing up ship traffic more than ship traffic has ever been screwed up, with ships backed up into the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, and some near the back of the line have just turned around and decided to take the long, old route around the southern tip of Africa.
In a way, it reminds me of a couple years back when those boys got stuck in a cave in Thailand, and the whole world was focused on what was essentially an engineering problem. But, this time everybody is above ground and fatalities, or even serious injuries, are unlikely.
I’m sure it’s the worst experience of that captain’s career, and the crew is probably not having a lot of fun, either – Egypt is a nice place, I quite enjoyed it when I was there, but outside of a couple big cities and four or five major tourist sites, it is mostly sand and desolation. And, where the ship broke down is most definitely one of the desolate parts.
But, for most of us, it’s a funny situation. It’s like a traffic jam, which all of us understand, but with ships, so that’s funny, because on the open ocean there is so, so much space between them, and this kind of thing has never happened before.
When a traffic jam happens on land, even if it’s the worst accident imaginable, say a collision between a Greyhound Bus and a big-ass 18 wheeler which leaves both of them on their sides, and blocking all lanes of traffic. They’ll call out the heavy equipment and have both vehicles pulled off the road within a couple of hours. But this, they say, may take weeks to clear. (It could also be floated free by tomorrow)
The whole situation does, I suppose, point up the weakness of our planet-wide infrastructure, and we have to find ways of dealing with that, but it’s funny, too.

(spoiler alert) A couple of days ago I started to watch a show on Netflix called The Secret because it seemed to be a tale of arcane mystery, and I do love a good arcane mystery, the arcaner the better, and I lasted maybe about 20 minutes in. Which was fine, I think I got the gist of it, and the gist of it is interesting, but it was starting to come across as a new age rant, a press release for a cult, as if somebody put together this montage of glowing testimonials to try and start the next Scientology.
The gist of it is the power of positive thinking, the idea that ‘thoughts become things.’ That seems to me a positive approach, I certainly think optimism is superior to pessimism, in the same ways that it’s better to be healthy than sick, rich than poor, good looking than not, smart than stupid, and so on. We don’t always get to choose, or maybe we sometimes we don’t want to make the necessary sacrifices, but we all know which is better.
It irritated me, however, how speaker after speaker kept using the word ‘guaranteed.’ There are no guarantees. You may have filled your head with positive thoughts, you may be sitting there quite comfortably visualizing the promotion you know you deserve, and the addition to your house you plan to build, when the plane you are comfortably sitting on plummets from the sky. Now, you might blame that on the fact that the guy sitting next to you just had an overflowing headful of negative thoughts, but it doesn’t work that way.
So, while I like the idea presented, and intend to practice it, I don’t think it’s a guarantee that I’m suddenly going to become rich and successful. Can’t hurt, though.

I just read something on Facebook, although it was probably from Twitter, written by one of Pete Buttigieg’s staffers, how he (Buttigieg, not the staffer) is playing chess while everybody else is playing checkers.
So, I could write a blog about what a ferret faced failure I think Buttigieg is, a one-term, piss poor mayor, and specifically on the wrong side of the BLM movement, but no. I’ve written that before, and I probably will again, being as he is Secretary of Transportation in a transparently anti-green administration, and so will many other people.
So, I’m just going to use this blog to point out the ridiculousness of the metaphor. Not that I think Buttigieg isn’t capable of chess. I never said he was stupid. Corrupt, racist, opportunistic, self-serving, sure.
No, the thing is, is you walk into a room where everybody’s playing checkers, sit yourself down at a board and make a chess move, you’re going to be disqualified and escorted out of the checker club. You’re not playing the game, you’re just being an elitist dick.
Of course, metaphors are not meant to be exact, and I am as prone as anybody else to throw out gratuitous game and sports metaphors, but politics being compared to a game happens so frequently that most people tend to see it as such. And it’s not. It’s really not.