Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I woke up with a couple lines of poetry leftover in my head from a dream, and they fit in really well with something I’m writing, and a rhyme scheme I tend to use more of, so the day was a success right there.

Helena was already at work, we had a couple of things to complete this weekend, getting my next two poetry books to  Create Space and Amazon were in 2nd and 3rd place, respectively.  But, they’re both written, so, there’s that.

One of them I’m not too worried about,  it’s just another book of poetry.  The other, 155 Sonnets, I’ve been  working on for years and I’m very anxious to get it into print before somebody else writes a book called 156 Sonnets.  Of course, there are people who’ve written greater numbers of Sonnets, but most of them don’t rhyme, or keep to a consistent meter, so they don’t count.

Anyway, I agreed to take the kids out for a walk, so Helen could get some work done, so we decided to go to the playground at the top of Vitkov Hill.  The highlight of the walk for me was this: there’s an archaeological dig going on just a few blocks from our house – this happens in Prague – and you can’t really see much because they’ve got a blue tarp over the chain link fence all the way around it, and it’s quite a large area.  There is quite an extensive complex of brick walls that have been unearthed and it must go back to at least the 15th, maybe the 14th century, because there are buildings at ground level not two blocks away that date back to the early 1700s, and how long does it take for the soil to pile up like that?

Anyway, I pointed it out to the kids (Sam undoubtedly walks by it frequently, Isabel may not have known it was there) and they just said “So what?,” I don’t remember their exact words, but that was the intent.  These kids are just spoiled rotten from living in Prague.

Anyway, we had a lovely walk, it’s still a bit cold out but it was sunny and there were bright green buds on some of the branches.

When we got back, I realized that H had been hard at work on the book I cared the less about.  Whatever.  Some things got done.  I’m satisfied with the day.

So, Putin has actually sent troops into the Ukrainian region of Crimea, that little peninsula on the Black Sea that is only tenuously connected to Ukraine geographically.  Lots of Russians live there, and there are a couple of Russian military bases, like there is a U.S. military base on Cuba.

This is a huge dick move on the part of Putin, who is swiftly cementing his reputation as the biggest Russian dick leader since… I don’t know,  maybe Brezhnev.  A couple of my  facebook friends compared it to the Germans going into the Sudetenland in 1939, which would make Obama into Neville Chamberlain.

Putin’s bellicose attitude is probably not causing him any trouble with Russian voters.  That kind of thing can  play very well with the home crowd.  It was not so long ago that the U.S. had such a leader.  The world basically stood back and watched the disaster unfold.

The world will do the same with Putin, because there really aren’t a lot of options. This article in Think Progress lists 5 possible U.S. reactions.  I liked 1 and 2, thought 3 unnecessarily punished the Russian people and would actually  strengthen Putin’s hand, thought #4 was a no-brainer, and #5 downright counterproductive.  But, I’m glad some people are thinking beyond the war/no war paradigm.

Films are being churned out faster than I can keep up with them, and sometimes one just  comes and goes without me even having  heard of it.  Happens more and more often.

Just watched a little gem that falls under that  heading, This is the End, and everybody can get off James Franco’s back because that film was a damned work of art, unless I’m just high, probably a bit of both but a really fun film, despite being a bit gross at times.  I could have lived without all the talk of drinking pee, but especially without watching the guy pissing in his own mouth, and the scene where they were kicking the decapitated head around the room was pretty  gross, and that whole weird

These Guys

conversation about whether or where you were allowed to jerk off in the house, where 6 guys were stuck together after the apocalypse, which they at first thought was an Earthquake, and the whole gang at James Franco’s house was totally oblivious, until Seth Rogen and his good body  Jay McBride (all of the actors used their own names, it was just a party at James Franco’s house, that  waskind  of cool) and Jay  started talking about the rapture, they’d seen people being sucked up to heaven  in blue lights, but Seth Rogen totally denied seeing anything because he was a total Hollywood sell-out douchebag, and there’s a brief bit with Emma Watson, who thinks it’s the Zombie Apocalypse, but realizes that being  stuck  with  6 guys is going to be awkward, so the threatens them all with an axe and takes off.

Also, some really scary, dragon-style demons, and lots and lots of fire.  Good entertainment.

I saw some buds today!

I saw some buds today!

Today I saw some bright green buds,

I saw some buds today!

It could be premature

It’s hard to be quite sure

and certainly it’s early for the signs of  flowering  May

nonetheless, I saw some buds today!

So, there’s that, and I’m really pleased about it, but our mild winter in Prague was offset by the frozen hell the eastern half of North American has gone  through this year.  Weather  comes, weather  goes.  Today, we have bigger news.

Actually, it’s as good a guess as any

NASA announced today that they have confirmed 715 new exoplanets!  Well, new to us, anyway.  They’ve undoubtedly already been there for awhile.  To put that in perspective, it brings the total to about 1,715.  Overnight, the number of known exoplanets has nearly doubled.  Which means that, due to new techniques, the  rate of discovery is becoming faster.  And it will become faster still.  Since science is not facebook, there is  no 5,000 friend limit.  It seems very likely to me that before this decade  is out, we’ll be talking about hundreds of thousands of exoplanets, if not millions.

Still, there is a big difference between knowing they are out there, and  finding intelligent life on any of them.  Out of those 715, only 4 are in  their Sun’s ‘Goldilocks Zone,’ the  distance where it’s likely to not be too hot (like  Mercury) or too cold (like Neptune) to support life.  Of those, we have no idea which ones have atmospheres.  We know, just from our own solar system, that some planets do and some don’t, but we don’t have a large enough sample to know the galaxy wide average.  Ditto a solid surface.  Ditto water.

Moving on through the Drake Equation, we have no idea whether every  planet that can develop life does develop life.  Beyond that, we don’t know that intelligence, and technological ability are always the end point of evolution. (not the  same thing – dolphins might all have Stephen Hawking level IQ’s, without that thumb they’re never going to invent civilization)  There might be lots of planets out there where dinosaurs still rule, and they certainly aren’t going to be answering our  messages any time soon.

So, we still have a long way to go, and even a sample of millions may not be enough.  Nonetheless, like those first, tiny, bright green buds which foretell the eruption of life which is spring, today’s news is a sign of things to come, and brings hope.

Of my 1,600 odd facebook friends (some significantly odder than  others) a hefty percentage are writers.  Some of them are real writers who have written books that have actually been purchased and read by  people who don’t even know them personally, but I  suspect the greater number are writers like me, who continue  to write in the vain belief and desperate hope that one fine morning their literary genius will be suddenly and universally acknowledged and acclaimed, even though  there is  no real world indicator that such a revolutionary development  is imminent.

Hello. My name’s Dave and I’m a Writer

With  so many writers, a lot of the conversation the  past few days has been about  the annual AWP Conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs, which should logically be abbreviated AWWP but, you know, writers;  not all of them are big on accuracy), now taking place in Seattle.  Some people saying they’re going,  more people saying they wish they were going, and now some people who are actually there.

On the one hand, I’m a little  bit jealous.  Although one person, who has been several times, wrote to say that it’s really not a  very productive conference, more of a shmoozefest,  it would have been fun to go for the shmoozing, meeting lots of writers, maybe making contact with some of my faceless facebook friends, getting some new ideas, stopping at any stand that’s giving away free stuff, or food.  Also, Seattle’s a fun town.  There’s plenty of other stuff to do, too.

What struck me, though, was the number of people going: 12,000.  That’s a really big number.  How many writers are there out there, anyway?  Hundreds of thousands? Millions?

I guess this is the result of internet publishing and absolutely anybody being able to call themselves a writer, which I am all for, as I wrote a few days back.  Without that recent democratization of the process, I wouldn’t be able to call myself a writer, either.