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Just got back from an evening of karaoke.  The karaoke followed an Austin Lucas gig, I got there a little bit late and only caught the last 4 or 5 songs, but it was great stuff.

I haven’t done karaoke probably in over a year.  It conflicts with my old-man-with-kids-and-a-job schedule, which generally dictates being home by 8 p.m., when things are barely getting started in the happening spaces of Prague.

Austin Lucas

But, the wife and daughter are up at the cottage and Sam is staying at a friends, plus I don’t work tomorrow until 11:50,  so it was the perfect opportunity.

It was the regular karaoke crowd.  Some people I hadn’t seen for a long time, whose lives I’ve been following through facebook but not face to face.  That felt good.  Some really good singers.  Some rather not so good singers.  One guy with a seriously powerful, maybe I’m a little high but I’d say operatic powerful voice, but he kept singing Heavy  Metal songs about committing suicide and shit, a bunch of Spanish tourists who all got on stage together, that’s a thing you’ve got to love about Prague, on any given evening, everywhere you go, you’ll see a group of people from somewhere who are wild in Prague, hitting all the bars and going nuts and having an amazing trip, a rap song that was incredibly fast, and one from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, that brought back some memories, and a guy with bright blue hair and an orange shirt, who thought it was funny to mess up somebody’s act, although they may have planned it together, I don’t know, by rolling around on the floor at his feet.  Typical karaoke night.

I got to sing ‘Suspicious Minds’ and that Spice Girls thing, ‘Wannabe’ because I played karaoke roulette  which means you just  give your name to the DJ and sing whatever he puts up, but he knows my musical tastes pretty well, I think.

I’ve missed karaoke.  I’ve got to do it more often.

On February 18th, 1930, Pluto was discovered.  So, it’s not really a birthday since it existed long before it was discovered, just as America existed long before October of 1492, just as gravity existed before the apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head.  Also, Pluto’s not really a planet any more, because it got reclassified, but I feel bad about that.  I feel like the human race has taken an adopted dog back to the pound.

Happy Birthday, Pluto

Just because it is small.  So what?  If we call the Dead Sea a sea and not a lake, then why should Pluto be penalized?  On the other hand, fair’s fair, and if we were going to continue to call Pluto a planet, than anything larger than Pluto would have to be a planet, and we’d add Eris and have ten instead of eight, which would screw up the mnemonic phrases just as bad, and that’s really what I was most upset about.  It makes no difference to Pluto, which is inanimate and therefore not offended in the slightest that it has been demoted and schoolchildren will no longer be taught it’s  name, at least not with the same reverence.

What’s interesting to me, though, is that before 1930, there was no Pluto.  That is to say, nobody had ever heard of the planet Pluto.

I know people who were born before that.  Sure, not very many of them, but still.  It means it was a very narrow window of time in which Pluto was considered a planet.  Most of a lifetime for us, but 100 years from now it will be thought of as a short interim, and a 1,000 years from now it will be a strange blip in history, less widely known than the 10 missing days of 1582, when the switch was made from the Julian to the Gregorian Calendar.

Most people have never even heard of that,  but to the people alive at the time, it was a huge deal. Things get smaller and, sadly, less important, with the increase of distance and time.

Somebody posted this on my facebook page, and the comments thread has turned heated.  The article, in Publisher’s Weekly, is all about how wonderful publishers are, which is like seeing an article in Golf Monthly about what a wonderful sport golf is, or an article in Dental Hygiene Digest (I just made up these magazine names, btw.  If they actually exist, sorry.) about how everybody should brush their teeth after every meal, even in restaurants.

Apparently, whoever posted the article expected nothing but agreement from everybody, so they weren’t too happy with me.

Sure, the idea that anybody can self-publish anything has resulted in the market being flooded with absolute drek.  That’s the downside.  The upside is that a lot of stuff is getting published which wouldn’t have been getting published otherwise, and it’s just up to the readers to sort through and see what they like and what they don’t.

What I think I do

The art of writing is in no danger of dying out.  Great writers will continue to be great writers.  They just stand a better chance of getting published now.  We will never know how many great writers over the last centuries have remained unpublished.  We will never, ever know.  They weren’t published.

The main beauty of it for me is personal.  I don’t need to put my work in front of an “expert” who may or may not be a better judge of writing than me.  I can lay my work directly in front of the public.  If they like it, they like it.  If they don’t, they don’t.

It’s sort of like setting up my own language school.  When I did it, it was just because of the realization that I could make more money than I would working as a teacher at somebody else’s language school.  But, once all the paperwork was completed, the students started trickling in, and it was a going concern, it hit me: I never have to go on another job interview again, as long as I live.

Up to that point, I hadn’t realized how much I hated job interviews.

So, I will continue to publish my own work and ignore the bigwigs.  I may never sell any books.  I  may never make any money.  But I don’t have to kiss anybody’s ass.

After a weekend of getting nothing at all done, I had a busy, complicated Monday, with  zero chance of getting anything done, except my job, of course, which  should count for something, I guess, but I am in a bit of a rut with  teaching and would like to focus  more on my writing, unless of course I could get back to the whole having-a-school-and-teaching-group-lessons-where-the-students-come-to-me situation, but even though, I wasn’t exactly  revolutionizing  education, there probably is no magic formula to force knowledge into the minds  of people who totally don’t want  to learn.

I got a bit  sarcastic  with  a few of  my 6th graders today and I feel guilty  about  it, there were three or four of them who got that treatment where I would stand right over them and berate  them for not having registered something I’d just said two seconds before, and then just now I watched a video from Cracked (I’m not really a huge fan  of Cracked, they just put together lists and aren’t really funny like they used to be, but I still watch them, sometimes they come up with a gem) about  comics putting down hecklers, and it made me cringe because  I sympathized with the hecklers, they paid good money to be entertained and then they’ve got some guy berating them from the stage and mostly saying “fuck, fuck, fuck, motherfucker, you’ve got a tiny dick, you’re a stupid  bitch” and the  audience is laughing like that’s something hysterical and I realized that’s kind of what I was doing to those poor kids, who, in my defense, really were asking for it.

Anyway, talking about the writing, though, I’ve got several projects going on  in  various  stages.  Two poetry books which are more or less completed, the 1st one is just a poetry book like all the other poetry books  I’ve written, I’ll make a polite announcement here and on  facebook, and if anyone wants to buy it they’ll buy it, but the 2nd one is a major work, I’m seriously proud of it, I think I’ve done something nobody else has  done, and  once that’s ready I intend  to plug the shit out of it, people will be calling me a spammer and all.

The next project after that is a biography of a friend of mine who’s got a lot of the typical expat stories and some that aren’t so typical at all because he’s a wildass old hippie with a bit of a messiah complex and a habit of attracting people who are even dodgier than he is himself.  I’m having a lot of fun writing it but the project is still in the  stage where it is growing and growing and I’m not even up to the trimming and pruning phase.

Then we’ve got a couple of translation projects that have been on hold forever.  I’ve no idea when we’ll get to them.  Life is busy.  Life is full.  Life is good.

Of course it’s absurdly premature to speculate on who the candidates for president will be in 2016.  There is a serious midterm election this November, still two full years ahead of the next Presidential arm wrestling contest.  That will launch a couple of political careers, torpedo a couple of others, and shape the political climate in which the 2016 election will be held.

So, he was a drunk. At least he didn’t invade Mesopotamia

Nonetheless, political nerds are speculating, because that’s what we political nerds do.  I have plenty of people on my facebook page advocating for Hillary Clinton and at least one person who is already up on the ABH* soapbox, loudly reminding us all of her many, many flaws.

She’s certainly not my top choice.  Although I admire her intelligence and think she’s competent enough for the job, I have lots of reservations.  But that’s not really the point of tonight’s blog.

The point of tonight’s blog is this: if we’re going to be discussing this topic, let’s discuss it seriously, intelligently.  When Sam (the guy over on facebook) opened the thread with his anti-Hillary rant, someone suggested that Michelle Obama should run.  This is just silly.

I can only think of 3 examples in American history where someone who had never held any political office whatsoever became president.  Washington, Grant, and Eisenhower.  Actually, come to think of it, that may disprove my point, because all of them did all right.  ( I do not agree with those historians who think Grant was a terrible president.  Poor people loved him, and that says something to me.)

Still, they were exceptions, and they all had had some pretty intensive on the job training at leading large organizations through times of crisis.  Admittedly, even that’s not among the legal requirements.

Let’s review.  To be legally eligible for the presidency, a person must be at least 35 years old and a “natural born” citizen of the United States.  There’s a bit of debate about what that second part means, but it rules out Arnold Schwarzenegger and Texas Teabagger Ted Cruz, for which we can all be grateful.

That’s it.  In addition to the legal requirements, though, there are some practical requirements.  Like maybe the person should have held some political office at some point in their life.  Otherwise, maybe we should nominate Michael Douglas, because he played a really good president in a movie once.  Or Martin Sheen.  Not that president from Scandal, though.  He’s a dick.

*anybody but Hillary