Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I just can’t seem to let this go. Oh, I admit that in all 3 cases (Mr. Potato Head, Pepe LePew, and Dr. Seuss) the decisions were made without any direct outside pressure, by the people entitled and empowered to make those decisions. No laws were broken. I can’t go screaming “censorship!” even though the thought is lurking, just below the surface. And I don’t really care that much about Mr. Potato Head, and wasn’t even planning on seeing Space Jam II. My kids are past that age and we also never saw Space Jam 1.
But Dr. Seuss is important to me and the thing that horrifies me about this whole conversation is that so many people glibly refer to “To Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street,” “McElligott’s Pool,” “If I Ran the Circus,” “Scrambled Eggs Super,” and “On Beyond Zebra” as books “nobody had heard of anyway.” If you have never read those books, or had them read to you, your childhood was lesser than mine. You apparently missed a major cultural component of our times and I urge you now to go to the Internet, where they still exist as PDF files, and read them. They are works of pure genius, odes to human imagination and a belief in unlimited possibilities. I recommend them for children of all ethnicities.
Imagination, and a belief in unlimited possibilities, are characteristics the human race badly needs if we expect to survive into any kind of a future that’s worth living in.

Spring trundles in, the daisies are scattered across the lawn, in clumps and irregularly, like when you let a two year old decorate their own cake, and Facebook friends from more meteorologically advanced regions are posting pictures of Tulips beginning to bloom and cherry blossoms filling the trees. But, enough of my day…
Elon Musk really has no sense of PR, does he. After Bernie Sanders, beloved by millions, champion of the working class, and all around good guy says we should focus on crating a better world rather than rushing off into space, which is one issue I disagree with him on but that’s neither here nor there, Elon tweeted (I’m not looking it up to get exact words, but this is pretty close) “I’m accumulating resources to make interplanetary living possible and expand human consciousness to the stars.” As if that means he shouldn’t pay taxes.
For one thing, it sounds like the kind of thing a Joel Osteen or Creflo Dollar type preacher would come up with. I’m doing the Lord’s work, I should not be taxed, I should be allowed to accumulate all the resources possible to glorify his name. Same thing.
Second, though, is how in the hell does he think he’s different from anybody else? Sure, most people’s goals are a bit more basic than putting a car into orbit, or planning a colony on Mars, but we are all accumulating resources to achieve our goals, and there’s no reason why somebody who is accumulating resources to put a kid through college, or to take a summer vacation, should have to pay a greater rate in taxes than the mighty Elon Musk.

I am a great fan of Fitzgerald, particularly Gatsby, although I’m not sure I am drawing the ‘correct’ message from it. I know it’s supposed to be about how callous and shallow rich people are, and maybe a bit about the tragic inevitability of fate, but I admired the rags to riches aspect of Gatsby’s life, and his ability to throw an absolute rager of a party, which was, of course, the defining cultural aspect of the 1920s. Also, I think it’s got one of the best closing lines in literature: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
The past is an amazing place. We’re all from there, and none of us will ever see it again. It grows larger and larger as we leave it further and further behind. And, the further back into it you look, the less clear it is.
We don’t know if anybody like Robin Hood or King Arthur ever existed, we know absolutely nothing about the life of Homer, and we do not know how the aborigines came to be in Australia, although they have been there an amazingly long time. We know Shakespeare existed, he was a popular playwright even in his own time, but there is still a great deal about him we don’t know. Was he gay? Did he ever visit the court of Ludwig II in Prague? Did he write all of the things he is credited with? I’ve got opinions on all of these questions but they’re just opinions. We don’t even know his birthday, for sure, or what he looked like.
Well, according to this article in the Guardian, we now have a better idea of what he looked like. One bust, which was previously thought to have been sculpted well after his death, has been verified to be the work of a sculptor who lived at the same time as Shakespeare, and almost certainly (his shop was very near the Globe theater, and he visited Stratford) knew him.
The main difference between the bust and the image we all have of Shakespeare is that the bust portrays a somewhat chubbier individual. Which could be accounted for by age and the fact that he was, by the end of his life, a wealthy man.
So, we know a bit more about Shakespeare today than we did yesterday, as the boats beat on against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

What do guitars, guns, books, and motorcycles have in common? In each case I have several people in my Facebook feed (and I suspect my semi-randomized demographic is not too far off the average) who just love to talk about how much they love to own them. I mean, not just that they love them, but they love to buy them, even if they already have a sufficiency (which, in 3 of the cases, is 1). People make all sorts of dumb jokes about how they spend all of their money on them, and how their wife (in 3 of these cases, it’s almost always guys. And it’s the same 3 cases) objects and they have to deceive her in some funny way.
It’s not about the usefulness of the item. You can only ride one motorcycle at a time, you can only read one book at a time (and there are libraries), you can only play one guitar, or shoot one gun at a time.
I suppose, in their defense, you could say it’s a collector’s urge. If somebody collects stamps, rare coins, comic books or baseball cards, nobody thinks it’s weird. Well, maybe a little weird.
A more negative view would be that it’s a hoarder’s mentality, and that, taken to an extreme, can actually be a psychological disorder. I imagine its roots are in insecurity, and fear of a shortage.
But I suspect, in the case of these things, it’s a kind of advocacy. People who say “I just can’t stop buying guitars” and post pictures of their latest acquisition are sometimes great musicians. I suspect that they are more often mediocre musicians who just have to keep reminding people how obsessed with music they are. Gun nuts are a special kind of weird. They want to buy more and more because they are afraid the government is going to come and take them away, which is just straight up bad math. If the government does decide to take all their guns away, that just means that the government will get more guns.
Bibliophiles definitely are advocates, they tend to believe that the key to world happiness is everybody reading more books, which I don’t entirely disagree with, but they still get confused at the difference between owning (which may impress more people) and just reading, which is a very solitary matter.
Anyway, that’s my rant for tonight. Carry on doing whatever you love doing.

I went to the store this morning and on the walk back home I say something that made me really happy. Buds. The first small, bright, but unmistakable, 100% new growth buds on a single bush. Well, I felt pretty good about that. I like Spring. Things change every day, the cycle of life is actually moving at a pace that is visible. It is an inspiring time of year, a time when poetry gets written.
So, I had a Zoom lesson coming up, two groups of little kids, and I decided to do a Spring theme. I’d go through the flashcards, but make each of them come up with a sentence which ended “…in Spring.” It worked pretty well. The whale eats plankton in Spring. The door is open in Spring. I sit on the chair in Spring. So, anyway, it’s rolling a long, getting to be a bit of a chant, this in Spring, that in Spring, and my wife comes over and taps me on the shoulder and points out the window and it’s snowing. Not like sort of vaguely snowing, like big white flakes being whipped along on a high wind.
Well, that made me laugh. Anyway, the snow all melted off in about 5 minutes, when I went down to take out the garbage after the lesson there were puddles all over and you’d have thought it just rained, if you hadn’t just seen it snow. So, I still feel that Spring is fairly clearly on the way.
But just now, I went out to smoke a last joint before writing this and then going to bed and, lo and behold – there’s snow on the ground again.