Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

It’s a bit of a slow news day.  In science, the Japanese are planning to launch a “tether” which basically sounds like a giant bungee cord with a velcro tip, although I’m sure it’s much more complicated than that.  It’s job would be to yank old satellites out of orbit, and let them burn on the way down.  It’s a step forward.  Also, the candidate list for the Mars One colony, in which a dozen or so brave souls will get to live out their lives in Spartan conditions millions and millions of miles away from home, has been narrowed down from 200,000 to slightly over 1,000, presumably the sane ones.  One guy’s wife threatened to divorce him when she found out he’d applied.  Heck, might as well.

A Republican Senate candidate in Virginia made some incredibly stupid comments about rape, but basically it was a slow news day, so I wound up reading about Sochi, which isn’t due to start until February 7th.

There are some aspects of the Olympics that I love, some that I hate.  I love the beauty of the sports themselves.  In the winter Olympics, my favorite is the figure skating and in the summer Olympics gymnastics.  Downhill skiing is fine, but watching the figure skaters I almost feel as if I am watching superhuman beings.  They are doing things with their bodies that most human  bodies just aren’t capable of.

The Rule is Against Text

I enjoy hearing the athletes stories.  It’s a whole series of mini-movies, and I think about which ones would make good biopics.

I don’t like the politics.  I’m glad that some sort of equilibrium has been reached in the whole gay athletes thing.  Russia has apparently lightened up a bit, perhaps even crazy old homophobe Putin got tired of being called a crazy old homophobe.  And no gay athletes have refused to attend, as far as I know.

One interesting aspect of that controversy is that this will be the first Olympic games where it is even an issue.

And I don’t like the nationalism.  The U.S. Women’s hockey goalie had plans to have a few inspiring patriotic words inscribe on her helmet – in gold – but the IOC nixed that.  It’s still all patriotic logos, including a couple of rapacious and apparently outraged eagles.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to it, and wish all the athletes luck.  May the odds be ever in your favor.

Well, now, here is a topic worth debating.  The individual vs. the collective. Where do we draw the line.

My  internet friend Grace posted this quote from Virginia Woolf as her status:  “I think I see for a moment how our minds are threaded together — how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato’s & Euripides. It is only a continuation & development of the same thing. It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind.”

A friend of hers, Ralph, although I suspect that is not his real name, said “Whoa, hang on there a second, that is Borg talk.  We should hang onto our individuality.”

The thing is, I like the original quote and think the emerging world consciousness is a beautiful thing, but I see Ralph’s point, too.  We certainly shouldn’t surrender our individuality lightly.

It’s all about the definition of the oneness, the cohesiveness of the cohesion. Our sun and its planets and all the asteroids and comets and other space debris are one, and our solar system is one with the universe, although there are big, empty spaces in between them. The ants in a colony function as one animal, even though they are visibly millions. Certainly, you and I are different, and when you get hit in the head by a random golf ball, I do not, thank goodness, feel the pain, because if that was the case you couldn’t walk down the street without seeing people doubled over in pain the whole time. However, the thoughts that were in Plato’s head, at least the best ones, were written down, and I’ve read some, so a bit of Plato’s mind is now in mine. We are, through the miracle of social media, creating a space where all of our thoughts swim around together, bump into each other, fornicate and bring about new, baby thoughts. We all have to balance our individualism, our humanity, against this emerging, brilliant, beautiful, group mind. We are one, we are many, we are both at the same time, like the particles and waves that make up a beam of light.

Woody Allen.  Fucking Woody Allen.  I don’t know that what I have to say is that different from what other people are saying – it’s all in a question of degrees.

It ranges from “He’s the most genius director who ever lived and he didn’t do anything wrong and he and Soon Yi are in love and Mia’s a bitch and besides, Ronan is obviously Frank Sinatra’s son,” which has nothing to do with anything but always seems to come up in the conversation, to “He’s a horrible old pervert and child molester and besides, not that great a director.”

I put him pretty high up in that “most genius director ever” category-  and I’m less skeezed out than a lot of people that he married his teenage step-daughter.  As weird as it was (and it was) they are still together, so it’s not just what’s in Woody’s head, but hers, and I’m prepared to get over it.

Besides, who the hell knows what goes on in the families of the rich and famous.

I question his judgement, for sure.  He’s a funny looking old Jewish man and he was married to Mia sex goddess Farrow.  Talk about greedy.

Then, there are the allegations that he molested his 7 year old stepdaughter (who is an adult now, and maintains that it happened), which, to tell you the truth, I heard about for the first time today.

An Enigmatic Mind

Seven year olds can be unreliable witnesses.  They can be coached.  But sometimes they’re telling the truth, too.

Maybe I just conveniently forgot about that, because I like his movies so much.

He was never convicted, but that doesn’t mean anything.  In the USA, the guilty go free and the innocent are convicted in a large enough number of cases that you really have to go a bit deeper than that.

I just don’t know.

I do think it was appropriate, though, for him to win a lifetime achievement award at the Golden Globes.  A few years back, they gave one to Elia Kazan (which was deserved), and he’d sold half of Hollywood out to HUAC.

Maybe that was the Oscars, but it’s all the same crowd.

I was about to write a scathing obituary about Ariel Sharon, all about how he was a war criminal (Massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon), a corrupt politician (although he was never actually convicted and it may be just that his son was corrupt, and spoiled, and kind of stupid), and a deliberate troublemaker.

It might have been the sunglasses that pissed them off

His walk on Temple Mount was an act of deliberate provocation which sparked the Intifada.  Sure, radical groups may have planned the violence ahead, Israeli intelligence may have even known about it, but this obese man (sorry, it’s part of the image, and that day was all about image), trudging around the Mosque of Omar surrounded by about 1,000 heavily armed police officers, and probably in violation of a couple Arab traditions in the way he was dressed, was an act of deliberate provocation.  It was saying, “Come on, throw rocks at us.”

There’s no spin you can put on it that can make it not that.  I saw it.  Plain as the nose on my face.  (kind of a strange expression, as you can’t actually see the nose on your face without looking into a mirror)

And besides.  We live in a polarized age, where we praise people who we loved at their funerals, and heap abuse upon those we hated.  Or perhaps it is just that as I get older, I care less what people think about what I think, and have no real problem criticizing the dead, when they were a public figure deserving of criticism.

So, I was going to write a scathing obituary, and then I read this:  “Between 16 and 30 August 2005, Sharon controversially expelled 9,480 Jewish settlers from 21 settlements in Gaza and four settlements in the northern West Bank. Once it became clear that the evictions were definitely going ahead a group of conservative Rabbis, led by Yosef Dayan, placed an ancient curse on him known as the Pulsa diNura, calling on the Angel of Death to intervene and kill him.” (from his Wikipedia page)

He went into a coma less than 5 months later.  He died today.

So, he was cursed to death by the Israeli right for taking the side of peace and compromise for a change.  Also, the man’s been in a coma for over 8 years.  Time to let go.  RIP,  Ariel Sharon.  Perhaps you weren’t as unrepentantly evil as I remember.