Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

I usually make New Year’s resolutions but I never keep them especially the ones about losing weight and getting into shape, so I’m not even going to bother with that one.

If  I make it about my writing projects, then my resolutions for the year will resemble my to-do list for this week.  There’s a proofreading I’ve got to get started on, and by started I mean write back to them with our rate and hope they haven’t found somebody else because they contacted us at least a week before Christmas.  Things get in the way.  There is a translation we haven’t even started with yet, but that’s basically  Helena’s thing, I  just proofread her work.

Then there are the 4 books I am working on.  Three of them are books of poetry and two of them are virtually complete,  I just need to read through them and write forwards and stuff.  So, I should get them done this week while I still have vacation.

The third I hope to have finished in a couple of months.  It’s kind of a different project.  There are poems that need to go into it that I haven’t written yet.  I can’t give out too much information because I don’t want to jinx it.

The fourth is a novel, sort of a biography, that I’m doing for a friend who gave me all his compiled travel stories but, as he said himself, he is not a writer.  There’s some good material there, but I’m kind of bogged down.  So, my New Year’s resolution is to get de-bogged.

Actually, I think that’s a pretty good New Year’s Resolution overall.  This is the year I want to get debogged, to start doing the things I need to do rather than just getting high a lot and thinking about them.

But, I’ll probably break it.

2014 is going to be an awesome year.  On January 1st, pot shops will open in Colorado and Washington State.  I don’t know if it will make a huge difference.  People who smoke will continue to smoke.  A few people who didn’t smoke will try it.  Most of them will cough  spasmodically for a few minutes, walk around in a daze for a few hours, and never try it again in their lives.  That’s O.K., at least they will have a better understanding of it the next time it comes up in conversation.  A few will become converted.  For those who are already smokers, it will make the experience a bit more pleasant.  Perhaps when I was in High School the risk, the feeling of doing something rebellious and illegal was exciting, and perhaps that’s part of the reason I started, but after 4 decades of getting stoned, I can live without the paranoia.  Smoking freely, in the certain knowledge that you won’t have to go to jail for it, is a wonderful thing.

As 2014 continues, the popularity of Obamacare will continue to grow, opposition to it will fade to a whimper, and Republicans will start referring to it as the Affordable Care Act.  Too late, Republicans.  It’s Obamacare now and forever.

Technology will continue to advance in 2014.  Hundreds of new planets will be discovered.  There will be a robot that can fool people into thinking it’s human.  That is, the Turing Test will be passed, but the definition of Artificial Intelligence will be changed.  We want intelligent robots, but we’re not ready to accept them.

There will be beautiful days, some sunny, some rainy, some windy, some snowy.  Children will be born, and couples will be married.  New books will be published.  New films will be released.  Many of them will be entertaining.  A few will be brilliant.

Obviously, there will be some bad stuff, too.  But, for the most part, I am looking forward to 2014.

I’ll add the title once I’ve  finished the piece because tonight is one of those nights that I have nothing to write and am just plunking down words to fulfill my daily obligation to myself, so if you are the kind of person who occasionally takes a  day off of reading my blog, this would be as good a night to miss as any.

Right now watching The Mummy on TV; good, mindless entertainment, in a way it reminds me of the old Abbott and Costello films, the classic genres never die.  Throughout the day, I’ve watched nothing, Sam has either been watching football or playing X-box football all afternoon, and I have been “working” at the computer, my job was to find stories for this months edition of Watson’s World News, and I’ve found a few doozies but “Woman Stabs Beerless Husband with Ceramic Squirrel” seems a bit pointless even by my standards.  It’s the kind of thing that gets into the papers just because of the headline they can write about it, but strip away the comedy of the ceramic squirrel and it’s just another squalid tale of domestic abuse in working class America.

I think I’ll do a trio of stories on the downside of new technologies, one about all the complaints about Google Glass, one about people who bitch about e-cigarettes, like what the hell do they want, for everybody to just get down on all fours and start eating grass?  The third one, I don’t know, haven’t figured that out yet but that should not be too much of a problem, because every new technology has somebody bitching about it damned near before it’s out of the box.

Just got back from seeing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.  I’m not going to tell anybody not to go see it, but I was disappointed.

The 1st disappointment was my own fault.  Sam wanted to go to the cinema to see the Hunger Games and I really didn’t, I don’t like  spending that much  money just for the big screen experience and I do not understand, economically, why the experience costs so much.  We will eventually watch the stupid Hunger Games at home and it will be no less of an experience.

…and it was too dark

But, my wife kept checking for other films ( I suspect she just wanted us out of the house) and when she came across The Hobbit I said “Sure, we’ll go see that,” but I’m so out of the popular cultural loop that I didn’t know this was  a part two of three film, and thought we were going to see the scene in the shire where all of the dwarves came and drank all his beer and stayed the night, and the bit with turning the trolls to stone and some other bits but, no, two minutes in and they’re crashing at Beorn’s.

Then, there were inexcusable changes. the escape in the casks was very different from the book, they were sealed inside the barrels IIRC, and there was no attack by orcs at that point.

And when the Orcs attacked Lakewood, why was Legolas the only living creature out in the streets fighting them.  This was the most sporadically populated town in the history of Middle or any other Earth.

But, basically, the whole thing was far too much like Lord of the Rings, dark, violent, all the funny bits were cut out and the whole thing was one long fight scene.  The sequel has swallowed the original.  Darkness has won.