Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Harold Camping died

Unsatisfied

Even though he’s gone

the  world goes on

When Peter O’Toole died, we all looked back in sadness and nostalgia, but the happiness lingers and the love will last forever.  Everybody was sharing their favorite Peter O’Toole movies.  I think of him in My Favorite Year, The Stunt Man, and some thing I can’t remember where he was running a lame haunted castle for tourists in Ireland but then the real ghosts decided to get in on the action and hijinx ensued.  I’ve never actually seen Lawrence of Arabia, so I think of him in comedic roles.

Harold Camping July 19, 1921- December 15,2013

Harold Camping also died this week.  I don’t think many people noticed.

Sure, you  may not remember the name, but do you remember May 11th of 2011, when the world was supposed to end? Yeah, that Harold Camping.

He didn’t get raptured.  Well, maybe he did, we wouldn’t know, but since there was a distinct lack of mass disappearances on Sunday, when he died quietly in  his home at the age of 92, I’m going to assume it was natural causes.

I wonder if he was bitter? I wonder if he felt he had been forsaken by God? If his life had been in vain?

Well, tough luck, Harold Camping, your  life was in vain and, since I very much enjoy being alive in a world which hasn’t ended, I’m really glad it was.

I don’t know what happens when we die.  Neither do you, dear reader, even those few of you who think that you do.  And neither did Harold Camping.

Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh.  He was an old man, he never killed anybody, and the people who gave him all their money gave it perfectly willingly.  So, I wish him all the best in the afterlife, whatever it might be.

It’s a  bit of a slow news day and I’m not keeping up with the news quite as much as before since I got booted off from commenting at the Huffington Post.  If I can’t leave comments there, it’s really not that much fun to read it, and there are plenty of other news sources.  I’ll get around to the other sources, for the moment I’m just linking to anything anybody links to my facebook page, on the theory that anything that is earth-shattering, be it a typhoon or a flood, a civil war in a 3rd world country,  or the fact that Miley  Cyrus either did something, said something  or wore something, will make its way there soon enough.

As a writer, if it’s not too much self-flattery to call myself that, I have a lot of other wannabe writers on my facebook page.  As in all fields of human endeavor, they can be broadly divided into two groups.  The good ones, and the not so good ones.

Of course, one does not have time to visit all of their fan pages, much less read their books, and I should be quicker to trim them from my tree,  but it’s the Peter Principle of facebook.  It’s easier to add than delete, so everybody’s friend list exceeds their number of actual friends by quite a bit.  Unless I’m different from everybody.

But it’s the writers I want to address in this blog.  I will be scrolling through and come to a post that says, for instance “Woo hoo! Launch date for “Season of the Stud is 2 wks.  Can’t wait!”

Woo hoo?  Woo hoo?  You call yourself a writer and the best you can do is woo fucking hoo?  Additionally, “can’t wait?”  That is not a writer’s thing to say.  That is a commoner’s thing to say, when what you really mean is “waiting is exquisite torture.  My every waking minute is consumed, either with flights of fancy and visions of fame and fortune, or bleak worst case scenarios in which hordes of critics and angry readers line the streets just to turn their backs on me as I walk by,” or perhaps “I feel as nervous as my first day at college, looking forward to meeting fascinating, interesting people who would change my life, but with  a sinking  feeling in the pit of my stomach that it was just  going  to be 4 more years of high school, albeit with more alcohol.”  Or something.

You are a writer.  Act like it.

I wound up taking a walk in the park today because my wife sent me to the store and I figured I might as well go take a walk through the park and smoke a joint on the way.  It is not a large or special park  but it is in the neighborhood and I often go there to smoke, and also just to walk and think.

Kaizlerovy Sady

It has been the scene of inspiration for many of these blogs and  a fair bit of my poetry, too, and when I first started writing this blog I used to refer to it as blog park, sort of an interface place  between the real physical world where I live, and cyberspace where  I live intellectually,  uncorporeally and yet (I hope this isn’t being too melodramatic) officially and eternally.

It was a nice  day, the air was still and crisp, it was not raining  or snowing although I wouldn’t have been surprised at either.  It was cold enough there were no children  at all in the playground and only a few  people  walking around.  One woman  with a baby  in a stroller. Baby’s are not bothered by the cold at all, they ride around in that stroller so bundled  up they could survive  three days in the  Arctic.

I saw three things of interest: They were filming  something  down at one end of the park.  It’s cool, always something that makes me look, but  not  an uncommon  Prague sight.  Portions of Hell Boy were filmed in the  old semi-abandoned Napoleonic era  military hospital of which  the park is the former  grounds.  Then a saw a tree with a bole on its  trunk  that looked just  like  a penis and I thought,  I’ll have  to  get a picture  of that,  but my battery was dead.

Then, the 3rd thing.  First, let me state for the record that I hate graffiti, I do not consider it to be art and I do not respect vandalism.  It  is almost always  crude, unfunny, generally illegible, and most of the time illiterate.

So, I looked at the bench and wondered  if I was reading  it correctly, if the  person had really intended such a profound message, or if they were just screwing around and accidentally wrote something intelligent.  It said, in white, drippy letters on the back of the green bench “Read Amok.”

But then I saw, on the next bench, in smaller letters (and written in Czech, so I hope my translation is accurate “Read as if you will be run over by a train tomorrow,” so I’m sure it was the same person and I’m sure that she (or he, but for some reason I’m picturing this vandal as female; it’s either the handwriting or my imagination filling  in the blanks in  the pleasantest  way possible) understood her own words perfectly.

Of course, you could replace the word “Read” in  either of those quotes with  “dance,” or “sing” or “live” and it would still be good advice.    But it was a park bench, made for reading, and I thought “How nice would it be if that was on a plaque or carved into the bench properly, or all the benches? Very nice.”

So, I still hate graffiti as a general rule, but this was an exception.

What do New Jersey Chris Christie and Professional Dumb Blonde Megyn Kelly have in common?  They are both big liars.  Not subtle liars but in your face liars, like Kim Jong Un or former president George W. Bush.

Of course, sometimes it’s hard to know who’s lying and who’s not.  Some people can fool a lie detector and that’s why lie detectors aren’t admissible as evidence in court.  These people are called psychopaths.  I am not actually accusing either Governor Christie or the pretty Fox News lady of being a psychopath.  I don’t know that they’re not, but I have no real evidence that they are, and that’ s not the point I’m trying to make.

Chris Christie, at the Entrance to the George Washington Bridge

My point is that, even though sometimes it’s hard to  know who’s lying, sometimes it’s not.  When their version of events is at variance with perceivable reality, they are lying.

When someone says “I was only joking,” as Megyn Kelly said today about her remarks yesterday that both Santa Claus and Jesus are white and everybody else had better just get used to it (“the fact that it makes you uncomfortable doesn’t mean it has to change”), you can tell if they  were only joking or not.

There are a few indicators we can see when somebody is joking.  A smile, a twinkle in the eye, a wink, a nudge, being on a comedy show, or saying something that could be construed by a reasonable viewer as funny are a few sample ways.

None of those indicators were present.  Her initial comments were bad enough.  There’s no way we should accept the lie.

In the Chris Christie case it ‘s all about the closure, for one day, of 2 out of 3 access lanes onto the George Washington bridge, between Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Manhattan.  Christie’s opponents say that he did it on purpose, to get back at the mayor of Fort Lee, New Jersey, who had refused to endorse Christie’s re-election bid.

Of course, Christie denies that, but two people have been fired over it (that, coupled with an apology, might have convinced me that he really hadn’t known anything about it), but the reason they gave for the closure – they were doing a traffic study – doesn’t sound very believable.  What can you learn from closing two lanes?  That traffic becomes 3 times as bad as normal, which is bad enough?  That’s about it.

Still, it’s possible that some bonehead bureaucrats might have come up with a survey like that.  So, did it happen?  Were there people standing there with clipboards, counting the cars?  Does the paperwork exist?

If so, Governor Christie, present the evidence.  If not, you are a liar.  A big, fat, liar, but the important part of that is liar.