Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

“Pizza, guns, drums, music, family, and God, that about sums up my life” Robert Aaron Long wrote on his Instagram page. Then he went and shot up 3 “spas” where he’d been a customer (yeah, I’m sure they were brothels, but this isn’t about that) killing 8 people, most of them Asian women.
He says it’s because he’s got a sex addiction. He’s been in rehab for it and everything, because as a devout, oh so very devout Baptist he knows that sex is wrong, and he tries, oh , he tries, but then his parents kicked him out because he was just watching porn all the time. So, he just had to go kill those girls, to eliminate the temptation.
Dude, sex addiction is bullshit. All guys are horny all the time, that’s hormonal, it’s a natural part of being a guy, you get frustrated some times, and girls put you down, and you feel bad, and maybe you go out with hookers now and then, but lots of guys do that without ever killing a single person.
Yes, you have mental problems, clearly, but sex addiction is not one of them. So, you watch porn for hours on end. Millions and millions of people, probably billions, of both sexes watch porn now. Most probably for 20 minutes or less, but still, even if you watch it for hours on end, it doesn’t classify as an addiction, or at least not one that’s any more harmful than playing Fortnite for hours on end. Both have the same net result as far as anyone else is concerned.
Heroin, now that’s an addiction. Cocaine is an addiction. Alcohol can be an addiction. Those things will kill you.
But, if you are insistent, I say society should get you the treatment you need. Top of the line rehab. Complete isolation. Safe from all sexual temptation in a secure facility with bars on all the windows and high walls around it and guards with machine guns to make sure none of them sexy Asian ladies ever bothers you again, for the rest of your life.

Two incidents today pointed out to me how much we are at the mercy of the machines, and by machines I mean this this cyberweb we live in and sometimes convince ourselves we are a part of.
First, I must say, I do a lot of Sudoku. I got into them as soon as they appeared on the scene, doing the one in Metro every day. Then, when I got it on my phone, I started doing them more frequently and it became my go-to time waster for while I was on public transportation. Now, in quarantine, it has blossomed into a full blown addiction. I’ll sit and do it for hours, one after another. Oh, I kid myself that I’m trying to get better at it, but I’m not. It’s just killing time, which is a thing I don’t like myself for doing. Time is precious, and I should be doing more productive things.
This morning, when I woke up, I did one, and surprised myself at how fast I did it. So, I had a cup of coffee and launched right into another one. I beat my best time ever by over a minute. It was like Bob Beamon at the Mexico City Olympics. I was in disbelief. I checked to make sure I hadn’t done one at the easy level by accident, or intermediate, but no, it was set on hard. But, here’s the thing. It wasn’t a hard. You can tell the difference.
For some unknown reason, whoever programs those games had decided to put a couple of easy ones in at the hard level, maybe to try and convince me (and all other users) that we are smarter than we really are, like all of the Facebook IQ tests. I still felt pretty good about it.
This afternoon, while browsing through Facebook, I came across a site which interested me. It said ‘for serious poets only.’ Now, if that means only people who write serious poetry, maybe it’s not my place because I write plenty of stuff that’s not serious. If it meant, however, people who are serious about writing poetry, then I wanted in.
So, there was an application, and you had to check a box or two, and it asked “Why are you interested in joining this site” but there was no place to write an answer. None. So, I just have to wait until I hear back from them, and if they accept me as a member, it almost automatically indicates that they are not just restricting it to serious poets because they don’t know me at all.
But, like in the Sudoku case, there’s nothing I can do, no human I can talk to to unravel the mystery, to figure out what the hell is going on.
We are in uncharted territory, and it’s only going to get worse.

As a wannabe writer, my Facebook feed is loaded with other writers and wannabe writers, and language and words is a common topic of conversation. I have one friend in particular, someone I know irl btw, who has made it his mission to track the usage of certain phrases, i.e. how frequently they appeared in print 20 years ago, 10 years ago, just this week. Trendy words and phrases. Sometimes he seems a bit paranoid, treating a perfectly intelligible phrase as language pollution when in reality it’s just trending slang, but sometime he hits the old nail right square on its proverbial head.
Yesterday’s pet peeve was ‘quite frankly,’ of which he said “‘quite frankly’ is the new ‘If I do say so myself.'” True. Actually, there are a whole bunch of words and phrases that serve the same purpose, which is to announce the sentence you are about to say (or write) in a way that convinces the listener (or reader) that you aren’t bullshitting. Actually, actually is one, and I know it’s one I overuse. Honestly, truly, really, I’m not lying, Lemme tell ya, You know, the list goes on and on. When I was studying journalism back at El Camino Community College, Mrs. Combs always told us “If you’re writing an editorial and stuck for an opening, type “I think that….” and then when you’ve finished writing go back and cross out the “I think that…”
Good advice. These are just filler words and they do not make the words that follow them any more frank, or honest, or true. I’m not going to go on a crusade, it’s not a misspelling or a grammatical mistake. Quite frankly, I just didn’t have a better blog topic.

I was about to write a blog about how horrible it is that the police busted up a feminist rally because they were protesting against rape, particularly the case of Sarah Everard, 33, who was recently found murdered. A police officer, Wayne Couzens, is charged with the crime.
I was ready to write about how horrible this is that the excesses of the police in the U.S. are now happening in Britain, and who knows how far that will spread. The whole world tries to emulate America, and often in the worst ways. Fast food is everywhere, everybody wants a car and, despite an occasionally impressive film, Hollywood still dominates the world’s cinematic consciousness.
But, I read a few more articles, just to make sure I was spelling everybody’s name correctly, and it’s not really a similar case at all. Couzens was not on duty at the time he allegedly (One has to say allegedly. We can’t dispense with trials, but they took him into custody pretty quickly so I’m guessing he was either caught on camera or left some DNA evidence behind) kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard.
And, both Couzens and Everard are white, so race wasn’t a factor at all.
It’s just a case of a cop happening to be a filthy rapist, which probably happens in every country in the world. But the police still shouldn’t be trying to bust up the vigils. That looks bad.

It’s early stages yet, they haven’t even decided if that means a station permanently orbiting the moon or a base on the surface. I think they should go for both, because that would be the coolest option, but I suppose a base on the surface would be the second coolest option, because I’m envisioning domed cities with drip hydroponic gardens forming little tropical paradises spreading across the lunar surface, rather than the spartan (picture Antarctica – and then remember that the moon is almost 400,000 kilometers further than that, wherever you are on Earth) accommodations which they’ll probably be, at least at first.
If its a surface base, they are considering the region around the Moon’s south pole.
In any event, it’s good news. After the Challenger disaster, the U.S., it seems, has basically given up on space but I am glad others are starting to pick up the slack. Russia, of course, has always been a leader in space. Sputnik, Gagarin, Tereshnikova, etc…and today they are in control of the International Space Station. If American astronauts want to go up, they have to train at and launch from Star City.
Maybe competition from Russia, China, and Elon Musk will convince the U.S. to get their butt in gear. Maybe not. Either way, the human race is making strides in space, and that is a good thing. That is a very good thing.