Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

As somebody who studied journalism and spends a fair bit of time reading news, bad headlines are a serious pet peeve of mine.  There’s just no excuse for it.  Back in the day, when newspapers were still paper, sometimes space constraints might excuse using silly abbreviations, omitting a word or using the simple past instead of the present perfect because you couldn’t fit the extra 4 spaces for the word had, but now they can use as many lines as they like, seeing as how space on the internet is infinite and the articles just keep on streaming, so there’s no excuse.

But those are minor quibbles.  Allow me to use examples from the front page of today’s Huffington Post for examples of some of the things that really piss me off. “Clock Ticks on Gitmo Detention Authority,” first, as I mentioned the space issue before, they don’t really need to write Gitmo.  They could write Guantanamo if they wanted to speak of this egregious human violation of human rights in dignified terms rather to be cutesy and always  say “Gitmo” because it sounds tough and mariney.  Second, it’s not like there was any real legitimacy to Guantanamo in the first place.  Third, no chance in hell congress is actually going to do the right thing and actually close the damned place.  So, it’s essentially news about nothing.

“Sarah Silverman Talks Masturbation.”  Well, of course she does.  Sarah Silverman talks about that stuff all the time.

“Kim, Kanye and Baby North Step Out in NYC”  Really?  Sort of famous people exist, we have photographic proof.  They go for walks!  Just not really news, is it?

“Officer Admits to Taking Demeaning Videos” nothing really wrong with the headline there, but again, it’s not news.

“Couples Drinking Habits May Predict Likelihood of Divorce” Again, well, duh.  If you sit around the house all day drinking beer and doing intermittent shots of Jaeger while your wife is out working, a breakup is imminent.

“Republicans Aim to Finish State Takeover.” Well, of course they do.  They are Republicans.

Actually, after writing this, I realize that it’s not so much the headlines that I object to as the blandness of the news itself.

President Kennedy

They say that everybody who is older than 55 or so remembers exactly where they were when President Kennedy was shot, the same way everybody from our parents’ generation remembers where they were when they heard about Pearl Harbor, and everybody today who’s older than 16 or 17 remembers where they were when the  airplanes hit the twin towers.  I suppose it’s mostly true, but when you’re dealing with human beings, nothing is ever 100%.

Anyway, a few years back, I don’t know where to find the details but I’m sure this happened, somebody got the bright idea to check it out.  They interviewed a whole bunch of people about where they’d been and then they went out and interviewed the people they said they’d been with, and very often the stories didn’t match up.

It’s hard to know if people deliberately fabricated their stories, because being a thing that everybody talks about, people want a cooler story  than “Well, I was sitting at home by myself watching TV and scratching my balls…” and certainly there are the extreme cases where people don’t want to say anything that will implicate them in something illegal or embarrassing.

More likely there were a lot of cases of people not remembering so clearly, but filling in the blanks as time goes by, to the point where they believe it themselves.  We know so little about history and half of it is lies.

That said, I will tell you my story.  I was 9 and in 4th grade at Longfellow Elementary School, built in the fine brick and glass tradition of the 60s, and my teacher was Mrs. DeLong, who’d been  Miss Kniebel when we were in 3rd grade, and that was a totally incomprehensible thing  to me, because she was so old.  (She probably wasn’t really, but that was my impression at the time)  Anyway, we’d been out at recess, quite likely I’d been on the monkey bars because that was my favorite, and when we came back in from that we had to line up for the bathroom.

Over in the girls’ line, a girl named Dawn, who I kind of had a crush on, was spreading the word, because she lived right across the street from the school and went home during recess.

We all immediately ganged up on her, and the group consensus was “Nyuh uh, you’re lying!” which was really quite illogical of us, because why would she lie about something so easily verifiable.

Nonetheless, between the bathroom and the classroom, it was already out of my mind, and there was our teacher, standing at the front of the classroom and quietly weeping.

Shortly afterward, they sent us home, and I was thinking “Hey, cool, we got a half day off” and I was wondering how I’d explain that to my Mom, and then I walked through the front door and she was standing at the ironing board, staring at the TV, and crying.  That’s the moment I really remember.  That’s when I knew it was real.

Today I had my kliene Kindern, definitely one of my most challenging classes. Five kids, at a German pre-school.

I do love teaching  children, but it poses some special problems.  Like they can’t read yet, so that constrains  my teaching style quite a bit.  And they can  burst out crying for no apparent reason.  And, mostly, they just seem rather oblivious to the fact that this hour is supposed to be an  English lesson.

They just see it as a play hour, and I am the stupid teacher who can’t speak to them in Czech or German.

Today, I was informed as soon as I got there that I would only have two students – two of the girls.  Didn’t know if that was going to make it easier or not, but I figurted it would be easier to focus, as any rate.

But getting the two of them, two little girls, to come in off the playground was not easy. Today wasn’t a particularly cold day, it wasn’t windy at all and it wasn’t actually  raining but, still, it’s November and no adult would be outside voluntarily at all.

One girl in particular was dragging her feet, and I was  worried that she was making me look bad in front of the head teacher.  Anyway, got them into the cloakroom and then the other one went to my bag and pulled out The Cat in the Hat and brought it to me and that’s the best student response I’ve had to a book in a long time, and there was a chair right there so I sat down and read some Dr. Seuss and before long the whole school was gathered around  me, so I guess my reputation was  redeemed.

So, I had 5 students after all, but by the time I got them into the room we usually use for their class, they were ready to start ignoring me again.  It  was a roller coaster.

There is nothing new under the Sun, or so it is written in Ecclesiastes, IIRC, I’m not much  of a scripture reader but that’s one of the more common quotes and I am certainly not above quoting the Bible when it happens to conveniently agree with my point of view.

Our place. Tonight. Bunga-Bunga!

There is nothing truly new in the world of politics, there are always a few politicians sending horrible racist and sexist tweets and e-mails; there are always Teabaggers ranting about abortion, or how horrible health  insurance is; there are always celebrities doing crazy celebrity stuff like drugs, and being naked, and giving their kids stupid names; there is always bad weather going on somewhere.

That is why we must look to where the sun doesn’t shine.  No, that is not the set-up for a scatological joke, or a 7th planet pun.  I’m being serious. 

If you look to the future, there is nothing but new stuff under the sun.  Some of it might be really bad stuff, like the total environmental destruction of our planet, rendering it uninhabitable and dooming the human race to an untimely extinction.  Some of it might be cool.

If you look deep into the past, where the sun no longer shines, we are finding out new stuff all the time.  Like, a new study shows that early Homo Sapiens were boinking both Neanderthals and a hominid species called Denisovans, who I’d never heard of before but from the sound of their name I suspect they were rather well dressed and urbane, at least as far as club wielding savages go.  Maybe there were other species, too, in this global bazaar of boinking.

50,000 B.C. was a freaky time, back before all the taboos and religions and stuff.

O.K., I’ve been looking for this one particular box for several months now, cleaned the balcony looking for the box, reorganized our basement storage space thoroughly  looking for this box and I remember I was already searching as early as July because I went through the basement once and found a fan, and it was at a time when we really needed it.

A couple of days ago, while rummaging through some other boxes, my wife finally asked me what I was looking for.  “There’s a bunch of poems I’ve got in a folder labeled ‘Ancient History,’ I said.

“Oh, I know where that is,” she said.  I  am an ass.  What with writing this blog every day, I probably communicate better with the outside world than I do with my family.

Then, she went back to yelling at the kids, it was all in Czech, and the subject was forgotten, but tonight she  got the box down for me and it was more than I’d hoped for.  Although the file marked ‘Ancient History’ turned out to be not the one I was looking for at all, there was another file, called ‘Old Stuff,’ which was.

I was looking for  some old, old poems, stuff that I wrote even before I came to Prague, before I got married and had kids, back when I still drank heavily, back when I was much thinner than I am now, back when I was living in Los Angeles, in another lifetime (my life has been a bit like that so far, episodes defined by the place I was living, and that really have very little relation, one to the other.)

Well, I found them and there were a couple more than I’d thought, and even some stuff I’d forgotten about writing at all.  Several first chapters of a novel, for one thing, but they weren’t any good, it was just like reading an old diary.  It’s interesting to me, because it recalls the moment, but there wouldn’t  be much  interest to anybody  else.  People want conflict, and drama – not my  impressions of someone I saw on the tram, or what pubs I went to on a Friday night.

But, a couple  of interesting things: Despite the changes in my life since then, I’m not sure I’ve evolved as a  writer at all.  Although  I’m writing more now, and more  consistently, I was just as good  then.

Also, I wrote a couple of poems recently which  had a line like “the  7 billion people who all live on Earth” and I found one old  poem  where I’d used the same line but with only 6 billion people and  one, older still, probably from about ’92 or ’93, where I say 5 billion.

Population explosion is not  an exaggeration.