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One of the things I love most about Prague is that once you are out of the center a little bit, there are lots of little places where you wander off the beaten path and suddenly you are surrounded by trees.  It might be a park, there are a lot of beautiful parks in this city.  But not necessarily.

The place where Isabel takes her tennis lessons is an interesting place. (btw, she mentioned to me today that she is not crazy about tennis.  Maybe it was just a bad day, maybe it was just to deflect criticism because the coach said she was just running around  and not listening, but  we’ve paid good money for these lessons so, by golly, she’s going  to finish out the year.)  We’ve lived in this neighborhood over 10 years now and I didn’t even know it was there.  A little wooded parkland, behind concrete and barbed wire, with a security gate like you’d think they had  something valuable in there, tucked in off to the side of the  road that crosses the railroad tracks.

We’ve started going a different way lately.  Instead of around the hotel and  up the  hill the way the traffic  goes, we take some steps off to the side, through the graffiti splattered tunnel under the rairoad tracks, and it’s wild and natural, but it’s not even close to being a park.  It’s just sort of a no-mans land, littered with garbage and the housekeeping items of the homeless.  We’d never come back that way, it’s dark then.

It was a beautiful autumn day today,  the leaves are multicolored but many are lying in soggy clumps here and there up the stairs and there was a dying rose garden with 3 or 4 blazingly brilliant rogue survivors.

Nature is beautiful, even if it’s not in the place we’ve assigned to it.  Maybe especially when it’s not in the place we assigned to  it.

The  50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s  assassination is approaching, so there are going to be absolutely a shit ton (which  is right  at the top of the scale of unspecific amounts: a pinch, a dollop, a gob, a mess of, lots and lots, a shit ton) of articles about it in the next couple of weeks.  Stuff like this, about how John Kerry has a theory about it, but won’t comment on what it is, saying it would be inappropriate, I guess because he’s Secretary of State, which means it’s like he’s saying “Hey,  I’m on  the  government side now, if they say it was a lone nut case, I’m going to say it was a lone nut case, fuck the world.”

Highly Respected Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren

I don’t lay  awake nights wondering  about John Kerry’s opinion on  things.  That’s probably because  even  thinking about John Kerry puts me to sleep.  Wake me up when Miley Cyrus has an opinion on who killed JFK.

My candidate is, and has been for a long time, LBJ.  Sure, he was only a car or two behind, which means he had some balls, but I don’t expect he was actually in on the planning.  I just reckon he let a lot of people know  (Brown and Root Construction Company, later called Halliburton.  They made a fucking fortune out of the Viet Nam war) that if he were president, he’d treat them a lot more favorably than that Massachusetts liberal.

1.  He hated John Kennedy, and the whole Kennedy family, with a passion.  He hated them for their money, he hated them for their good looks, and he hated being vice-president. (Read Robert Caro)

2.  He was a totally unscrupulous son of a bitch and a heartless psychopath. (Read Robert Caro)

3. He was totally obsessed with the idea of becoming President, and had been his whole  life (Read Robert Caro)

4. The Thomas Wink.  Take a look.

5.  The assassination took place in his back yard.  Which mean it was an easy mess for him to clean up. As the ultimate well-connected Texas politician, the Dallas police force and the local press did his bidding.  As President, he could appoint the investigating committee.  I suspect the conversation went something like this.

“Hey, Earl!  Come on in here!”

Chief Justice Earl Warren somberly enters the oval office.

“Earl!  We’ve got to investigate this hee-yar assassination, keep the people happy, let ’em know we’re on top of things.  We’ve already got the killer, this Oswald guy, and he’s already day-ed, so you should be able to wrap it up real quick.  Whaddya say?  Will you head the commission?”

“I would consider it a great honor, Mr. Joh…..er, excuse me, Mr. President.

“Haw! Haw! Haw! Yeah, it’s takin’ me a bit of gettin’ used to, too.  But, boy, I sure do like the feel of this chair.”

“Ahem, yes, but as I was saying, Mr. President,  I don’t know if we should be so hasty about this.  A thorough investigation takes time, and we have to honestly look at all the possi….”

“Aw, horseshit, Earl.  I’ll give you all the civil rights legislation you want.”

“How many pages would you like, sir.”

Well, it’s 11:30  on a Sunday night and as far as I can tell, nobody’s done or said anything particularly newsworthy all day, of course there’s the terrible typhoon in The Philippines but there’s not really much I can say about that that hasn’t been said, there are no two sides to this, to say, deliberately, “Typhoons are good!” just because everybody else says they are a great tragedy would be stupid, and somewhat evil.

And, since the one thing I don’t want to write about in this blog is the same thing everybody else is writing about, the one thing I never want to say is what everybody else is saying, I will leave the Earthquake alone.

I would like to know, however, why is it that whenever I write a poem on a comment thread,  and by poem I mean something that  rhymes, it totally kills the thread, amputates that sucker right at the ankles, cauterizes the wound, and leaves that sucker hanging like a turtle on a fencepost.

I would like to know what people’s obsession is with cats.  They are just animals, and not particularly responsive animals.  Why are they preferred to rabbits, which are also fluffy and have similar personalities?  In fact, they have exactly the same personality.  As do guinea pigs, slugs, sloths, and moss growing on the sides of trees.  They sit there.  And look fluffy.  Well, except for the slugs and the moss.

I would like to know why people are still getting caught sending racist, sexist and otherwise really obviously offensive e-mails.  Have they not been paying attention?

Seriously, if you have been using the internet for more than a day, you should know better than to post that kind of shit.

I would like to know why I can’t do the normal, intelligent thing and write my blog at 6 or 7 in the evening so I don’t need to go through this last minute not-having-a-topic so just writing any old damned thing.

See you tomorrow.