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A few days ago I read a thing called “The 7 Most Annoying Status Updates on Facebook” or some such shite and, against my better judgement, I started to read it.  I only got through a couple, and the one I remember, at which point I stopped reading the article, was the “My Life is Better Than Yours” status update.  Well, this covers everything from bragging about your kids’ soccer team to showing awesome vacation photos to pictures of your garden to recipes to basically just about everything.  What the hell are people supposed to post about, their failures?  (Actually, I’m guessing that was probably further down in the article.)

Anyway, everybody should post whatever they like on facebook and not worry too much about what other people think, but, since I’ve titled this post “I Disapprove of This Post” I’m going to go ahead and talk about a couple of status updates that really irritate me.

First, “In two words, what would you say about….”  Two words is not enough to say anything about anything.  When I started writing this blog, I set my minimum and maximum.  Minimum word count, 250, because I am doing this largely as a writing exercise and less than 250 is a copout.  Maximum, 500, because longer than that and people are going to get sick of reading it.

The other is “Share if you love your mother/brother/best friend,” etc… or “Share if you hate cancer” (as if there are a lot of people out there who just love cancer) or “Share if you would like to end domestic violence or whatever.”

No, I am not going to share and I am not going to feel guilty about it either.  If everybody shared, facebook would get godawful tiresome awfully quick.  It’s  like the pre-facebook bumper stickers that said “Honk if you blah, blah, blah”  If everybody actually responded to everybody else’s bumper stickers, driving would be even more annoying than it is, and maybe a little dangerous, too.

So, yeah, for a lot of people, facebook is the new version of bumper stickers, or t-shirts, just a place for one slogan after another and, as much as it irritates me, that’s fine.  Post whatever you like.

Just don’t expect me to share.  Or comment.  Or like.

I am old enough I can remember when we just had 3 channels on TV.  Most of it was crap, occasionally there was a program that was great, but we watched it with the same zombie like focus that we still do today.

When the idea of massive numbers of channels came in, we all thought this would lead to a great variety in programming, and there are some kinds of programs (reality  TV) that just didn’t exist back then.  That doesn’t mean they are any good.

The common wisdom, of course, is that the people who run the networks, the people who choose the programming, are just trying to get the maximum number of viewers so that they  can charge the maximum amount for advertising.  I think there must be another force at work.

I just can’t believe that 80% of the viewing public, at 10 o’clock in the morning, want to watch cop shows.  Super gory, twisted, bloody cop shows.  Because that’s what’s on.  If it was just about market share, a few of these channels would think “Hey, if everybody’s showing a bloody, violent program now, maybe we should show something funny, or something historical, or something with a talking horse, or a quirky being from another planet.  Just to get that percentage of the audience  that doesn’t want to watch a band of supercops solving a brutal and senseless murder committed by some evil genius who’s covered his tracks brilliantly.”

But the percentage of cop shows (I’m counting in lawyer and detective shows, they are the same thing) is just too high.  I suspect that the powers that be, the Masons or Illuminati, or Elders of Zion, or Rosicrucians, or whoever the hell it is who is really running the show, are putting out massive police propaganda,  to get the populace to accept police control, and extreme police tactics.

This morning on CSI (New York, with Gary Sinister) they had an episode about a cop who was accused of shooting an unarmed man, but of course he was pure as the driven snow and the guy had had a gun and shot at him and ran through alleys filled with garbage cans, accompanied by dark, evil music.  And the crowds of liberal do-gooders were ready to storm the police station and lynch the poor, misunderstood, heroic defender of society.

That is their story.  It counters the real life incidents of the cops in LA who shot the Rottweiler, the cops in Pine Bluff, Arkansas who shot the 107 year old man, the cops in Chicago who tazed an old man to death in his nursing home, the cops who shot a black football player dead when he tried to report a car accident, because he was big and scary, the cops in D.C. who shot the woman after she got out of her car, as her infant son watched.

I’m convinced that it is meant precisely to counter those stories.  It’s dressed up as entertainment, but it’s propaganda.

I stand when I feel like standing

I sit when I want to sit

I eat whatever I want to and

I shit when I need to shit

This was in response to a BBC article, which got reposted on my facebook page for some reason that I don’t really comprehend, about how standing is much healthier than sitting.  I think they’re leaving out rather a lot of factors, there.  Such as standing up when the people behind you are shouting at you to sit down might be, in some situations, extremely injurious to your short term health and, whether or not the extra calories burned are worth the fallen arches and aching feet.

Yes, Hemingway wrote while standing, but I’m not about to take life advice from a guy who killed himself

But I don’t care to argue the merits of standing vs. sitting.  Obviously, everybody is going to do a great deal of both in their life and I think the argument over what is precisely the right percentage for you must be solved by the age old logic of “Do whatever you feel like, you’re eventually going to die anyway.”

I also generally avoid articles telling me what I should or shouldn’t eat, or drink, or wear, or how many hours a day I should sleep and whether or not it should be all at once, and whether or not a man should sit down to pee, and pretty much any article that suggests that by changing my behavior I will be healthier/happier/more successful.

There are more interesting questions to ponder in life:  Free will vs. predetermination, steady state universe vs. big bang, God vs. no God, are we alone in the universe, rhyming poetry vs. free verse, is Woody Allen a great director, capitalism vs. socialism, are we our brother’s keeper, can a film ever improve on a book, how is social media affecting the way we relate to each other as human beings, is phone sex cheating, what is the secret of humor, is beauty always in the eye of the beholder or is there some actual criteria which defines some art as great and some as throwing paint, and if the human race were to go extinct, would anybody miss us?

Stand up or sit down is the kind of question you can just turn your mind off and let your body answer.

On Wednesdays I have two 7th grade classes, back to back.  Both of them have a couple of surly, too-cool-for-school students, it’s that age, but the 2nd class is definitely worse than the 1st.

Today, my lesson plan was inspired by something my friend Bubu used to do when he was teaching English here in Prague, before he decided he wanted to live in Tehran, translating Persian poetry into English.  It’s a decision I don’t understand, but that’s not the point of tonight’s blog.

He used to do an exercise with “Mr. Paper.”  What can Mr. Paper do?  It’s a good way to find out all the verbs the students know and maybe teach them some new ones.  Instead of having all of the students cut a man out of paper, I just drew a robot on the board and gave them the starter sentence “My robot can ______.”

With the first class, it worked like a charm.  We covered the blackboard with sentences, they were asking me how to say different things, everybody was participating, and some of the ideas actually were quite clever.  “My robot can make me laugh.”  “My robot can water the flowers.” “My robot can choose my clothes.”

I thought “This is great, it’s an easy lesson, surely it will work with the next class as well.”  Hah.

I began to introduce the topic and one girl (one of the 3 constant troublemakers in the class – but they are all different – D actually speaks good English and thinks she is being funny, so I have hope she may come around in the end – A is just sullen and pouty and resentful of my authority, I’ve no idea what I can do with her – and N, the one I’m talking about,  is just plain weird- I’m not sure if she’s actually smart, or nuts, or both) pointed out that the word robot is a Czech word.

At first, I just said yes, that’s true, but I tried to breeze past it because it wasn’t my lesson plan, but she just continued talking, so I decided to address the subject.  I asked if anybody had read the play (R.U.R., by Karel Čapek, 1920), meanwhile she was still talking, but nobody understood the word “play” so I explained (translated) that and she was still talking and I asked her if she had read or seen the play and she said “what play, what are you talking about?” and I explained it again and she was still talking and none of the students had actually read the play or even heard of it, and so I told her to shut up but she didn’t so I yelled at her to shut up and that brought some other students in on her side, one of the brighter girls said “Why don’t you answer her when she’s speaking in Czech?” and I said “Because she’s speaking in Czech, and also (I probably shouldn’t have said this) because she’s an idiot,” but she, all this time, was just merrily chattering away and so I yelled at her and made her go sit in the back of the room, and then we sort of got started with the lesson but there was still a lot of crosschat, and students standing up and walking around, and me yelling at various students to sit down and shut up, and then I let N come back to her seat, and then the director of the school walked in and decided to monitor the class for awhile, I figured that was not coincidental and I was right, another teacher had complained about the noise, and as long as the director was there they acted like little angels and we had sort of a decent lesson.

So, 1 win, 1 loss, but it’s still a good lesson plan and I’ll use it again.  If I don’t get fired.