Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Those games on Facebook with your birthday and your name and maybe you can figure out which house at Hogwarts you would belong to, well, I place them in about the same category as the horoscope or ghosts. I don’t believe in them but don’t disparage those that do. I find them relatively harmless and, while not a great conversational starter, better than nothing.
But I came across one this morning (which I’ve come across probably a hundred times before) which sparked a reaction and that reaction is this blog that I’m writing right now. It said ‘The song that was number 1 on your 14th birthday is the song that determines your life,’ which made me say “Hey, wait a minute. I determine my own life.”
That’s not entirely true, of course. there are many things that determine a person’s life. Our parents, our place of birth, our nationality, ethnicity, gender and native language, our inherited traits, our birth order perhaps, and a lot of other things later on, our teachers (both the good ones and the bad ones), the other kids in the neighborhood, all of the random things that happen at random moments and, of course, the culture of the moment. So, music does play some role, among other factors, but it’s not the only factor. In addition, the 14th birthday thing is very arbitrary as we all mature at different rates, and just because a song was number one does not mean that it had any personal meaning for you.
Anyway, #1 on my 14th birthday was ‘Honey’ by Bobby Goldsboro. I don’t even remember it.

To start with, I am pro-space, so anything that advances space research in any way shape, or form, I’m for it. But, like the Paris Environmental Accord, the Artemis project is maybe aiming a bit too low. It’s a NASA project (I wish it was international) and they’re going to send up a crew to the moon (wish they were aiming for Mars) to ‘learn more about what is needed to establish a permanent presence.’ I’d be way more impressed if they were just establishing a permanent presence.
Another goal of the program is to put a female astronaut on the moon. I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, it strikes me as a PC gesture, a nod to identity politics, a publicity stunt, and tokenism. Of course women should be in space, they should be 50% of the people in space because if we are ever to travel to other stars like in Star Trek, we will need crews capable of reproducing because the journey (it’s 2020, and we have no Zephraim Cochran. There is still no certainty that faster than light travel is even possible) will take thousands of years. Also, of all the captains in the Star Trek universe, Janeway was arguably the best.
I wish Project Artemis all the success in the world. Which is what I also wish for Elon Musk and Mars One, and anything the Chinese, the Russians, the EU or anybody else does in space. It truly is the final frontier and the deeper we go into it, the better off we all will be.

Despite their record of fumbling incompetence, despite having some of the worst stats in Europe regarding Covid 19, dear old England is the first to roll out a vaccine. The name of the first patient to get one is already forgotten. It just happened a couple of days ago, I read an article on it just 30 seconds ago, and I’ve already forgotten her name. A 90 year old woman, and I wish her a long life.
But the second patient to get the shot is an octogenarian by the name of William Shakespeare. That’s hard to forget. The article I read did not say whether or not he was any relation. He could not possibly be a direct descendant, since Shakespeare only had one son, and poor Hamnet died when he was 12. But, it’s not a tremendously common name, and William Shakespeare the author and William Shakespeare the medical experiment, although separated by four centuries in time, are practically neighbors in space, both being sons of Warwickshire. Maybe a great, great, great (and so on) grandnephew or something. Or maybe just a coincidence.
Anyway, the important news is that there’s a vaccine and, if everybody is serious about stopping this and getting back to normal, they will soon be producing it by the millions and billions. If.

Of all the the progressive podcasts I watch, my favorite is Rising with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti. Of course, Krystal is a big Berniecrat and mostly the show consists of her ranting for a bit and Saagar nodding and agreeing with her. He’s basically the Ed McMahon to her Johnny Carson.
I’ve heard a lot of people say he’s a conservative, which would make the show a left wing version of Hannity and Colmes, but I have a hard time thinking of him as a conservative, because he never directly challenges her. Anyway, a couple of days ago, Krystal was gone and we got to see the real Saagar.
Not progressive. Not conservative. Just a good old fashioned, run of the mill UFO true believer. We exist in large numbers, and it is not a right or left issue.
Here’s the episode, you can watch it and judge the evidence for yourselves, but I’m kind of surprised this isn’t being more widely reported. The photo itself isn’t proof, because it’s just something that looks like a high speed aircraft, or it could be a piece of jewelry on a blue cloth, because there’s nothing else in the sky to give it scale. But, we’ve got the pilots eye witness testimony as to the size of the object and the speed and direction it was traveling.

I’m not saying there’s no other possible explanation, but I think it would be worthwhile to send a couple of submarines to snoop around where it shot out of the ocean. If they’re here, and they’re watching us, I want to know.

You see a lot of comments on Facebook that start like that. Somebody will write something about guests in their house and you read it as ghosts, or somebody will say it’s a lovely day and the next comment will be ‘Oh, I read that as ‘lovely dog.’ It’s sort of the text communication equivalent of a mondegreen, and is almost always harmless, and sometimes a fortuitous substitution, like if you intended anchovies and threw in some chocolate chips instead and it wounds up being the greatest thing in the world, although I can’t actually imagine a recipe that would be true for, it’s just an example.
Anyway, I just saw some convoluted, nonsense chart about ideologies, filled with circles, lines and arrows, and where it had ‘civil society’, I read that as ‘chill society’ and realized right away that that is pretty much the same thing.
If everybody was chill with each other, we wouldn’t have any riots, because the police wouldn’t be murdering people, because they’d all be chill.
It was very much the Hippie ideal, as I remember it, as I thought of it. You don’t need a whole bunch of rules if everybody is being nice to each other, and letting everybody do their own thing, and letting the love happen.
The world isn’t like that, but it sure would be nice if it was.