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Last night’s dream was not a lucid dream, there was no point in it where I thought “Hey, I’m dreaming, let me direct this and go where I want to” which would be interesting but, in fact, that would sort of defeat the whole purpose of dreaming, which is to let the mind go wherever it will and maybe learn something from the places it takes you. Even if I had been trying to direct this dream, it could not have been any more spectacular.
We (there was quite a crowd of us. My brother Dennis was the only recognizable face at that point, although there was a largish crowd of amiable strangers) were watching a movie, which revolved around a gameshow, with a single contestant, so nobody considered it cheating that she was getting outside help with the answers, like an international team that was off searching for clues, because it was a really hard question, it had to do with a famous legend of a missing payroll for an Antarctic expedition, and they were asking for the specific date, day, month, and year, when the funds miraculously appeared, and an Indian gentleman (turban, not feather) appeared and handed her a dollar bill on which the date was encrypted, and then we were all hiding just behind a circus tent and somebody was saying “Wait, it isn’t over yet!” and we could hear the cranking of machinery, like a film projecter stalling or that ka-thunk kind of noise which is quite disturbing if you hear it when you’re on an elevator, and that happened for a few seconds and then we all came rushing out and ran down the street and into a building where it was all superheroes v. villains in a huge melee and of course we were victorious but interesting characters with key pieces to the puzzle kept showing up and then we left the building again and it was a big parade and I was being pushed in a wheelbarrow with two or three teenage girls (I was much younger myself, my dream, my rules) and we were singing but, it was like a conversation and we were finishing each other’s sentences in perfect rhyming synchronization and I remember thinking “how did she ever come up with a rhyme for ‘someone else’ but I can’t remember what it was and then we were back at the circus, or carnival, what have you, and I was standing underneath a roller coaster, sort of like being under the bleachers looking up but with neon yellow curved tubes everywhere, and the woman running the ride looked down and said “Hey, I know you” and it was Mayim Bialik and then the ride started to move, not as in the cars moving along the track, I mean the whole structure was moving, but I didn’t feel in any danger, and it was shortly after that I woke up.

I think it might have something to do with a difference in the marijuana I am smoking, from the legal pot shop, in that I’m smoking just as much, getting just as high, I think, but am still able to remember my dreams. I’m not sure, but if so, that would be one argument in favor of a GMO.

I am often accused of being a Grammar Nazi and, I suppose, if you are really adamant about your right to spell words any way you want to, and to place them into a sentence (which may or may not be ended by a period or other punctuation mark) in any order at all, then I may appear a bit authoritarian at times.
However, I prefer the term Grammar Police, because I’m not actually suggesting anybody be put into concentration camps or shot because they refuse to learn the difference between lose and loose. Socially shunned, absolutely, but not literally imprisoned or killed. Grammar Police is a voluntary affiliation, sort of like a neighborhood watch group, but far less likely to jump out of our cars and murder teenage pedestrians who are just walking home from the 7/11 with a box of Skittles.
The thing which has recently sparked my ire is a paid ad, which appears over and over again on my phone and on Facebook, so undoubtedly somebody spent good money for this ad for something call a protachair. It’s pretty obvious they mean portachair, as in portable chair, and somebody just got the letters inverted. If they meant it to be a combination of prototype and chair, it would have been protochair. It’s not, and anyway, a prototype is a model that you are working on, or using as a demonstration. Once you’ve mass produced it and are selling it to a mass audience, it’s not a prototype.
It’s kind of a dumb product, as most chairs are fairly portable, you can move them around the room quite easily, and there are beach chairs and folding chairs which people take to sports events and concerts quite frequently, so this product is just one more in that line. If it’s affordable, comfortable, and cheap enough, I’m sure some people will buy it despite the misspelling.
But, I find it rather shocking that a professional ad designer would produce such a monstrosity (the ad, not the chair) and flaunt it in front of the general public.
Did they not realize and then, after receiving complaints from the grammar police, decided it would be too difficult, or expensive, or time consuming to change?
Or perhaps they didn’t get a notice from the grammar police because, very much like real cops, we can’t be everywhere and even I am just bitching about it in my blog and not contacting them directly, hypocrite that I am.
Or, perhaps, worst of all, they misspelled the word on purpose. There would be a logic to that, and I can picture the meeting in the board room. “Who is our target demographic for this product?” “Stupid, lazy people who will order something online they don’t really need because they think it looks cool.” “How do we reach those people” “Our research shows that they tend to post and respond to posts mostly if they are horribly misspelled.” “O.K., let’s go with that.”
I really want to think that is not the case. But, I’ve been seeing the ad for days now and they haven’t corrected it.

There are three things that I’ve heard from a lot of people recently – well intentioned, intelligent people – that I just cannot agree with, even if I were to try. Perhaps I don’t understand the science well enough. It’s certainly true that I don’t understand enough about science, but, to be fair to myself, nobody can ever understand enough about science. Even the greatest scientists in the world (especially the greatest scientists in the world) are always trying to understand more science. It’s open ended like that.
First, there is no such thing as time.
Second, there is no such thing as gender.
Third, there is no such thing as race.
Of course there is such a thing as time. We pass through it, we are not the same at every stage of it. If you show up late for an important meeting, for work, or even for a social engagement, it’s no use saying “There is no such thing as time.” Nobody’s buying that as an excuse because in the real world, in the society in which we exist, time is crucial. Of course, when I hear scientists talking about space time, and the speed of light, and how people actually age slower if we send them out into space, I can’t refute them. But, we’re not exactly talking about the same thing. It’s a semantic argument, rather than a scientific one. Time, in our reality, exists. If you want to talk about the curvature of the universe, talk about the curvature of the universe.
Of course there is such a thing as gender, and a bit more than 90% of all human beings on the planet fall into one of the two major ones. When you say ‘heteronormative’ it is right there in the second half of the word. To be male or female gendered is the norm. This has nothing to do with gay rights. I’m all for gay rights. But gender is a thing which exists.
As to race, of course we are all members of the same species, and the similarities of our brain structure and emotional range far outweigh our differences in skin color, hair type, and predisposition to certain rare diseases. But those differences exist, they are visibly obvious, and to pretend that they have no effect on our upbringing and our relationships with other people is, simply, magical thinking. It shouldn’t have as much effect as it does but just claiming it’s not a real thing is absurd.
That’s my rant for the day. As usual, I welcome all comments.

I just, like a few minutes ago, finished watching ‘It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,’ which was not really a biopic of Mr. Rogers, as it focused on just a couple of weeks out of his life, when he was being interviewed for an article in Esquire, on which the film is actually based. I guess you could call it a biopic, though, since his life was his show and his show was his life. (The urban legend that he had been a Navy Seal was shot down in one sentence near the end of the film)
The main thing I want to say is that it was a great film and everybody should watch it.
I feel compelled to add, however, that Mr. Rogers neighborhood was not part of my childhood. I’m from the Captain Kangaroo generation, and by the time Mr. Rogers came onto the scene, I was already at the beginning of my teen years. I’ve never actually seen a whole episode of the show straight through, although, of course, I am familiar with it, just by living in the world. When a show is as important as that one, there’s a sort of osmosis.
Tom Hanks is great as Mr. Rogers, of course, because Tom Hanks is always great. I’ve only ever seen him in one movie I didn’t like (Road to Perdition) because he tried to play a bad guy, and it just did not work. I’m not sure if that’s just because he’s typecast and you don’t expect him to ever play a bad guy, or if he’s just naturally such a nice person that he couldn’t play a bad guy if he tried, but I suspect it’s the latter. Which made him the perfect choice to play Mr. Rogers.
The story is about the rage-a-holic reporter with a messed up family life who is sent to interview him, and how the process winds up having a totally rehabilitative effect on the reporter, because Mr. Rogers can totally feel his pain. There are sad moments, there are beautiful moments. You’d think it would be difficult to make a compelling feature length film about somebody who’s just so damned nice all the time, but it worked. Two thumbs up.

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot!
I see no reason the gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot

It is the 5th of November and so it is time for the annual revisitation of my gunpowder plot false flag conspiracy theory. Here we go:

We know perfectly well that governments lie to their people all the time. I am convinced that the events of September 11th, 2001, were orchestrated by Dick Cheney, the CIA, Marvin Bush, Larry Silverstein and a few others. Probably the Saudis were involved. Maybe Mossad. Certainly we know that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, and that the nation of Afghanistan had bugger all to do with it. We also know that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was reported at the time as an attack on a U.S. ship in international waters, by the North Viet Namese, was actually an attack on Viet Namese ships, inside their own waters, by the U.S. Nonetheless, it was the excuse for a long and profitable (to Halliburton, which was then known as Kellogg, Brown and Root, and was a major contributor to Lyndon Johnson). We know that the Reichstag fire, which gave Hitler an excuse to invade Poland, was not set by a Polish terrorist, we know that the Lusitania was, indeed, carrying weapons, we know that the battleship Maine sank due to a boiler explosion, and so on. Governments have been using false flag events to justify wars and all sorts of other shit for a long time. Probably forever, since there’s no reason to believe that governments suddenly became corrupt in the 20th century.
Which brings us to Guy Fawkes. King James was trying to follow in the footsteps of Queen Elizabeth, and they were pretty big footsteps indeed. A popular graffiti of the time was Rex fuit Elisabeth; nunc Regina Jacobus, which is kind of impressive, because even though most people were illiterate, they were illiterate in Latin. It translates as “Elizabeth was King, now James is Queen,” which probably rankled James a bit.
Also, he’d inherited Elizabeth’s biggest problem, which was to keep Catholics and Protestants from killing each other, and to keep either of them from killing him. So, his big plan was to write his own version of the bible, make all the Catholics and Protestants buy one, unite the country and get really rich in the process.
But first, he needed to make a big splash, he needed to do something to look authoritative and get the whole country behind him. Well, nothing like a failed assassination attempt for that. Once they’d ‘found’ the dynamite, arrested a bunch of suspects, who were all Catholics so that made sense, what could anybody say? As one-sided as the press is today, it was even more so then. In fact, the official version was pretty much whatever the King said it was, and nobody was going to say otherwise, because this was back in the day when hangings, beheadings, and worse were fairly common, and the idea of a fair trial hadn’t been invented yet.

I do not have a time machine, so there is no way I can prove my theory. But, contrariwise, there is no way to disprove it either.