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Lucid Dreaming is something I’ve always wished I could do, and would like to train myself to do, because the dream world is an amazing world, where anything can happen, like a virtual reality fantasy land, but without the computers. Last night I came close but, as the saying goes, no cigar.
I was at a party in somebody’s very normal looking living room, probably about 20 people or so, none of whom I recognized but that is par for the course, and something I think is different in my dreams from most people’s dreams, from conversations I’ve had and all I’ve read. My dreams are generally populated with complete strangers, and friends and family only pop up infrequently. Well, one I recognized, of course, Bill Clinton was there. Bill Clinton is a politician I once liked and admired, back when I still bought into the fiction that Democrats were trying to get good things like universal health care, but history has burst that bubble. Anyway, as he was moving from one hot girl to the next, I said “Hey, Bill, nice to see you haven’t lost your touch!” and gave him a thumbs up sign to which he responded with a wink and a lift of his glass. (red wine, btw) Shortly after, I was seated at a table with a bitter looking old woman who said “I’ve watched your classes, and analyzed your teaching. It’s not good.”
So, I left the party and started to walk home. At that point I thought of the idea of lucid dreaming, because I read an article recently (in the waking world) that said one way to induce lucid dreaming is to learn how to recognize when you’re in a dream by training yourself, in the waking world, to look around occasionally and see if everything is normal, if everything could possibly exist in the real world and if not, then you are dreaming and can try to turn it into a lucid dream. So, I looked around. I was on E. 13th St. in Des Moines, just around the corner from our old house. Everything was just as it should be. There was the Paterno’s big white house, the green lawn, and I continued up to Buchanan St., walked around the corner to our place and everything looked perfectly normal. So I kept on dreaming, without direction, accepting it as reality.
It never occurred to me that our house was torn down decades ago, and the neighborhood now doesn’t look the same as it did then, or how odd it would be for President Clinton to be at a random house party in my old, very average neighborhood. Lucid dreaming is tricky. You ask yourself if everything is normal and of course it is, because you’re in a damn dream. Catch 22.

(this happened about a month ago, but I’m just hearing about it now, so I’m writing about it now)

I hate being put in the position of defending Joe Biden who, in my opinion, is a plagiarizing, bribe accepting, creepy old shitweasel who is nothing more than a front man for the real power brokers, the billionaires and corporate executives who are destroying the ecosphere and condemning humanity to extinction.
But, I also hate being associated with the MAGA crowd, who are racist morons who love guns and hate Greta Thunberg, and anybody else who is smarter than they are.
So, mixed feelings on this story, but it is funny. A reporter at a NASCAR event recently was interviewing the winner, a man named Brandon Brown, who is in all probability a nice and decent person who doesn’t deserve to be dragged into this, and she said to him “Just listen to that crowd chanting, they’re saying ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’!, which was extremely reminiscent of the Simpson’s episode where Smithers said to Mr. Burns “They’re not saying Boo!, they’re saying “Boo-urns! Boo-urns!”, because the crowd was very clearly and very unmistakably chanting “Fuck Joe Biden!“
Why they are chanting Fuck Joe Biden at a sporting event, I’m not sure. I doubt it’s because the free community college and allowing Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices provisions have been taken out of the so-called Build Back Better act. I’m sure it’s not because Biden is setting up too many solar panels and wind turbines, and its definitely not because he’s been putting pressure on the evil coal companies, because he hasn’t. In fact, if they loved Trump, they should be loving Joe Biden because, as he promised, nothing has fundamentally changed.
Anyhow, since this happened “Let’s Go Brandon” has become right wing code for Fuck Joe Biden across the internet and recently, a member of congress, South Carolina Republican Jeff Duncan, wore a mask with that slogan in congress.
The reporter, however well intentioned, screwed up. You try to bottle this kind of thing up, you lie about it, and look what happens.

A lot of people are predicting that Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse will be kind of boring, and fail. They could be right, I don’t know, but a lot of it sounds like wishful thinking. They are hoping it will fail, which is strange, because if it succeeds it will be because it’s a cool, new thing, and the world can always do with a cool, new thing. I suspect the reason people are hoping it will fail is because they hate Mark Zuckerberg. Sort of the way I chime in when Biden flops, or the Alec Baldwin haters (oh, yes, they are a thing) laughed when he accidentally (was it, really? we will never know) shot that woman, whose name I (and most other people, I’m sure) have already forgotten, or the anti-anti-vaxxers laugh, and laugh, and laugh whenever an anti-vaxxer dies a slow, lingering death from Covid, which happens fairly frequently lately.
Why does everybody hate Mark Zuckerberg? Well, it might be because they think Facebook is a pernicious social force, or maybe they don’t like the way he’s rigged the algorithms to promote hate and division, or maybe it’s because he has more money that the rest of us. Way more money.
I suspect it’s that last one. There are, according to Forbes Magazine, 2,775 billionaires in the world, and more joining the club every day. All of them, guaranteed, are hated by some, and some of them by almost all. Bill Gates, who is the 4th richest man in the world, one slot ahead of Zuckerberg, seems to get a pass from a lot of people. That’s because of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. He donates a tiny percentage (i.e. a very impressive sounding amount) of his wealth to worthy causes, vaccinations in India and easing hunger (i.e. pushing Monsanto’s GMO products) in Africa. I remember before he did that, he was known as a chintzy bastard who gave nothing to charity and didn’t even tip well. He once actually said “Why should I donate to charity? It’s not a requirement.” I guess at some point after that, Melinda got tired of everybody in the world hating them and thought “What do we need to do (i.e. how much do we need to spend?) for people to love us? and the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was born.
Which gives me an idea. Let us divide the world’s problems up into 2,755 units, ranked large to small, and assign a billionaire to actually solve each problem. Of course, the biggest billionaires would be assigned the biggest problems. Like Jeff Bezos could be tasked with ending homelessness (which he could probably do and figure out how to make money on it), Elon Musk could be tasked with ending world hunger, and so on, until you get down to the people who only have a paltry couple of billion, who could be tasked with renovating a neighborhood, or setting up a couple of dozen organic farms, or rescuing the bees like Morgan Freeman, who I don’t think is even a billionaire.
We could solve all of the world’s problems and everyone would love the world’s billionaires. Wouldn’t that be nice?

When I first heard that Mark Zuckerberg wanted to change the name of Facebook, I didn’t quite believe it. Then, I thought “Well, if that isn’t the stupidest business decision since Tesla failed to get Edison’s promise in writing, I don’t know what is.”
I don’t think Zuckerberg’s nearly the genius he’s cracked up to be. Sure, he’s good with computers, but it seemed to me, from watching The Social Network, that he just sort of stumbled onto something big and had the good sense to let it ride. But, I didn’t think he’d actually be stupid enough to do that. I mean, Facebook is still the biggest thing on the internet, and he’s the 3rd richest man in the world, which is no small thing.
But I was curious enough to look it up, since the stupidest thing of all would be to write a blog based just on a Facebook rumor. Turns out, he’s not actually thinking of changing the name of Facebook, just the company that owns Facebook. That makes sense. Halliburton’s gone through so many name changes over the years nobody actually knows what their current name is, although they are probably still doing evil shit all over the world. Lots of people change their names to avoid alimony payments, or to hide from the law. The great American naval hero, John Paul Jones, changed his name when he moved to America, to avoid a murder charge in his native Scotland. His original name was John Paul, but he figured Jones was nice and forgettable.
So, Facebook’s management company will now be known as Meta, which is nice and forgettable.
Zuckerberg says that it’s because he wants to focus on other projects, which is all right by me. Facebook is chugging along, I’ve found my own little comfy corner within it, and the less he’s directly involved, the better it probably is for everybody involved. The main project is something called Metaverse, which sounds to me like an update of a site called Second Life, which was kind of popular for a while before Facebook came along. Everybody will have avatars (which have improved considerably over the last 20 years) and wander around a virtual space, interacting with each other. It might work. After all, the first Dune totally bombed, but the current version is getting rave reviews.
But, Facebook will still be Facebook. Not to worry.

I have often noticed that peaceful, calm, rational people, when placed in the driver’s seat of an automobile, can become, almost immediately, total rage monsters who can be triggered into violent streams of profanity by rather minor infractions, such as someone driving too slow, or accidentally leaving their turn signal on or, God forbid, being a pedestrian.
It’s traffic, and people should be able to move through it without the rage. The other day I collided with someone while changing from the yellow line to the red line at Florenc. Don’t know whose fault it was but I said excuse me, and he said no worries, and we both continued on our way. People on foot are reasonably cool. It’s having that heavy piece of machinery, with a powerful engine at your command, which makes people feel that they are the lord of the fast lane, the king of the road, and everyone else’s imperfection becomes infuriating.
I suspect it’s the same with guns. Yesterday my gun nut brother-in-law (No disrespect intended, but the man does love his guns. He probably owns more than 20, and his favorite things to post online are memes about guns, how much he loves guns, and how much he loves buying guns. Sometimes girls with big tits holding guns.) posted a meme showing a family at the shooting range – mother, father, and son who appeared to be about 14, who was lying in the prone position with an AR something or other.
The point of the meme, I guess, is that a family that goes out shooting together is a solid family. I’m not against family bonding, of course, but you can say the same about a family picnic at the beach, or a family day at an amusement park. Time spent together is quality time, most of the time.
Anyhow, someone commented that it builds character and I pointed out that the kid could be a young Kyle Rittenhouse, as an example of the kind of character parents shouldn’t want to be building. Damn, did that ever open up a can of worms. Highly toxic, racist worms. Kyle Rittenhouse did the world a favor, that kind of thing. There were also words of praise for George Zimmerman.
I’m not saying that gun ownership and racism, or even gun ownership and aggression are automatically linked, but there is obviously a huge overlap in the Venn Diagram.