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Happy Easter

Here in the Czech Republic, Easter is celebrated on Monday instead of Sunday.  I’m not Christian and have never been a big fan of Easter.  Sure, hunting for Easter eggs was fun when I was a kid.  I also remember a farm we used to visit, some friends of my parents, really old people, or at least seemed so at the time, and every time we would come, they would send us out to the barn to find eggs because they just had a bunch of hens running loose who would lay anywhere and we thought that was amazingly cool fun.  I just realized while writing this now that maybe they didn’t actually like kids very much and just wanted us out of the way.  Also, the chocolate was cool but I hated the idea of getting all dressed up to visit our most boring relatives, which was how Easter afternoon was spent.

Later on, realizing the religious significance of the holiday, I began to like it even less.  Except for Christmas, which has lots of cool pagan stuff like Santa Claus, an indoor tree, festive lights and presents, I see no reason whatsoever that anybody who is not a Christian should take Christian holidays seriously.  I mean, we could celebrate the Spring solstice or equinox, I always get those too confused, or Beltane or something.

Anyway, I like Easter even less in the Czech Republic.  The decorations are cooler than in the west.  They really go all out on the eggs, and each one is a work of art.  They also have an Easter tree, which is a live tree, usually a willow, outdoors, draped with lots of colored paper and hung with eggs.  It looks nice.  But they’ve got one tradition which is really obnoxious and sexist and anachronistic.

The boys and men all have Easter whips, little braided switches decorated at the handle end with colored paper, and they whip all the girls and women they can find, reciting a little rhyme, and then the girls give them eggs (traditional) or chocolate (more modern) or alcohol if they’re old enough(also traditional).  It’s supposed to keep the women young forever.

I’ve been told that the version I’m seeing now is actually rather mild, that in the old days it seriously was a woman bashing festival.  I don’t know.  I’ve definitely seen some men who enjoy it in more than a healthy way.

Anyway, my wife and kids went up to the cottage to celebrate with her family, and I found excuses to stay home.  Everybody’s happy.

The Legacy of Lascaux

Of course, another rule that I had set for myself at the beginning was that poetry was poetry and the blogs were the blogs, two entirely separate writing projects, but I am not just violating that rule, I am tossing it out entirely.

This post will catch me up to today’s date and I think I can maintain a blog a day after that, but we still don’t have April’s book of the month up yet, and it’s all proving to be quite a bit more work than I imagined.

So, this is a sonnet I wrote today.  There may be more in future.

The hungry tribe were huddled in the cave

Sheltered from the weather and the lions

They were timid more than they were brave

They had to be, to live in those environs

When someone got some gunk upon their hand

A bit of ochrous clay and slightly damp

They rubbed it off against the nearest wall

And noticed that it left a ragged stamp

Then, in the light of fire and dimmed by smoke

They molded it with fingers and with sticks

Perhaps, at first they thought it was a joke

A game, perhaps, a sort of magic trick

They had time and little else to do

And so the game became a form of art

Images of animals they knew

Both fanned their hunger and enflamed their hearts

And once they’d killed the bison in their brains

Then they could kill the bison on the plains

Once there’s enough of them, of course, they will be recycled as a book of the month.

March 31^st, 2010

Computers Hate Me

I swear to God, computers hate me.  Now, I know that sounds paranoid and that they are only soulless machines, who cannot possibly hate one user more than another, and that the malevolent machine is a myth of the movies, but they definitely do not work as well for me as they do for other people.

When my son, who is 7, wants to play a game, it works.  Horrible, mindless games with terrible music that is a cross between heavy metal and circus music, repeated over and over.  Then when he leaves I cannot get the music to stop nor switch over to another program.  I have to actually turn the computer off, which is another thing it does not want to do for me.

This morning it did something it often does (to me – if anybody else in my house has had this problem, they haven’t mentioned it)  I turned off the computer as I was going out to do some errands  (the optician’s shop on Vinohradska, near Vinohradska Trznice, fixed my glasses for free even though I’d broken them carelessly.  Kudos) and then when I got back and wanted to turn on the computer, I opened it up, turned it on and got….Windows shutting down.  Why couldn’t it have done that when I asked it to?

Lately, I’ve been randomly bounced off the internet.  I’ll try to go to another page and all of a sudden, it’s “problem loading page” and I’m done.  I have to wait and try again later.

Anyway, the latest frustration.  My wife sent me a document to proofread – her English is good, but she’s not a native speaker, so it’s good to check these things over.  There’s usually quite a bit of confusion between a and the, for instance.  Anyway, I did it, all 9 pages, and I had to be on the internet because it was an e-mail attachment.  Then I saved it as a wordfile (so I guess I was offline for a moment) but then when I tried to go back to hotmail so I could send her a reply and attach the corrected version…no internet.

It’s not exactly two hours wasted, because the job is done and saved, but I feel like it’s two hours wasted.

I think I’ll take a break now and smoke a big, fat joint.

Pedophile Priests

Now, I’m not saying that the pope himself fucks little boys because I think if he did somebody, maybe a whole lot of sombodies, would have sold their story to the magazines by now.  But, just as he was a participant in Nazism because everybody else was doing it, so he has participated in the great cover-up.

That is, the great cover-up of the increasingly clear state of affairs within the Catholic Church, i.e. that lots and lots of priests like to have sexual relationships with very young boys, and that this has probably been the case for centuries, even millenia.

Of course, this has always been suspected.  I’m sure even in the 12^th century or so the common people heard stories of priests sodomizing children.  But it was a simpler time.  Plenty of the common people had sex with their relatives and various farm animals, too.  People didn’t necessarily talk about it, and if some of the boys talked, as some must have, there was little anybody could do.

So, some grew up to be child-molesting priests themselves and the cycle continued.

What is different today?  The internet.  Television.  A whole new attitude of openness and communication.

I was watching an episode of Criminal Minds about a week ago.  Horrible show, really, like all cop shows it is an advertisement for a police state.  The police are good.  They may lie to you.  They may abuse suspects.  But they do it all to save innocent children and old ladies.  Nonetheless, like WWII movies and boxing, I watch with a guilty pleasure.  I like seeing violence on TV as much as any red-blooded American boy.  Anyway, it was one of their more interesting episodes, they were investigating a double murder of a couple and the kidnapping of their 10 year old daughter.  It turned out, she was the intended bride for their 10 year old son.  The twist to the episode came when they were investigating previous, similar crimes and discovered that the DNA from a victim of 20 years ago matched the DNA of the current suspect.  And at that point they figured it out, that this had been going on for generations, for centuries, and only now that we’ve got DNA testing and super high speed computers (yeah, right, if real cops had half the technological capabilities they have on TV, there’d be no crime left.  Most criminals, seriously, are not supercriminals) the pattern has become clear.

That’s the way I see it with the Catholic Church and pedophilia.  We are well into the age of documentation, we are in an era when it’s not such a stigma to talk about homosexuality and its causes (50% genetic, the rest just get sucked into it…sorry, little joke there), and all that means we are entering into an era when nobody is going to get away with anything.

The Catholic Church is fucked.

March 29^th, 2010

Thai Food

When I was in Thailand, I was quite struck by the fact that Thai people would not ask you “Do you like Thai food?” as people in most other countries ask foreigners.  They would ask “Can you eat Thai food?”  Because that stuff is spicy as hell.

Not everything, of course.  Thai cuisine includes lots of fresh fruit.  The single greatest taste treat ever is a Thai banana pancake served by a street vendor.  It’s a show to watch them make it, delicious to eat, and cheap.

The one area where they fall down, surprisingly, is the tea.  Chinese tea is weak but Thai tea is basically tepid water, slightly flavored with tea leaves, but only slightly.  The concoction which is known in the U.S. as Thai tea is not Thai at all.

Anyway, I have not found a good Thai restaurant in Prague yet.  The place that’s at the food court at Palac Flora is not only an offense to Thai cuisine, it is an offense to anyone who likes food at all.  Their noodles are soggy and their vegetables are overcooked.

Which are hallmarks of Czech cuisine, but that’s probably why I’m not a fan of Czech cuisine.

It is impossible to have a good Thai restaurant in Prague for the same reason it is impossible to have a good Mexican restaurant or a good Indian restaurant.  Czech people do not like spicy food.  A little bit of pepper, and they’re bitching.

My wife tried the Thai restaurant in the mall where she works today, and she said it was pretty good.  However, she is Czech.  She was raised spice free and doesn’t know what she’s missing.

I don’t actually know why I like spicy food.  Some of it might be the macho thing.  Growing up in America, “I can eat Mexican food” was almost the same as “I can eat Thai food” is in Thailand.  It means “I am not a wimp.”  But also, I like the bodily cleansing effect.  It makes you sweat, it makes your nose run and your eyes water.  You probably lose enough in bodily fluids to make up for any caloric intake.

So, it’s good for you.