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Sonnet of the Day

Still 3 blog posts behind, I’d sure like to get caught up tonight or at the very latest tomorrow and there has never been a more opportune time.  Both of the kids’ are at their grandparents place, so there is a rare peace and quiet in the flat.

You would think that was conducive to thinking, but that’s not necessarily the case.  It is certainly a conducive atmosphere for smoking large amounts of marijuana, which is fun but it doesn’t exactly boost productivity.

I did finish a sonnet this morning, while I was sitting at Bohemia Bagel.  I met one of our teachers there this morning and still had plenty of time before I needed to pick Sam up for school, and since I’d paid the highly outrageous price of 49 crowns for a cup of coffee, whose sole saving grace is that it’s refillable (once upon a time Bohemian Bagel made a thing out of having exotic blends, it was always like Ethiopian Butternut, or Brazilian mambo sambo or something, I guess they eventually figured it was pearls before swine which, admittedly, it was), I decided to just hang out there for awhile and so, anyway, to fill up space, here’s the sonnet:

Lie on your back on a grassy hillside

Stare straight up into the evening sky

It’s the solar systems greatest thrill ride

Seriously, you should give it a try

You should be far away from any city

Far, far  away from any city lights

The stars above are really very pretty

But they are best observed in blackest night

You’ll have to lie there for a couple hours

To see that things aren’t staying in one place

Embrace the void and you will feel the power

The vast and awesome emptiness of space

You’ll feel the Earth as it is spinning round

Alone, in empty space, without a sound



How Al Franken Deals With Hecklers

Still 4 days behind, but I hope to get that sorted by tonight.

I really must comment on the ambush journalist who confronted Al Franken on the stairs.

Al’s response wasn’t bad, making him point out the part of the bill where he got his $7 million for jungle gyms claim which, of course, made the guy look like a bit of an idiot but these people have their own logic and the guy was undeterred.

What Al should have said, what I would have said, but of course hindsight is 20/20 and I probably wouldn’t have thought of it at the moment, either, is something like this:

When I was in the 3^rd and 4^th grade the jungle gym was one of my favorite things.  I liked it better than 4 square or tetherball and almost as much as the monkey bars, which were my very favorite.  I wasn’t a big kid, and the jungle gym worked to the advantage of small but agile kids over the bigger, slower children.

Didn’t you have a jungle gym at your school?  Home schooled?  Figures.

Anyway, jungle gyms have been part of childhood for millions of American children since at least the 60s, when I was in elementary school, and probably long before that.  They are not terribly expensive, being just a bunch of metal tubes bolted together, and they continue to stand, requiring almost no maintenance, for years, serving wave after wave of children who are eager to explore their physical capabilities and grow into healthy adults.

Who did you think paid for the jungle gyms?  Corporations?  Private donors?  Playground equipment is part of any elementary school.  Of course it’s paid for by the government.

What do you mean, where does the government get off…?  Would you have schools built without gyms?  I’m guessing you’d like to cut out the band program as well, and the drama department.

You are a right-wing asshole who somehow got confused in your childhood between school and prison and you want to impose your own miserable, limited life view on succeeding generations of youth.  Fuck you.

Actually, as I reread what I just wrote, Al probably handled it better than I would have.

Good job, Al!

Excuses, Excuses

Of course, there are reasons why I am 5 days behind in writing blog posts.  Some might call them excuses but for myself, seeing nothing particularly evil about making excuses to myself, they are reasons.

For the last 3 days we have been putting together the March issue of Watson’s World News.  I guess really that’s the April issue but we come out the last Wednesday of every month.  It’s a little project we do to advertise our language school.  I would like for it to be a much bigger project but it’s rather like this blog.

If either my wife or I had a business mentality, that sales persona, we could probably make a much bigger deal out of it than it is.  I believe the quality is there.

Anyway, when we put the paper together, it consumes a whole weekend.  First, I have to choose the stories.  I like going to Ananova’s quirkies and then Reuters’ oddly enough, but I’m kind of tired of the stupid criminal stories.  Apparently, a lot of the guys who rob banks are stupid enough to ask one of the tellers for a date.  So, I go through the month and find, with luck, 8 or 9 stories which I feel like stealing.  Then, I round it out with a bit of Hollywood celebrity scandal and maybe something cool from the tech world and Bob’s your uncle, we have a paper.  There’s also a word of the month and a letter from the editor, which I have to write, but that doesn’t take too much effort once I have the idea.

So, there’s no one particular part of it that’s hard, but it’s time consuming and made much more difficult when you have two kids who both want to use the computer and a computer that keeps screwing up.  And it totally pushes my blog writing, to some extent even my Wonkette reading, right out of the frame.

Add to that, my wife decided that this would be a good time to finish renovating our bedroom.  Now, I have many fine qualities, but DIY skills are not even close to being among them.  No, my wife’s cousin is the handyman of the family, so he was here for a few days, and my mother-in-law.

It was hard enough to even think in English, much less get anything else written.

Desperate Times

I’m 6 days behind, this is being written on the the 30^th, that is, so I am going to break all of the rules to get 6 blogs typed up today and, of course, the 1^st rule and the worst one to break is the rule against writing about writing, about getting too involved in the process, but that’s where I am in my head, I think of Jack Nicholson typing again and again and again “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” and it’s a symbol for writer’s block but of course, it could be a writer’s technique, like this:

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

All work and no perks makes Jack angry

All work and no play makes Jack

All work is a horrible way to spend one’s life, back when I was a salaried office slave, or worse, manual laborer, the thing that depressed me most was that all of that time spent at that job was time out of my life, my time, my allotted 80 with luck or even less, and you don’t get it back, that’s time you spent fulfilling somebody else’s agenda

All work and no play will, all things considered, lead to a more successful life than all play and no work

All of the work that has gone into the construction of the civilization in which we live, the infrastructure and the institutions, the culture, all of it, and the effort that goes into it’s daily maintenance is a hell of a lot of work.  The everyday miracle of the world we live in, planes that fly over oceans, live television, mobile phones, great food served to you by friendly waiters, is all based on human boredom and misery, your waitresses feet hurt, someone had to work in a factory to make that airplane.  Play, on the other hand, has very little downside.

Jack, a dull boy, should play more and work less.  Jack, the layabout, should probably play a bit less and work more.

Work was defined by Mark Twain as “anything you don’t want to do.”  I can live with that.  Writing, at least, is supposed to be more play than work.

But I feel that, as with a highly competitive sport, if you’re not really working to win, then you aren’t playing the game correctly.  And as much as I am a supporter of more play time, for the entire human race, I still want to win the game.

O.K., there’s one blog post in 10 minutes.  On to the next.

Teabag Triangulation

Well, a recent poll showed something interesting, although I will add my own interpretation of events at the end.  The poll showed that Republicans will gain seats against Democrats in November, unless there are Teabaggers in the race, in which case the conservative vote is split because, let’s face it, a Teabagger is just a Republican who is somewhat less hesitant about speaking their mind.  Speaking their empty, little, pathetically warped mind.

It’s perfectly logical, really.  Who did the pollsters think these people would vote for if there were no Teabagger in the race?  A Democrat?  That is, the people they call Demoncraps, Dimmocrats, Dumocrats, Demrats and many other bad things.  The people who they have more than once accused of being Satan incarnate.  I don’t think so.

So, it’s an interesting possibility, and a tempting thing to wish for (think NY 23), but, as the Pussy Cat Dolls have famously said:  Be careful what you wish for or you just might get it.  Which means, I’m torn.

On the one hand, I think we should encourage the teabaggers to run candidates in every district.  I even wrote a little poem to that effect:

Run, Teabaggers, Run!

Your blood is pure, your vision clear

bring back the fife and the drum

Run, Teabaggers, Run!

Break out the tri-corner hats

and your trusty hunting rifle

Run, Teabaggers, Run!

wave your copy of the constitution

in the air like a banner

Restore Pre-existing Conditions!

Bring back the America of fierce individuals

who loved freedom and embraced war

Run, Teabaggers, Run!

Americans support you! You are 25%!

How can you lose?

On the other hand, 25% is a quarter, and that’s a damned scary amount.  I would hate to encourage these ignorant lunatics to get involved, and then see some of them win.  And whenever there is a 3 way race, that is always a possibility.