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I’m not sure exactly how gay Eric Massa is (pretty darned gay, though, it would seem) and the  politics of his situation are confusing even to a political junkie like myself, but he sure is a class A dumbass and, as such, it’s good that he’s gone.

O.K., so he eventually admits (when he knows it’s going to come out anyway) that he made a suggestive and inappropriate comment to a male member of his stuff, while drunk.  Sorry, Eric.  The “it was the alcohol talkin” defense doesn’t work in the court of public opinion, in vino veritas and all that, and everybody who read the account understood clearly that if the staffer had followed you back to your room, instead of reporting you for sexual harrassment, you would have gladly fucked him.  Or whatever else it is that you enjoy doing with other men.

Then, he claims that he’s being forced out because he’s not co-operating with Obama on health care.  That’s actually believable, and it might have made a difference if he’d made the statement before his inner gayness became a national joke.  The image of Rahm Emmanuel, naked, poking him with a finger while they were both in the shower, is a little bit hard to digest without being reminded of his gayness.  If it’s true, I salute the Obama team on their decision to play hardball.

On the other hand, according to the New York Times (admittedly, not always a reliable source) he was an advocate of single payer which would mean, in my view at least, that he was opposing the current health care plan for the right reasons.

Still, a dumbass.

He thought he was going to defuse the situation with a bit of a sitdown on Glenn Becks’s program and that might have worked if he hadn’t said a whole bunch more stuff that was comically gay.  He said there was nothing sexual, but there was this one time him and a bunch of the guys, at his 50^th birthday party, had a tickle fight.  Adults.  His failure to realize how gay that sounds puts him in the Michael Jackson category of detached from the standard social norms.

Also, it was in a house that he shared with 5 male members of his staff.  He said he had to do that because the rents in D.C. were so high.

A U.S. congressman gets $174,000 a year, plus plenty of perks including comprehensive health care.  Did he think nobody would look that up?

I’m sure rents in D.C. are too high, and $174,000 is not exactly bank CEO level wealthy, but it ain’t bad and there are a whole lot of people in D.C. living on a lot less, with fewer than 5 roommates.

A dumbass, and an insulting dumbass at that.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats

Outside of the glimmer of a possibility that Donald Rumsfeld may, however belatedly, finally face trial, it’s a pretty slow news weekend.  So, as I was meandering through the pages of the Huffington Post, I made short work of the home and politics pages and began looking for something else to read.

So I turned to the Green Page.  There is an article there about an extremely ambitious project of the tiny country of The Maldive Islands.  It’s one of the smallest countries on Earth, set on a group of coral islands off the coast of Sri Lanka.  About two hundred of its islands are inhabited.  The total population is under half a million people and about a 3^rd of them live on the capital island of Male.

It’s also the lowest country on Earth, most of it being less than a meter above sea level.  If the ocean levels rise as much as many scientist predict, the entire country will be erased from the face of the Earth, swallowed by Poseidon, gone.

So, where will the people go?  The project in the article, a cooperation between the Maldivian government and a Dutch architect, is for a series of floating islands, big enough to have ponds, golf courses, swimming pools, homes, docks, beaches, small towns.  The pictures look beautiful but, of course, an artists rendition of a planned construction always does.

I’ve been fascinated with the idea of floating islands since the 1^st time I read about them, maybe a couple of years ago, and every time I check back in on the subject the projects seem to be a little more definite, and a little bit more ambitious.  This project is extremely ambitious.  If each of the islands is designed for a population of 5,000 – which is possible, large cruise ships hold about that – they still need to build about 80 of them to hold the 400,000 people who now call the Maldives home.

They could maintain their two largest industries, which are fishing and tourism.

Although it is a new concept, and undoubtedly will run into snags which nobody has foreseen, if it is successful it will become a model for new and improved versions off the coasts of all the world.

It won’t solve the problem of global warming.  But it may be a way of adapting to it.

I’m sick of the snow.  It has been a long, hard winter and of course it had some beautiful moments.  The world covered in white is pretty, and evokes thoughts of purity, calm, timelessness and all that good stuff.  I got a couple of good poems out of it.

But, as the cycle of melt and freeze continued, we wound up with patches of slick ice, snow drifts covered in dirt and little rocks, and even the long expanses of pristine white were dotted with dog turds, because a lot of people seemed to think they had a pass, a moratorium from cleaning up after their dogs for the duration of the snow.

Then, it all finally melted away and I rejoiced.  2 days ago it was completely gone and I was wondering how long it would be until the first green buds appeared on the trees and the first dandelions would poke up from the ground.

Then the snow came back.  The first snow of the season is always beautiful, surprising, even inspirational.  This snow after it was supposed to be all gone is just irritating.  It’s like the bad guy who is supposed to be dead in all of the action adventure movies who suddenly jumps up with a knife and needs to be killed all over again.  It’s like the little kids in the back seat who ask the same stupid question over and over and over again.  It’s like a bad cold that won’t go away.  Unless you are a die-hard winter sports fanatic, there is nothing at all even slightly pleasant about an unexpected spring snow.

I comfort myself with the thought that it is early in March, the month which is entitled to come in like a lion but which, ancient wisdom assures us, must go out like a lamb.  This snow will not last as long as the last lot.  On the first seriously warm day (perhaps today, the sky is blue and I can already see a bit of melting) it will be gone.  Within a week or two, we will see hard buds with a slice of green at the edge, as promising as a slit skirt, appearing on the trees and bushes.  Within a week or two of that, the lawns will be covered by dandelions.

Of course, my predictions with regard to the weather should be considered with the same grain of salt as my political predictions, and for the same reason:  my track record is well under 100%.

Still, I am optimistic.  Summer in this green and fertile land of forests, lakes and rivers is exceptionally pretty and pleasant.  I’m predicting serious springiness within 3 weeks.  If it takes 5 or 6 weeks, no matter.  It’s still coming.

Another One Bites The Dust

John Patrick Bedell is dead.  That is almost undoubtedly a good thing.

He was the man who walked up to a security checkpoint at the Pentagon the other day, pulled a gun and shot 2 police officers (both are expected to recover completely from their wounds).

My suspicion is it was a suicide.  There is plenty of evidence that the man was delusional, but I doubt that anybody is so completely delusional that they think they are going to invade the nerve center of the largest military organization the world has ever seen with a handgun and win.

The thing that bothers me about this is that Bedell and I share some of the same viewpoints.  He was an ardent advocate for the legalization of marijuana.  So am I.  I would like to point out, at this juncture, that the vast majority of marijuana smokers are peaceful folks.  Probably even more so than the general population.  Bedell was an exception among smokers.

Also, Bedell believed that 9/11 was an inside job.  So do I, and it bothers me that this will just be used as further evidence that anybody who believes the 9/11 was an inside job is nuts.  I’m not nuts.  I have very good reasons for believing it was an inside job, but no intention whatsoever of invading a federal building with a gun.

Apparently, he once wrote a grant request for a project which would merge DNA with microchips.  It’s actually a great plot for a science fiction story and I’ve often wondered at what point in the future of mankind that will become a reality.  Like nuclear power or heavier than air flight, it will be a two edged sword.  It could hold mankind’s salvation or our destruction, be an incredible tool for good or agent for evil.  It’s going to happen.  The brain, the human body and the cells that make it up are physical entities.  They can be analyzed and, eventually, replicated.

But it’s not going to happen in the near future.  We are getting better and better at mapping the brain and computer technology is advancing at a rapid pace, but the merging of the two is still as much a fantasy as manned interstellar flight.

J. Patrick Bedell will certainly never live to see it.  Good riddance, Mr. Bedell.  We may have agreed on a couple of points, but the world is a better place without you in it.

The Evil Weed

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love marijuana.  I’ve been smoking it since my teens and I’m 55 now so it has formed, to a great extent, my view of the world and has become, to a great extent, part of what I am.  I love the feeling it gives me and I love the social milieu in which it is consumed.

But I’ll admit that it does make me lazy.  Yesterday I had all sorts of plans.  I had things I wanted to write, a couple of posts here, a couple of poems the ideas for which I’ve had kicking around in my head for awhile (the “Beautiful Women” series of haikus I’ve been thinking about for months now), I was going to clean the flat, even redecorate a bit, mostly because the place is just too damned cluttered (I’m a bit of a packrat but my wife is 10x worse) and some other stuff, but I was out of pot and it seemed a good time to go get some.

The wife and kids are out of town, so I had plenty of time.  I met my friend at a café which I’d never been to before, talked to an expat from Sarajevo who has been here for a long time (“I left as soon as they started shooting”), a really cute Czech woman with kids a bit older than mine, a couple of students from Korea and a friend who is writing a book to teach people English using the great number of cognates between the two languages, which he is listing by going through the dictionary with a highlighter – he’s up to the middle of the D’s and he’s been at it awhile, there really are quite a lot of them despite being out different branches of the linguistic tree.  Prague is just like that.  Interesting people all over the place.

Then I came home and smoked my brains out.  I started watching Mythbusters, the episode where they put a couple of dead pig carcasses in a car to see if they can get rid of the smell later.  Before I knew it, and 4 episodes of House later, (I really don’t know why they do that.  Surely, anybody who is not high would reach for the remote long before that.  Perhaps they are banking on lots of people being semi-comatose while viewing) it was 1:30 in the morning.  I wasn’t particularly tired, but there wasn’t any point in staying up any longer.

So, nothing got done.  Today, my resolution is to not smoke before noon, or before I’ve cleaned the house, whichever comes first.

It’s not a terribly strong resolution, though.