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January 12^th, 2010

I went to a Karaoke party last night. I had a blast.

I love Karaoke, but I haven’t been for a while.  The pub I know that hosts it regularly caters to a much younger crowd, most of whom do not have to get up in the morning to take their kids to school.  So, they usually start at about 11 and go till  4 or 5 in the morning.

But, last night I decided to go for it and I’m glad I did.  I love Karaoke.  I am not a good singer, by any stretch of the imagination, but there are always some people who are worse, so I don’t feel bad.  There are also some people who are much, much better, so it can be  an exceptional evening for musical entertainment.  Win-win.

There wasn’t as large a crowd as I expected, (maybe because of the snow – the most they’ve had in Prague for 17 years) but that’s O.K.  When there is a large crowd, you get the chance to really play rock star and it is intensely exciting – you will never see me jumping from a bridge with a cord around my ankles, but standing on stage and being watched by hundreds of people really gets the old adrenalin pumping.  When the crowd is smaller, you get to get up and sing more songs, and the chances of meeting and talking to new people is actually better. So, win-win.

First I sang “Under the Boardwalk.”  I love the song, it’s poetic and it’s romantic.  It’s also a lot harder to sing than I thought it would be.

Then, they did a thing called Karaoke Roulette, where you just get up to sing and the moderator chooses the song for you.  In my case, he did a fantastic job.  I sang “Who put the bop in the bop she bop she bop,” and “Yakety Yak.”  Two really fun songs and people got up and started dancing on the 2^nd one.  There’s no bigger compliment than that.

I suspect that he had me pegged more by era than anything else.  That’s O.K.  I wasn’t planning on singing any Kurt Cobain tunes in any event.

Last, I sang a duet with a friend to the old show tune “What a Swell Party This Is.”  I didn’t know it very well so we stumbled through it, but everybody applauded and it was a lot of fun.  Once again, win-win.

January 11^th, 2010

I believe that most people, given the option, would prefer to have a world without poverty, war and environmental degradation.  In fact, I suspect that the percentage of such people who would choose such a world over the one we have now, all other things being equal, is about 98%.

So, why don’t we have such a world?

The technology and resources are there.  We have a bit over 6 billion people on this planet, and there’s no reason why a home can’t be built for every single one of them.  The planet is easily capable of providing enough food for all of them.  3/4ths of the world’s surface is water, and we have the technology to remove the salt from it.

We could have a world of plenty, a global garden of Eden for every human family member to revel in, and we could have it within a year, maybe two.  So, why don’t we?

Well, one reason is that most people don’t really think it’s possible.  They are resigned to the idea that that’s just the way it is, some people were born to be poor, there is always going to be conflict, there aren’t enough resources to go around.  They would choose such a world, they just don’t believe it’s an actual choice.

A bigger problem, though, is that small percentage who actually would not want a world like that.  They prefer a world of poverty, war and environmental degradation because it’s one in which they have wealth and power.  The world doesn’t look so bad when you are eating lobster at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the marina where your yacht is moored.  Wars are things they read about in the newspapers, and on which they make money.  The environment just gets in the way.

So, how does this 2% keep control over the 98% of the world who would like a better existence?  Ruthlessness.

They may be only a small percentage of the population, but they are the bosses of the corporations, they are the heads of government and the leaders of political parties, they are the publishers of newpapers and the heads of studios, they are the ones who call the shots.  The same personality characteristic which got them to where they are is the same personality characteristic which pretty much guarantees that they will piss down the neck of anybody below them.

I am optimistic that some day our superior numbers will overwhelm them and a world of peace, harmony, prosperity, wine and music will grow up from the grassroots, and all of the bad stuff will just fade away.  I hope that that someday will be within my lifetime.

Home of the Willie Wants to be a Writer Project

“A Blog a Day, a Book a Month and Poetry on the Side”

January 9^th, 2010

Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood is a moron.

Last week Bakersfield airport was temporarily shut down when a passenger was caught trying to go through security with a “suspicious substance.”  The substance turned out to be homemade honey which the passenger, a gardener, was taking home to relatives as a gift.  Instead of giving it a quick taste and saying  “mmm, honey,” airport officials had it chemically analyzed and two of them said they were “sickened” by the smell.  They were taken to the hospital and immediately released by doctors who probably thought “get out of here, you paranoid hypochondriacs.”

However, even after it was proved that the substance in the jars was honey and that the passenger was, in fact, a legal resident of the U.S. (his last name is Ramirez – extremely suspicious), Sheriff Youngblood tried to blame the airport’s closure on the passenger.  “Why, in this day and age, would someone take a chance carrying honey in Gatorade bottles?  That in itself is an alarm.  It’s hard to understand.”  Let us examine those sentences one at a time.

1. Why Gatorade bottles?  Why not?  What does Sheriff Youngblood have against Gatorade?  Should Ramirez have printed up labels that said “Homemade Honey – Contains No Explosives?” Would Youngblood have been happier if the bottles had previously contained ketchup or laundry detergent?

2. That in itself is an alarm.  No, it’s not.

3. It’s hard to understand.  Only because you are a moron.

That, unfortunately, was not the only incident last week where airport security freaked out and caused needless delays.

At Newark airport, a man who was trying to get into the departure area to say good-bye to his girlfriend ducked out of line while the guard was away for a moment, and walked on through.   He was not a terrorist.  He was not even a passenger.

Nonetheless, airport authorities closed the terminal for 7 hours, rerouting numerous flights, causing delays for hundreds of passengers and costing the airlines huge amounts of money.  The non-passenger, a Chinese graduate student at Rutgers University, has been arrested.

At Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, whose toilet was made famous by Idaho Senator Larry Craig, a sniffer dog determined that one bag was suspicious.  The odd part is, it didn’t belong to a passenger at all.  It was a bag that airline employees used as a marker, a signal to other employees that all the bags from a flight had been unloaded.  With no passenger to blame, this one hasn’t been in the news as much.

One more great quote from Sheriff Youngblood.  “It could be honey.  It could be honey mixed with something else.”  I wonder if Sheriff Youngblood has ever read Winnie the Pooh.

Home of the Willie Wants to be a Writer Project

“A Blog a Day, a Book a Month and Poetry on the Side”

January 8^th, 2010

Once, you can say it was a mistake, a misstatement, a slip of the lip, it didn’t come out as I intended.  It happens to everybody, now and again.  Twice, maybe.  But three times makes it a lie.  A bold faced, up front, in your face lie.

Now, admittedly, these 3 statements came from 3 different people but they are all of the same political party, the statements came in rapid-fire succession and all three were on TV at the time the lie was spoken, so its logical to assume that the the lie was coordinated, that they were speaking with one voice.

Also, the lie is so bizarre, so totally disconnected from the truth, and so huge that I doubt if Dana Perino could have thought it up all by her lonesome.

Here’s the situation:  Dana Perino, who was W’s press secretary, Mary Matalin, veteran Republican strategist and half of the world’s weirdest marriage, and Rudy Giuliani, who based his entire presidential campaign on the fact that he was mayor of New York City on September 11^th, 2001, have all said recently that THERE WERE NO TERRORIST ATTACKS IN THE UNITED STATES DURING THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION.

Perino was the first.  While being interviewed on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News on November 24^th she said “We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.”  Hannity did not correct her.

Next was Matalin, on December 28^th.  While being interviewed by CNN’s John King she said “We inherited a recession from President Clinton and we inherited the most tragic attack on our own soil in our nation’s history.”  John King did not challenge her, even though the recession claim was a lie as well.

Giuliani was being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos, who was to Clinton what Perino was to Bush and is currently aiming for the title of “Worst Journalist Ever,” when he said “We had no domestic attacks under Bush.”  Stephanopoulos did not correct him, or challenge him.  He did, later, on his blog, say the Giuliani “seemed to have forgotten” the events of 9/11.  Still, he accepted the lie in public and apologized to the public privately.  There are very few people in this world who I respect less than George Stephanopoulos.

I used to wonder how low the right wing could go before people would realize what liars and hypocrites they are.  Now I suspect, unfortunately, that there is no bottom.  Their dishonesty is infinite.

Home of the Willie Wants to be a Writer Project

“A Blog a Day, a Book a Month and Poetry on the Side”

January 5^th, 2010

Aquariums are great.

They might not be so great if you are a fish, I suppose.  They say that fish are so mindless and have such a poor memory that every time they circle the fishbowl, they think it is the first time.  They see the same fake castle and the same plastic diver again and again and they think it’s a new one each time.  I’m not quite sure I buy that.  First off, I don’t know how they tested it.

But I’m guessing that, as long as they have food to eat and freedom to move, albeit in a constricted sense, they don’t feel a deep, ancestral longing for the vast, non-glass bordered ocean.

I am not a sentimental animal rights type.  I like animals.  I appreciate them and think they shouldn’t be treated cruelly,  but I eat them and wear the processed skin of their dead bodies to hold my pants up and keep my feet from getting dirty.  And I have a fish tank.  Aquarium is a nicer word, but it isn’t a really big one.  It’s bigger than a fish bowl, though, and rectangular.  So, it’s a fish tank.

I got one because I felt the classroom needed a little bit more color and I thought it would make a good conversation piece.  It didn’t really.  The more advanced students could easily say “You really should change the water in that” and most of the complete beginners, even, could say “water bad!” but it never led to probing conversations about the lives of fish and fantasies of living in a kingdom under the sea where everyone can swim elegantly through the water as easily and confidently as birds fly through the air.

We don’t all percieve things in the same way.  I see an aquatic eco-system as something to look at for inspiration.  It is a bit like lines in the sandbox in a Zen monastery, or the Tarot cards, or the laundry tumbling around in the washing machine, or the waves rolling in at the beach.  It is always the same, but every time you look, you see something different.  The world is as steady as a rock, it is our minds that keep changing.

Most people, however, I expect, look at an aquarium and think “Hmm…a fish tank.  There is the fake castle.  There is the plastic diver.  I have seen this many times before.”

This proves two things.

1. People are smarter than fish.
2. Not by very much.