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After living in a city a long time you get used to the touristy stuff, all the amazing old buildings are nothing new, and you start to relax into a routine as if it were a favorite armchair.

So, I hang out mostly at home in my Prague 8 Panalaček, venturing out to Vinohrady twice a day, to drop Sam off at school and then to pick him up, and occasionally out to someplace where he’s playing football (yesterday was kind of cool.  The field was actually at the edge of town, you looked out and you saw hills and fields), but for the most there are huge regions of Prague that I go long periods of time without seeing.

I almost never cross the river, for instance, and there’s an amazing array of cool places on the other side of the river:  Letna and Stromovka, the Castle, Malostrana and Kampa Island, Petřin Hill and more.  It’s just that nothing in my daily routine pulls me in that direction.

(the path you are on is the way your feet are pointing

The level is the face of the earth

The point you are at is a moment in time

The goal is whatever you choose – Kalehuru)

So, this morning  I had to go to Nusle, near Bratři Synku, to pick up some Duplo toys my wife ordered online.  I lived in that neighborhood for a couple of months, right at the turn of the millennium, but I hadn’t been there for a long time.

It’s a typical Prague neighborhood.  Prague 4 town hall would be a major tourist site, an outstanding monument of beauty in a lesser city.  And, after having completed my mission and gotten on a bus, we drove past quite a lovely floral display on a green lawn in an ordinary park, and I thought “well, it’s nice to pass this way, because I wouldn’t have seen that.”

Then I got off the bus at Pankrac and there’s a huge mall there, which has been there for a few years I think but I’ve never been there.

By that point, though, I was running late and headed down into the Metro and back to the known routine.  Doesn’t matter.  Malls are pretty much all the same.

Certainly, I understand the moral argument of vegetarians.  McCartney’s looking from the sheep in the fields to the sheep on his plate and having a satori, I get that.  But I still eat meat.

Perhaps that’s because I’m weak willed and hypocritical, someone who basically lets my life be guided by what’s easy and comfortable.

Perhaps.  But even though the main reason I eat meat is because I like the taste of meat, I have my rationalizations, like “if God didn’t mean for us to eat other animals, why are they made out of meat? ”, we’re at the top of the food chain, animals eat each other, and so on.

Perhaps some day the human race will be so enlightened that people won’t want to eat cows or pigs or chickens any more than most Westerners today would want to eat a dog or a cat, or even a rat for that matter.  If they do, though, there is a secondary ethical dilemma they will have to solve first.

What do you do with all of the cows, pigs and chickens?  No farmer is going to keep large numbers of them if not for profit.  Maybe one or two as family pets, which is a form of slavery.

If the bulls , boars and cocks are all neutered to reduce the herds, isn’t that a form of genocide?

If they are all turned loose to roam the no longer existent prairie, their numbers will increase until something bad happens.  They could wind up competing with humans for the available plant resources of the planet.  Can the earth sustain 20 billion cows?  200 billion?

Or, as their numbers start to grow, due to the fact that we aren’t consuming millions of them at KFC, could the chickens start to die from some horrible virus, which then spreads through the human population, causing panic.  Yes, that has already happened, but it could be a whole hell of a lot worse, after the chicken population explosion.

And pigs.  Yes, they are cute in cartoons, and I’m told that individually, they make interesting pets.  But they are shitty, smelly animals and they eat like pigs, which means anything they can get their vicious little snouts around, quickly and loudly.  If there were large herds of them roaming the Midwest unsupervised, it’s lock the kids in the house time.

No, I really think it’s for the good of the planet, the human race and human civilization that we continue eating animals.

This morning, while changing trains at Mustek (Isabel hates it when I refer to the Metro as a train…corrects me every time) I saw something that made me happy.  Garbage cans.  Big, heavy, sparkling, brand new garbage cans.

There are three reasons this filled my heart with joy. One is, of course, that it gives me a place to throw the used tissues and candy wrappers which inevitably accumulate in my pockets.  Second is that litter is one of my pet peeves, it really irritates the hell out of me.  Of course, garbage cans are only part of the solution.  You very often see litter within inches of a rubbish bin, because some people really couldn’t care less.  There is a piece of graffiti I see whenever I take bus #135 between Churchill Square and Masarykovo station that says “We don’t want clean city”.  These are apparently the same people who don’t want correct grammar in English, but they exist and we have to deal with them.

When I was in Kuala Lumpur, before it turned into the vacation from hell, I was quite impressed with how clean the sidewalks were kept.  Part of it was that there were rubbish bins on absolutely every corner.  I suspect that another side of it was heavy fines and maybe worse, but I’m sure the rubbish bins helped.

And the rubbish bins are something that every municipality could provide, at a minimum cost.  They are not high tech, they don’t wear out quickly and they can even double as advertising space, if you like.

The 3^rd reason, though, has to do with why the garbage cans were removed from the Metro in the first place.  It was in the worldwide wave of mass hysteria after the World Trade Center towers collapsed in NY, (yes, I think it was an inside job) way back in 2001.

Maybe, after 10 years of acting like scared rabbits, we can finally forget about 9/11 and move forward.

It’s political season in Prague, and candidates’ posters are all over the place.  Now, I don’t take a big interest in Czech politics, which may be a bit ironic, seeing as how I’m so obsessed with American politics.

I’ve chosen to live here.  It’s a great country.  But I’ve been here 12 years and don’t know the difference between the ODS and the CSSD.  In the U.S., I know more about politicians than most sports fans know about their favorite players.  Commenting on political web sites is like a role playing game to me.  I’m not building up a farm or trying to acquire an invisibility cloak, but I love it when people respond to a comment I’ve made.

But one thing is true in both countries.  Politician’s signs, from the handbills they plaster on walls and poles, to the billboards and the yard signs (that’s an American thing.  If anybody actually put a sign in their yard or window here to support a particular candidate, their neighbors would think they were nuts.  Seriously.) don’t give any real information.  Just a name, a picture and, maximum, a slogan.  What I don’t understand is why they seem to think their picture is so important?  If the candidate is particularly attractive, I suppose there’s a point.  I remember one girl who said she was supporting John Edwards because she thought he was cute.  That was a long time ago.  Certainly, Sarah Palin got a few votes based on her looks, and JFK would never have been president if he hadn’t been significantly better looking than his opponent.

But why would unattractive people put their pictures on their advertisements?  Why not some kind of graphic which illustrates their policies, or a picture of puppies playing on the lawn, flowers in the garden, unicorns and rainbows?

I saw one in particular the other day.  I laughed out loud when I saw it, but my wife was talking to the kids in Czech and, as long as I was carrying the groceries, nobody was particularly interested in my opinion.  It had the man’s picture (I can’t remember the man’s name or party) and something about ending corruption.

He just looked like the most corrupt son of a bitch you’ve ever seen in your life.

For her birthday, my wife got a large framed photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge at sunrise.  Of course, it went straight up on the living room wall and it has to stay there.  I certainly don’t want to cause any trouble with the in-laws and we did need something in that spot.  But good lord it is just about the ugliest work of art I have ever seen in my life.  (for the purposes of this essay, at least, I am defining as anything inside a frame)

First of all, it is beyond my understanding how anyone can consider New York a beautiful city.  Interesting, fascinating, vibrant, impressive, awe-inspiring or amazing I can understand, but not beautiful.  There is nothing inherently aesthetically pleasing about a skyscraper and, outside of the skyscraper neighborhoods,  New York is composed of block after block of old, crumbling ugly brick buildings which are still standing only because they are too close together to fall down.   The streets are full of potholes, the sidewalks are strewn with garbage, there are homeless people everywhere and homeless people tend to be very unattractive.

Yes, I have heard many people say that the most beautiful women in the world live in New York City, but you don’t see them riding on the subway.  The actors and actresses who live in fancy penthouses and drive around the city in limousines barely count. Also, New York is a city of 10 million people.  If there weren’t a handful of them who were stunningly gorgeous, it would be surprising.

If you’re rating cities on the proportion of their female population that is stunningly gorgeous, Prague has New York City beat all to hell.

So, as I type this, I look at downtown Manhattan through the wires and beams and towers that make up the top level of the Brooklyn Bridge.  And I’m just glad I’m not there.