Can there be us, if I can’t see what you see, and you don’t hear what I hear, and you fear what might be, while I strive for what could be, and you worry about what could be, while I worry about what might be, and we can’t understand what the other understands, and the present and the past are broken mirrors of success and failure?
Amazing News
You read the news today? Sure, what news, which news, right? Sorry.
History was made when a woman breastfed in Parliament. This happened in Australia. The woman who made this news is Senator Larissa Waters. She didn’t breastfeed another senator, but a baby, her daughter, Alia.
I’m amazed that this is news. I think breastfeeding has been around for over fifty years. I know breasts on women have been around at least that long. I’m sixty years old, and I distinctly remember seeing them on women when I was a teenager.
I guess this is news because breast-feeding is finally coming out of the closet in Australia. Actually, reading the article, it seems like it’s news because children were not previously authorized to be in Parliament. That makes sense; if Aussie politicians are like American politicians, that was probably because they’re afraid that children will outshine them in just about every aspect from speaking and making sense to manners, courtesy and intelligence.
Whatever the reason for the celebration, it’s good to see we’re finally making progress. It’s been finally acknowledged with books that ‘Everyone Poops’. That had also apparently been a secret. Soon, we’ll find out that people masturbate and fart, too.
About damn time. Let me know when someone breaks wind in Parliament in Australia.
The Beer Group
The beer group met last night, and I attended. Naturally, conversations rotated around weather, movies, literature, science, Trump and murder.
The murder is the worse topic of the moment. A twelve-year-old boy, Zeke, stabbed his fifty-two-year-old Mother to death and injured his older sister. We were asking why this happened. Three of the beerites personally know the family. Zeke was a loner, without many friends. The family seemed well off, living in a 4,000 square foot home in a good location. They’d just moved in in 2015.
The father was away. He flew home to this situation yesterday afternoon, his wife in the morgue, killed by his son, his son in a juvenile lock-up, and his daughter in the hospital, injured by his son.
Returning to more comfortable topics, several members told of bad weather experiences, sliding off roads, breaking axles, encountering abandoned vehicles, having chains snap. Then it was to the movies, where nobody save me has seen anything recently except ‘Rogue One’.
That was astonishing; ‘Fences’ was a play here last year and several went to see it. It was mildly surprising to learn they didn’t see the movie. I’d seen the movie and was eager to discuss and the rest. A few were talking about going to see ‘La La Land’ because of the Golden Globe Awards won. None had seen ‘Manchester by the Sea’, ‘Loving’, ‘Moonlight’, ‘Florence Foster Jenkins’. Two others had seen ‘Arrival’. Most surprising was that none had seen ‘Hidden Figures’. Several of them were engineers in the space program in 1962 and were working on the problems highlighted in the movie. I’d think they’d want to see how the era was portrayed, if nothing else.
But no; they waxed on about different problems and the creative solutions found for them, and the challenges of new math, or of coping with the complexities of shifting variables very quickly and things never experienced before.
TRump, of course, was villified. Not all were Hillary supporters, but none present can stand TRump. With head-shaking and angry voices, we talked about his press conference, the urine leaks, the Conway interview with Seth Meyers, the recall of the ambassadors, and his plan to turn his finances over to family members.
Ed, celebrating his eighty-fourth year, bought the beer and pizza. The rest of us donated twenty dollars to the cause of supporting STEM in school and after-school activities in local poor and under-privileged areas.
The establishment was still offering that porter that we all detest, and will continue offering it until the keg is gone. Fortunately, we endured with some local Ashland Amber and Ninkasi’s Total Domination IPA. It was a good evening in the warmth of friendship, and a pleasant way to whittle off a few hours of life.
Today’s Theme Music
Well, hello. Here we are. At the end, the beginning, a break, a start, a finale.
This is New Year’s Eve day. Tonight we’ll count down to a new year.
I mean, most of the western world will count down. Others use different calendars and count down at another time of the year. And we’re only counting down to the end of the Julian calendar year, and not, say, the fiscal year, although some use the calendar year and the fiscal year as the same year. It’s not likely to be your natal year, though. So you won’t be celebrating that new year, nor a wedding anniversary, which is another new beginning that’s often celebrated.
But here we are, celebrating this day that doesn’t quite align with the seasons,businesses, or our lives, but here we are, the masters of our domain.
For this day, I selected a soft, questioning song. ‘The Freshman’ by the Verve Pipe from 1996. It encapsulates a lot of thinking about human nature IMO. Perhaps I’m generalizing by my circle of relationships but this is what I’ll testify that I saw. We began by thinking we knew so much. Then later, we question, what did we really know?
How did we miss the signs?
How could we end up so wrong?
We end up marveling about how we came to be the relationship that we are or were, conducting forensics on our behavior and running audit trails on what was said and who said it. We look for clarity in the murk about what was meant by tone and meaning in the context of gestures that happened before and after.
Some are content to never question. “It is what it is,” they answer with tautological finality. “Ours is not to question why; ours is but to do and die.”
“That’s just the way it goes.”
Perhaps they question but never admit that they question, or limit the circle of who knows about their questioning. Some consider that questioning is a sign of weakness.
They don’t want to be seen as weak.
I’ve always been the questioning sort. I guess that makes me weak. I’m envious of those who find a trajectory of ignorance and remain true to its path, never veering or questioning but riding that comet with the certainty that they have the golden truth, convinced that nothing else other than what they believe can be true or correct.
But I remain a freshman.
A Bullshit Free Day
I’d like to declare a national day free of bullshit. We can call it National No Bullshit Day. NNBD. Although bullshit is spelled as one word, some call it as BS, or more colloquially, B.S.. So we could do NNBSD. Naturally, I like my idea better. We can have shirts and tee shirts, and raise money, or some other bullshit.
You know BS when you hear it and you call it by your expression. Mularky. Bull. Bullshit. B.S. Garbage. Crap.
We were used to it in the military. Bullshit inundated us, which, if you think about it, which I try not to do, is actually a lot of B.S. We had our bullshit meters. Hearing something that we knew as bullshit, we’d say, in a sort of laconic way, “That just pegged my bullshit meter.” That statement meant that the needle went all the way to the right. Another expression used was, “That buried the needle on my bullshit meter.” Buried the needle was an old expression referencing tachometers and opening throttles to the point where the needles entered the red zone or went as far as it could. Of course, the ultimate bullshit expression was, “My bullshit meter just broke.”
Most bullshit meters used to go to ten. Mine, of course, went to eleven. It was the Spinal Tap Special. (rim shot)
I suppose, in this precise digital age, that bullshit meters are way more accurate. They’re probably on a scale of one to a thousand, enabling the ability to assign a more accurate bullshit value to a given statement, action or news. There are probably apps that can be downloaded and installed on your smart phones, iPhones, iPads and tablets. Being sixty, I don’t need a bullshit meter, and will tell you, with a sniff, “I don’t need a meter to tell me when something’s bullshit. I’ve experienced enough bullshit to know bullshit when bullshit is around.”
But many naive and gullibles do not recognize bullshit. They believe you can get something for nothing. I, of course, believe that’s bullshit. Of course, the problem with bullshit is, once it’s in your system, you can’t get it out, debilitating your immunity to bullshit. You soon can’t even detect it.
Still, there times when my bullshit meter gets broke. For example, when a car manufacturer, like Ford, declares they’ve completely re-invented a car, I think, that’s bullshit.
When they announced literally no longer means literally, I shook my head and said, “What bullshit.”
When I see the price of my quad shot mocha is five dollars, I think, that’s outrageous bullshit, even though it’s not, really. Bullshit often depends upon your frame of reference. I have some years behind me so my frame of reference has gotten pretty damn big. First, I would tell you, “Nobody sold mochas when I was a kid. We didn’t have a Starbucks or coffee house on every corner. Coffee houses were part of the beat generation. Only artists and poets went there, not people.”
And then I will tell you, “I remember when a cup of coffee cost less than a dollar.” Someone with a bigger frame of reference will naturally top that and declare, “I remember when it cost ten cents a cup,” and another will say, “I remember when it was free.” I’m not sure if coffee was ever free, so that moves my old bullshit meter needle a little bit, but that’s okay, because they’re old, and it’s honest bullshit.
The Internet doesn’t help. I mean, come on, there is so much bullshit on it that it seems possible that the bullshit will take it down. Which would be a pretty good news lead: “In today’s top story, bullshit broke the worldwide web. More coming up, after this word from your sponsors.” Which is bullshit in its own right, to need to wait to hear about this important news until you’ve heard someone try to sell you something.
I may be showing my age there.
You’d think some tech company could design an application that not only detects bullshit but blocks it, just as intrusion detection and prevention software works. Then, as you’re downloading a page, a little popup arrives on your screen and says, “Warning. Bullshit was detected and blocked.”
We could even assign the bullshit levels of threat: faint, mild, average, serious, dangerous, and OMGWTF infuriating.
I dream of a time when television commercials could contain the disclaimer, “This commercial contains no bullshit,” and you can sit back and listen and know, you’re not hearing any bullshit. Because if they were spreading bullshit when they made the commercial, some great Bullshit God would zap them with a laser and declare in a thunderous voice, “No bullshit allowed. Not on my watch.”
But, yes, that’s a fantasy. For now, I’ll dream of a bullshit free day, or even just, like an hour when I don’t read something and say to the cats, “Can you believe this bullshit?”
I don’t think it’s going to be until after November 8th.
What I’m Following
I try to follow the news and escape the echo chambers. Demoralizing as so many American newspapers essentially offer the same take on every story. So vanilla. Meanwhile, columnists along the political spectrum are generally predictable about what they’ll claim, reducing their value. I like jumping out of the US and checking the news on BBC America, and British, Canadian and Australian newspapers for coverage of American events. I still dance through WaPo, SFGate, NYTimes, Boston.com, Forbes and a few others on a regular daily/weekly basis.
I’m following theSkimm because a friend recommended it. They read so I can skim. I wanted to see how they read and interpret.
Longreads take me into places I wouldn’t otherwise know. Longreads offer compelling, vivid stories. They take a lot of time to read. Yes, I read the Nation, the Atlantic, and Rolling Stone, which also have long articles. Oi.
Haven’t seen anything on theSkimm or Longreads about Lionel Shriver’s opening address at the Brisbane Writers Festival regarding cultural appropriation, but there’s an eruption of blog posts, newspaper columns and editorials about the complex, challenging situation. Wow.
Trying to drift into a different direction, I’ve been checking out Merry Jane’s website. Marijuana is morphing into a large and legitimate business in Oregon, with signs like ‘Exit here for the BEST marijuana’ emerging alongside Interstate 5, right beside signs claiming to have the world’s BEST pie.
I delve into Pinterest, FB and Instagram to see what’s bouncing around those places. I still check Flipboard and BillMoyers daily, and read an overabundance of writing blogs and newsletters, along with Wired, Popular Mechanics, the Smithsonian, Union of Concerned Scientists, Delancey Place and EPI when their newsletters arrive.
What are you reading out there? You have any sites that you recommend?
