Donald Trump wins

Across the street this morning, the toddler wails. He is immune in his sorrow to his grandfather's words:

"Stop crying! Listen to me! Stop crying!" He says this in the desperation that any who are or have been parents would know. The wailing cuts through the air and into the guts. "Stop crying."

But the toddler has no words to compass and control his sorrows. He cries and cries.

Last night Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 presidential race. He beat out Hillary Clinton, a woman thought by many to be the odds-on favorite to become the first woman president and, more centrally, the president. The effect among those like me who thought Clinton would win was as if the oxygen had been sucked out of the oxygen. Trump, the sociopath and bully and man of no certifiable policies -- the insulter of women and minorities ... the man who wanted to W-I-N ... had won.

My wife said she heard a report that Canada's immigration page was overwhelmed on the Internet and had crashed in the wake of the Trump victory.

But the body blow will be absorbed. What happens when those who long for victory actually win? One of the things is that bureaucracy kicks in: It's easy to assail and promise, but the particulars are always as glue-y as bubble gum. Will Trump be able to re-enfranchise those who have felt disenfranchised? Trump has the White House (executive) and the Congress (legislative) (if I've got it right) and ... OK, show me what you've got.

Christine Lagarde, the chair of the International Monetary Fund, said in a recent report that if economics proceeded along their current trajectories, there would be a growth in a "new mediocrity." The once great United States of America ... mediocre and, with principles sagging, more dictatorial.

As for today, it has been quite a kick in the chops.

PPS. And then there was the making of the First Family.

Eleanor Roosevelt

Jacqueline Kennedy

Melania Trump

election day

A crispy-crackly-blue-sky-cool Election Day here on the New England East Coast of the United States. Early voting, absentee and otherwise, has put the palpable lie to the idea that election day should be held on a Tuesday, a day that relates to the landed gentry for whom one day is much like the well-heeled next.

Unless I am alone, there is a sense of walking of egg shells about the contest between Donald Trump, the flamboyant real estate mogul who corrupts the truth with an impunity that would do a mafia don proud, and one-time secretary of state Hillary Clinton, whose fingerprints are all over the good ol' boy network the electorate hopes to mitigate. It has been a long slog with singularly little content attending on the bombast. People are depressed and crabby and yet don't want to make things any worse ... so keep your mouth shut, vote for whom you please and perhaps we can put this bad dream behind us. If the United States stands for anything, it is hardly a beacon of light. Too many people in too many ways feel that they have been somehow left out or left behind.

I voted early so there is simply the rest of the day to get through. Will things be more settled once the day has passed? I doubt it, and that is perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the whole matter. Race, gender, flamboyant lies, crisp spin, environment, poverty, war, education, healthcare, hunger ... the list rolls on and on and in each appearance, the candidates are well-dressed and assured, but what they are assured of doesn't convince many.

It's ick, but with luck the bombast will abate a bit come Wednesday.

PS.

"I don't do spin"

[AP] Janet Reno, the first woman to serve as US attorney-general and the epicentre of several political storms during the Clinton administration, has died. She was 78.

Reno died early on Monday from complications of Parkinson’s disease. She spent her final days at home in Miami surrounded by family and friends, her goddaughter Gabrielle D’Alemberte said.
A former Miami prosecutor who famously told reporters “I don’t do spin,” Reno served nearly eight years as attorney general under President Bill Clinton, the longest stint in a century.

A big, horsy woman dripping integrity you might not agree with but couldn't deny.

Can I take my vote back and vote for her?

"karoshi" -- death by overwork

As the saying goes, "No one ever lay on his deathbed saying, 'Gee, I wish I had spent more time in the office.'"

Those who mark their lives in accordance with income and possessions may take umbrage at such a wry observation (isn't it obvious that I am better than you are if I have more money?), but there appear to be limits beyond which this rubber band cannot be stretched.

In Japan:

Several offices of Japan's biggest advertising agency have been raided over suspicions its employees are being made to work excessive hours.

The raids come after the suicide of a 24-year-old Dentsu employee - the labour ministry ruled it to have been "karoshi", or death by overwork.
Dozens of ministry officials entered Dentsu's Tokyo headquarters early on Monday morning, said broadcaster NHK.

And in France the death-by-overwork had a slightly different twist:

French women are being urged to walk out of work at 16:34 on Monday to protest against being paid less than their male colleagues.
Women’s rights campaigners at the feminist newsletter Les Glorieuses suggested that downing tools until the end of the year – in effect taking 38.2 days off – would highlight the global wage disparity that experts say will not disappear until 2186.
“From 7 November at 16.34 (and seven seconds) women will be working ‘voluntarily’. If women were paid as much as men, they could stop working on November 7 at 16.34,” Les Glorieuses wrote.

For some reason, the issue puts me in mind of the U.S. military services, which were not integrated until 1948. There you are, hiding in a foxhole with enemy bullets flying and your life on the line when someone, somewhere, somehow eliminates the source that is firing on you. When you look around to identify your benefactor, you discover it is a black (wo)man or a Latino(a) or an Asian. Does anyone in their right mind give a hoot about the source of salvation or accomplishment? Isn't it the salvation or accomplishment that counts? Besides being stupid, isn't it really tiring to parse and separate and demean and raise up those wearing blue pajamas?

"gun!" ... not

At least The Guardian managed to talk with the man who brandished an anti-Trump sign at a rally in Reno and got the shit kicked out of him after someone yelled "gun!" Thirty-three-year-old Austyn Crites sounds like someone who thinks he still lives in a democracy.

It is hard not to wonder whether Trump jumped on the chance to create a furor and be hustled from a stage he very shortly returned to. The Republican presidential candidate has been claiming the upcoming election is "rigged" and perhaps he saw a chance to prove himself right.

Too bad a voice like Crites' didn't enter the presidential race earlier: He might have made a good candidate, although, given the competition, that wouldn't be hard.

"Monuments"

Pete Evanson: "These are the Kelpies in Falkirk - two fantastic pieces of modern design and engineering. Their name reflects the mythological creatures who supposedly had the strength of 10 horses." [One of the BBC's collection of reader photos on the topic "Monuments."]

wishing for a wish come true

Only god can pray to god
Yet there's the bid to
Spare the rod.
And so I pray
Each passing day
Sun will be bright
And children play.

naturally-occurring snowballs

A strange and beautiful sight greeted locals in the Gulf of Ob, in northwest Siberia, after thousands of natural snowballs formed on the beach.

An 11-mile (18km) stretch of coast was covered in the icy spheres.
The sculptural shapes range from the size of a tennis ball to almost 1m (3ft) across.

"The Big Con...." election of 2016

Just finished reading "The Big Con: what is really at stake in this US election." It is long. It is written in English. And yet however daunting, it is really good from where I sit. The blurb that accompanies the piece hardly does it justice:

Big government helped make America great but it was so successful its effect has become invisible. Anti-Washington hatred helps only the super-rich and puts progress at risk for millions living with wage stagnation and rising inequality.

The piece is as good a representation of the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren appreciations as I know. Just read five or six paragraphs and find out if, like me, you get sucked in.

There were many nuggets that sprang out for me. One was, "Considerations of fairness, fellow feeling, or the greater social good simply didn’t factor into the corporate calculus." It did not include one of my faves, "A rising tide lifts all yachts."

It is all so sad.

charter schools

Next Tuesday's election ballot contains a question about raising the cap on so-called charter schools in Massachusetts. To the proponents, charter schools seem to be an improvement on public schooling which is plagued in various ways... sluggishness, wounded students, etc. Charter schools seem to offer an improvement, but the improvement takes money from the public school kitty, leaving public schools that much more static and sluggish. My feeling is that if you want to improve public education, you have to bite the bullet and attack the whole system, not nibble around the edges creating quasi-private schools over which the taxpayer has little or no say. My argument is not terribly well-formed, but more separation does not seem to me to be a reasonable cure for less separation between and among students/teachers/educational-results.

Anyway, I wrote this letter to the paper yesterday. While not entirely clear, still I wanted to save it:

One of the ideas near and dear to the hearts of many Americans is, "no taxation without representation." The sentiment added fuel to the American Revolution and continues to this day in various splinter groups that feel they are under- or even un-represented.

And it is in this regard that I ask if it would be reasonable for me or anyone else to withhold the portion of my tax money that funds schools (which can claim representation through various school committees) but is then subdivided or siphoned off to pay for so-called Charter Schools, which lack similar representation.

Far be it from me to accuse anyone of bellying up to the tax trough through a back door. On the other hand it might be well to remember that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."

a wiser course?

This morning, the circuits kicked out...

Since you will die as you are, wouldn't it be wiser to live that way as well?

drip, drip, drip

The unremitting and sleazy vaporousness of the 2016 presidential election cycle drip-drip-drips towards next Tuesday and Election Day itself. Like a lot of what seems to be happening around me, there has been cacophony and insult and volume without much concern for the onlookers/electorate that is allegedly concerned. After Election Day, Hillary Clinton will be able to stop dropping to her knees in thanks to Donald Trump next Tuesday: If there was one voter who put her in the office she will assume, Trump is the man who did it. Trump's impassioned and unsupported belches of emotion and insult have struck a nerve without supporting evidence. Clinton's 'statesman-like' distances and issues of trustworthiness looked almost adult by comparison.

But nowhere has there been much evidence that either candidate has a goal in mind and a path along which to achieve it. The electorate is left to vote with his or her gut ... which is to say, without evidence or credible building blocks.

It has been sleazy and endless and among the electorate-hermit-crabs like me who stuck a head out to see what was going on, the news is not convincing. Tuck your head back in and watch America drip-drip-drip into third-world mediocrity where schools go begging, healthcare is a political football with no goal lines, and war is easier than the sticky wickets that peace might entail.

On television sport shows and television financial shows, network genius seems devoted to adding more and more talking heads, each disagreeing with the other ... or piling on so much information that the onlooker cannot find a focus. Volume is substituted for argumentation and the louder anyone is -- somehow -- the more truthful s/he becomes. Fuck the viewer, fuck the electorate -- it's MY opinion that matters. Only of course it doesn't: Again and again, intractable fact shows itself for what it is -- intractable fact.

But perhaps I am whining as once agrarian societies swooned and keened when the steam engine made its indelible mark. Or I am just another old fart looking back but unwilling to call it what it is -- looking back. I keep wishing someone would tell me that there were a point at which everyone could get off this highway and address and assess the actual-factuals as distinct from the heart-felt volume of the under-educated or well-spoken or much-dressed. Just a few minutes. It ain't gonna happen, but that doesn't mean I can't wish it might. Stop it, please!

Old fogies dress it up no less than the "millennials" who dress their Kewpie dolls. The grey and grizzled too have their volume and loneliness... and if you just whine loud enough, maybe you can drown out the others -- so young and so assured that they won't die -- who are likewise drowning you out.

Election Day is almost here, but the period on the sentence does not exist, I'm afraid. The drip-drip-drip awaits the advent of yet another drip-drip-drip and the laughter remains hidden in shadows no flashlight can dispel. It has been an anxious-making tsunami, this election business. And unfortunately there's no fat lady to sing.

the dromedary

That wretched, scheming dromedary
Confounds the sculptor's statuary.
At tea time in the local zoo,
He whispers sweetly, "One hump or two?"

the addictive grappling hooks of war

"They can't imagine any other life but war."

Russian mercenaries, like their American counterparts, are perhaps finding an increasingly hospitable home in the fiery hell of the Middle East. Well, maybe the American special forces sent in to advise one faction or another aren't exactly mercenaries, but their blood seems approximately as red. Two American soldiers were reported killed today in Afghanistan ... "rare combat deaths for Western forces who handed over the task of securing Afghanistan to local troops some two years ago."

But the shadow Russian troops, as reported by Reuters, are, well, shadowy.

Back in southern Russia, medals were delivered to [the] families [of two dead contractors]: the order of bravery, with certificates signed by President Vladimir Putin. The medals, seen by Reuters, were intended to honor the sacrifice they had made for their country.
Except Kolganov and Morozov were not employed by the Russian state. They were in Syria as private contractors, a small part of an army of such people who are being deployed secretly by the Kremlin in Syria.

And why?

"The Arabs are not warriors by nature, but are thrown together and told to storm high ground. They don't know how to storm it let alone conquer their instincts and move towards the bullets. How can you make them do it? Only by setting yourself as an example," Kapa said. "That's why our guys reinforced their units."

War is an insidious drug, it seems: Once introduced to this handmaiden of chaos, it seems impossible for a combatant to draw back, to stop thinking of so magnetic a companion. There is only one solution for the moment -- enter the fray yet again and again until the mind finds some surfeit. In drug addiction, "if one's good, two's better" and it seems that war has the same effect ... the beast must be fed and young men everywhere are learning to feast. And where the beast is fed, the attention is diverted from anything that might resemble peace. More and more and more ... and the souls of Russians and Americans alike rot away.

With the U.S. presidential election scheduled next Tuesday, it is impossible not to think that the souls of our young soldiers are destined for ever more of the deliciousness that politicians bask in -- the wars that go on and on and on and give rise to ever more fearsome fear tactics and, thereby, ever more successful re-election bids.

Hillary Clinton will be elected. Wars in the Middle East are assured. Women and children and otherwise peaceable men will suffer deprivation and death and meanwhile, the shadow warriors, the addicts who cannot avert their eyes and hearts, will crumble at the core.

In the Bhagavad Gita, the lord Krishna encourages the warrior Arjuna to fight in ways he has been trained despite the injunction against killing and for a wider peace. It is the way of the world, it seems, to reap even as you sow. What (wo)man does not encounter such difficulty, whether on the actual battlefield or otherwise? And yet there is something heinous and shameful and scream-worthy about the young who take on the burden of this addiction.

small matters

Small things that have crossed my bow of late:

-- On the radio, though not on Wikipedia, the 1908 classic baseball song, "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" was credited (by association) to the women's suffrage movement and the fact that women were considered unlady-like if they went to other than prescribed places in the park ... and/or hooted and hollered for their favored team.

-- The TV serial "Black Mirror," one of whose episodes ("Nosedive") I watched a couple of days back left me writhing in revulsion and delighting that anyone could make such an episode. It was as thoroughly repulsive as anything I have ever seen and yet in that repulsion, it was splendiferous .... creating enough nightmare potential for a year or even a lifetime.

-- Snippets of the on-the-telly movie "Smoke," whose silences drove the curiosity harpoon in ... wonderful when people can use silence without flaunting the fact that they are using it. Sort of like good oriental art where empty space is vital right up to the moment some TED talker tells you how vital it is.

mom as cash cow

I can imagine that many of those persuaded by psychology might take a dim view of idol-worshiping or other religious ritualisms.

And yet how many shrinks (Freudians front and center) do you know who bless the name and bow before the idols of the mothers of those practicing the 50-minute hour ... you know, the ones who put spaghetti on their table.

Oh well, one (wo)man's catastrophe is another's ascension.

Thanks mom.

the idiocy of religion

For the purposes of discussion, perhaps I can define "religion" as the response to the loneliness of the bedroom ceiling at 3 a.m.

The purpose of religion is to get through the idiocy of religion. Some may see this imperative as being so much drivel, but loneliness has its own vagaries, so I think it is not so easily dismissed. And the only compelling route I can see towards penetrating that idiocy is to dive deep, to embrace, and to become, yet again, a fool.

The alternative (not to pick on humanists but rather to use them as a possible example) is to remain mired in the criticisms leveled at the foolishness of others at the expense of overlooking the foolishness of the tool that exposes those idiocies. The criticisms of idiocy become the foundation of a further idiocy.

Anyway ... back to getting through the idiocies of religion. It is easier to skip gaily along the crests of the waves than it is to pause among the cruelties of religion. The confusions, the knots, the subtleties, and the endless construction and deconstruction are enough to waylay anyone. How many go to their graves abandoned to the abandonment that religion can entail? I don't know and I don't mean to criticize any of it. And yet ...

Getting through the idiocy of its own devising strikes me as the sole compelling impetus for religion. Entering this mansion of many rooms and then wandering, wandering, wandering. Cruel and kind, miraculous and mundane -- it's enough to make a TV magnate salivate at the advertising prospects.

Is religion a good thing or a bad thing? Is it some-thing or no-thing? Where does the bedroom ceiling end? There are explanations and bon mots up the chute, but really, really, really, where does its value, if any, lie? The traps are endless and 3 a.m. is no time to be ratting around. Shedding old clothes is important if anyone wants to avoid the ick.

It's late in the game. Late in the night after night after night....

I think there are Cocoa Puffs in the pantry, for those inclined. Idiocy is not really all that bad.

the ghost story

Here is the ghost-tale radio segment referred to earlier on this blog.

hitting the political nail on the head

I'm not sure where it is or who it is, but this wife is a breath of fresh air:

This is the campaign ad that has charmed America.
It's a world a way from the nasty, shouty, overblown attack ads currently dominating commercial breaks.
Instead, it's a gentle comedy, featuring Texas Republican Gerald Daugherty, the "always on" county commissioner, who drives his long-suffering family and friends up the wall by talking constantly about fixing problems in Travis County.

"Zen Dogs"

Says the author of the photo book, "Zen Dogs,"

"I hope this series of images is a gentle and positive reminder of the peace, calm and joy that dogs bring to our lives."

Interesting to see that every photo on The Guardian site is a picture of a dog with his/her/its eyes closed. Zen is an open-eyed business, though perhaps we're not supposed to say so. I guess "bliss" is more blissful if your eyes are closed?

off to the crocodile and toad races

A kiss for good luck

The Brits and their once-far-flung empire have got class. If you don't believe it, just ask them. But there is class and then there is class:

Not even a freak lightning strike and an escaped saltwater crocodile could dampen the spirits at Berry Springs Tavern, 60 kilometres out of Darwin, on Melbourne Cup day.
About 80 people people gathered at the outback pub on Tuesday, to celebrate a horse race 3,700 kilometres away by holding their own version, but with crocodiles and cane toads. The slated turtle race was cancelled after participants allegedly failed a drug test.

If reincarnation were an option, I think I'd want to be an Aussie. Serious and silly, their tales draw me in.

ghost story

It came up plump and soft as some small dust devil on a dirt track -- not threatening, not stinging, just soft and present as I drove to the convenience store yesterday to pick up cigarettes and cooking oil. Idly, I turned on the radio for the four- or five-minute drive and there was this male voice that seemed capable of rousing up some sleeping piece of my underbelly's underbelly. It wasn't raucous and it sought no group-hug agreement. It was just a piece of me that slept mostly and now, with the voice coming out of the radio, woke and stretched and purred and drew me to it. It walked daintily outside my more usual demarcations, tiptoeing as cats seem to do ... outside the lines ... and it made me happy.

I only got bits and pieces of the tale -- the drive was short -- but today I will try to nail down the whole segment -- call up public radio stations to get the whole picture -- the picture of what was clearly a ghost story. A quiet story. I want to listen to the entire willy-willy, the complete dust devil that folded me in and took me beyond the lines. I do not look forward to the research, but I'll make the effort: It's not often that something can take me beyond my blithely-overlooked lines and make me purr and make me happy.

Roughly, in the tattered four or five minutes ... a male voice, perhaps in its 30's or 40's recounted the tale of an immigration service to which he belonged. The mission seemed to be to corner and turn back immigrants trying to enter the United States from Mexico. The arena for the endeavor was so black at night that the car you got out of might be invisible after four or five steps away from it. Not even the Indians, who had peopled the area for hundreds of years, went to this dark, dark place.

And then there were bits and pieces about the immigration agent who had died previously showing up to turn back groups attempting to get to the United States. One group stood stock still and wept at the sight of him. One group was told where to find water. And one group declined, at a line-up, to identify the prime suspect in a smuggling operation until shown a picture of the dead agent. And in the end, the smuggler who had led to the immigration officer's demise fell from a cliff and died at the behest of the would-be wraith.

Bits and snippets and snippets and bits in the four or five minutes of my travels. It purred in my mind. It roused my credulity. It sought no argumentation or agreement. It crossed the lines and expected no crowd-sourcing on the far side. Is it true? Is it false? These seemed somehow minor matters. It was crossing the line and rising up and stretching and purring and ... the world is a wide, wide place.

I will see what I can find out.

PS. Here is the segment that appeared on the radio.

noodle mania

And you thought Nathan's competitive-hotdog-eating was something.

if you can't grow peace, grow war

I think I've posted this before, but I see no reason not to post it again since the presidential election is over and more (politically advantageous) war is in the United States' menu.

There's no draft - only 1 percent of the population is in the military. The government isn't levying special taxes or issuing bonds to pay for the fighting.
And all of this "war" – drone strikes, Special Forces deployments, air strikes and aircraft carrier deployments - is happening with very little public scrutiny, critics charge.
Rosa Brooks, a former Pentagon staffer and author of "How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon," argues that U.S. citizens and lawmakers should shake off fears of appearing unpatriotic to challenge the U.S.’s unchecked, unilateral and covert military activities abroad. If that doesn’t happen soon, the United States may have to pay for the dangerous example it's setting for powers like Russia and China, she says.

articles on death and sex

Couple of nice articles:

Less oleaginous than 'the caring' many when speaking on the same topic, author Margaret Drabble goes softly into the good night of what is called "death." Says she, "I am not afraid of death. I worry about living."

And then, natch, there is "The Story of Sex" ... whose illustrations I plead guilty to liking, even if the topic seems laced with both intelligence and good humor. Or maybe I am just pleased to finally hear that "sexual intercourse began in 1963 (“Between the end of the ‘Chatterley’ ban / And the Beatles’ first LP”)" The book is not entirely silly, I take it, but that it should include silliness speaks well for its serious aspects from where I sit.

class picture

Borgarfjörður, Iceland

Sheep pose for a group shot

Photograph: Einar Örn/REX/Shutterstock

forty miles from nowhere

The most remote of the British Isles is home to northwest Europe’s largest seabird colony, cliffs taller than the Empire State Building – and to one of the world’s eeriest ghost towns.

In a world over-puffed with information and a good deal of infamy, an almost-entirely unpeopled St. Kilda seems to slow the pace and suggest that things once had a beginning. Not The Beginning, mind you -- that would be intemperate -- but a beginning when hefted rock created shelter and perhaps a wash of hernias.

There's no returning to a sylvan beginning without inflicting demagogic wounds, but coming close or closer seems to warm the bones on the cold nights of strife and argumentation and advancement.

Where I live, a nine-year-old girl was killed Friday when she got caught up in the school bus that had dropped her off. Nine is a time of tickling and giggles and hugs and wobbly attempts on a two-wheeler. Or may be. And reading that headline, I would give a good deal for a magic wand that would trade my life for hers. Perhaps in my children's lifetimes, some such magic will arise, but it is not yet ... but perhaps St. Kilda is a bit closer to the mark.

The sleazy U.S. presidential election is winding down towards Nov. 8 when, with some luck, the presidential election will evaporate a bit. In Syria, the deliberate bombing of a school and the children in it is horrific beyond horror and yet with so many horrors, the capacity for horror is overstretched, worn out and somehow shaming.

Why then not take my small, fanciful break and wonder at a place so far from everything? It's a minor foolishness, seeking out a place that slows the pace and nuzzles up to the beginning or beginnings. The ground is, if only for a nanosecond, somehow firmer.

who's a carnivore?

It's probably not on anyone's ethical front burner, but ...

If a vegetarian eats a vegetarian is s/he a carnivore?

If a carnivore eats a vegetarian ....

You never know when you'll survive a plane crash in the Andes, right?

Muslims help rein in Christian kerfuffles

Restoration work takes place on the tomb of Jesus in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Photograph: National Geographic/AP

Thoughtful, caring, compassionate, wise, charitable ... the list of glowing adjectives rolls out for Christians like a rosy red carpet. It's nice, in a world full of so much strife, to find someone who's halfway decent.

And yet it is not just Monty Python who can tweak the Christian tableau.

Here is the BBC tale of the excavation of the site where Jesus was allegedly laid out after his crucifixion:

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in the heart of Christian quarter of the walled Old City, covers the assumed site of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection.
Six denominations – Latin (Roman Catholic), Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Syrian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox and Copts – share custodianship of the cavernous church. Bitter disputes over territories and responsibilities have erupted in the past, sometimes involving physical altercations.
In a sign of the distrust between the different denominations, the keys to the church have been held by a Muslim family since the 12th century. [emphasis added]

Lord, there's a blue-ribbon award in those words somewhere.

vote early ... or not

When I was a kid, there was no TV. At the end of the school day, I liked to come home, turn on the radio and listen to soap operas -- continuing sagas of one kind or another. I loved stories and the soaps told stories that even a second-grader like me could understand. There was, however, a fly in the ointment: The shows kept splicing in advertising. Ads would disrupt the flow of the stories I wanted to hear and one day, I hit on a second-grader's solution: I would do as the ad invited, ship off my 25 cents (a whole week's allowance) for flower seeds and THEN, of course, the ads would stop interrupting MY shows. There would no longer be the need for ads since I had bought my fair share.

Needless to say, my logic was flawed: The flower seeds arrived, I spread them without care in the back yard ... and the ads kept on coming.

This morning, I am considering how I might splice in an early-voting possibility at City Hall. I'd like to get it out of the way because I suspect the presidential election day, Nov. 8, is likely to produce a crowd at the polling place. But flickering to the side of my fears is the notion that if I vote early, the drum-beat of mindless politics will somehow end; I will have paid my dues and the news media that has proved itself a lickspittle to the electoral posturings of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will shut ... the ... fuck ... up!

Yes, I'd like to vote early: My choices feel stark: Vote against Trump, a sociopath nitwit who has tapped into a legitimate strain of voter discontent but has yet to lay out a single policy; vote for Clinton and 15 more years of politically-useful war in Afghanistan. It's not a delightful scenario, but if voting early will ease the sense of mild depression, a smog of sick air afoot in the land ... what the heck ... I'll do it.

And of course my voting will do precisely zero to affect the underlying story that goes on and on and on and on ... the one that neither candidate speaks about ... the country both claim to want to lead ... the country whose wars sap the national piggy bank and cast a nation into third-world status.

Luckily, more or less, there is the question on the ballot that asks whether Massachusetts should raise the cap on the charter schools in the state. Charter schools take money from public schools and create specialized and innovate schools outside the purview of school committees and the like. I favor innovation in schools ... all schools. Pulling an end run around the public school system fires up my desire to vote against it.

Against ... there is a lot of "against" in the air these days.

Me too.

Nonetheless, hope springs eternal, I suppose. In Inner Mongolia, responsibility for some 200 fatally-poisoned swans was laid at the doorstep of unnamed "poachers." Nevertheless...

Tian Yangyang, from environmental organisation Let Birds Fly, told the Sixth Tone website that many poached swans end up in restaurants in China, some of which offer "swan feasts" on their menus.
Despite the fact that many poached animals are killed with poison, "most people believe eating wild animals is healthy," he said.

A swan feast ....

Eat your poison, dear.

the Pirates of Iceland

A party that favours direct democracy, complete government transparency, decriminalising drugs and offering asylum to Edward Snowden could form the next government in Iceland after the country goes to the polls on Saturday.
Riding a wave of public anger at perceived political corruption in the wake of the 2008 financial crash and the Panama Papers scandal in April, Iceland’s Pirate party looks on course to either win or finish a close second.

A "crowdsourced" constitution ... now that would be interesting ... if not suicidal.