imponderables

Where does the light go when it meets the shadow?
Where does the shadow go when it meets the light?
Gautama ('the Buddha') suggested that it is wiser to steer clear of "imponderables" (what happens after death, etc.) but he was in the teaching business, the business of pointing. Teachers nudge, students do the walking.
After a bit, the imponderables are what make the most sense.
Ponderables only produce answers -- the stuff that C+ students might attain in a world where no one gets an A.
So, yes, steer clear of imponderables, the only questions worth answering... the scrumptious stuff, juicy and mysterious as a kumquat.
OK, so you find the answer ... only to discover the question had fled ... sort of. How convincing is that?
Damn!
Stick with the imponderables. They make better sense.
 

samovar

Like a painter whose works over time may begin as representational and then slowly segue back and back and back in future works until nothing is left but a single brush stroke, I wonder if all those interested in the arts or life don't do much the same ... back and back and back until a single ball on green baize is all that there is to indicate the symphonies and intricacies of a billiards match.

The word "samovar" crept into my head today and lingered like a peppermint lozenge. Even as the implications and associations of the word rose up dancing in my mind, still I did not want to give them force or favor. "Samovar" -- that was enough, if not too much.

The wolves, the tundra, the tall hats, the cold, the warmth of friendship, the romance, the tall actions and embroidered gowns ... no, none of that. Just "samovar."

The singularity may be annoying -- art, after all, is said to 'communicate' -- but still, the travel back and back and back seems inevitable. Back to a place where all things communicate by nature and defy the blather of "communication."

Anyway... for the moment ... samovar.

the loneliness of Facebook

It has been the better part of a month (12/18/17 submission) since I sent in the following to the local paper. The article makes no mention of local links (name of a town or region) so I suspect whatever consideration it is being given as a "guest column" is in the rear-view mirror. Anyway, I'm tired of waiting for the editorial stamp of approval. It ain't great, but it ain't that bad either. I'll put it here:

THE LONELINESS OF FACEBOOK

In an age of loneliness and gilded gadgets, no enabler of that loneliness stands out more sharply than Facebook, the lucrative internet format that allows people to imagine they have friends and enemies.

But now a shadow has crept across the sunshine of this internet platform. As a Guardian article suggested recently, "Facebook has acknowledged that social media use can be bad for users’ mental health, a sign the company is feeling pressure from a growing chorus of critics raising alarms about the platform’s effect on society....

The company’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, has asked for forgiveness and claimed his new mission was to “bring the world closer together.'"

Zuckerberg's mea culpa is leavened of course with the knowledge that the man has made billions of dollars promoting the notion that somehow Facebook already brings its users closer together instead of driving them further into the quicksand of loneliness and separation. "Bring the world closer together?" Don't make me laugh.

When it comes to addictions, I really am not sure which is more pernicious, opiods or Facebook. Some may see this statement as overreach: Facebook, they may argue, never killed anyone. My reply is two-fold: 1. Are you really sure of that and 2. Facebook nibbles at the human spirit. It does not gulp. But where there is enough nibbling, the result is likewise corpses. Is Facebook addictive? My guess is a resounding "yes," which is why I have done what I could to stay away from it and opiods. Both opiods and Facebook have some legitimate and informative uses, but there is no denying the addictive potential.

To rewrite Beatle John Lennon's observation about life, "Friends go begging while you were busy making Facebook "friends."

Facebook is very much like the widely-available pornography on the internet. Yes, it looks like sex. Yes, it is graphic. Yes, it reminds users of a potential reality. But what is that reality? Sex on the internet can hardly be called sex in all its actual-factual wonder and giggling and epiphany and despair. Similarly, Facebook "friends" or "enemies," with some rare exceptions, can hardly be equated with the wondrous complexity of having a real friend or enemy.

Turn off the phone and users of Facebook and porn are likely to find themselves every bit as lonely as before they turned it on and got so engulfed that they walked into light poles or ran over pedestrians. Friends and enemies require time and patience, stops and starts, surprises and doldrums. They are not based in the ability to type some long-distance witticism or lie or quick-hit observation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with Facebook or porn. What is wrong is the belief that this medium represents an honest and soothing human reality. No one has as many real friends as they can cobble together on Facebook. No one has as much sex -- even the no-giggles, one-dimensional sort -- as porn sites offer. But, to mix the metaphors, if you believe that Facebook actually brings people closer together, you're screwed... and left wondering why the loneliness of our time and gadgetry remains unassuaged. No one can have a beer or a cup of coffee with a pair of agile thumbs.

I grant that there is/are the occasional Facebook romances that turn into marriage. I grant that there are the shared interests in worm farms and astrophysics. I grant that there are connections that crop up and blossom. But into this mix I would add the deep suspicion that in the midst of it all, as reliance on Facebook grows, real friendship goes begging. I'm sorry, but the people I count as real friends have halitosis I have smelled as they have smelled mine. Building a friendship is subtle and not always as deliciously complete as a quickie message. And finding an enemy is much the same.

In the midst of Facebook's mea-culpa soul-searching, the answer proposed to the potential for a depressed user was every bit as gob-smacking as the notion that the institution might weigh its flaws at all. A study found that using Facebook "passively" (just reading it) could inspire depression, but that the cure was to be found ... wait for it ... by becoming more actively involved with Facebook. Join the fray. Add your comments. Dispel the loneliness.

It has been suggested that the definition of insanity is "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." Drug addicts have a similar psalm: "If one's good, two's better."

Wouldn't it be better to expend the energy to make a real friend than to wallow in a fragile belief system whose warmth dissipates at the push of a button?

Loneliness, after all, is no joke.

Friends are not a dime a dozen.

old news, new day

Everyone else may have known, but ...:

-- Julian Assange, that spiller of Wikileaks wire-tapping beans, has been made a citizen of Ecuador, the country in whose London embassy he has lived for five and a half years. The Brits are not impressed -- "go fuck yourself" might easily have summed up their reaction to a request to recognize Assange as a diplomat. The Brits have and continue to play handmaiden to the United States which hasn't got the balls to admit Assange won and if "treason" is the word chosen to describe Assange, then perhaps the same word might be tried on an American president.

-- Bill Cosby, the American comedian whose past predations retrial is scheduled April 2 even as reruns of his sitcom "The Cosby Show" seem to be enjoying healthy reruns on TV, quipped recently that he would prefer not to be added to Twitter's #MeToo laundry list that has swamped and dashed other politicians and similar entertainment personalities.

-- I did know that Oprah Winfrey's name has been bandied about as a potential presidential candidate, but the sense of suicide-by-Democrats lingers and waxes in my mind.

-- And through it all, the entertainer-in-chief manages to shine as Donald Trump is called out for referring to Haiti and various African nations as "shithole countries." A majority of the news media seemed unwilling to NOT QUOTE the president verbatim. There were a few lackluster stories about Trump's denial that he ever used such language. His batting average for telling the truth is below average.

On the radio yesterday, I heard an AP report that federal aid to Puerto Rico -- a commonwealth/unincorporated territory still reeling (spotty electricity at best) from a Sept. 20 hurricane -- has yet to be ironed out in any tangible form. A cluster-fuck at best. A cluster-fuck in a shithole, perhaps? The aid spigots are on in Houston and environs that were likewise hurricane-ravaged. And well-heeled, non-shithole Montecito, Ca., and Santa Barbara County will get help for the mudslides the followed in the wake of devastating and denuding forest fires.

I suppose my granddaddy was wont to observe that it was a life-skill worth learning -- separating the chaff from the wheat. I wonder what he might have said when so much is chaff and so little is wheat.

the road to peace

As the United States and 'friends' pursue a 17-year-old, easier-than-peace, Afghan war effort, a single man in India seems to be demonstrating the inescapable observation that peace and honest sweat are intimately linked.

A man in a remote eastern Indian village has single-handedly carved a five-mile (8km) road through hilly terrain to help his children attend school.
It had been taking Jalandhar Nayak’s three sons about three hours each way to navigate the narrow, rocky route to class. So two years ago the vegetable seller from Odisha state picked up a chisel, a garden hoe and pickaxe and began building a shorter route....
“My children found it hard to walk on the narrow and stony path while going to their school. I often saw them stumbling against the rocks and decided to carve a road through the mountain so that they can walk more easily,” he told News World Odisha.

Amen.

if you've got it, don't flaunt it

A retired Japanese crime boss has been arrested in Thailand, ending more than 14 years on the run, after photos of his yakuza tattoos and a missing little finger went viral.

Shigeharu Shirai, 72, was apprehended while he was shopping on Wednesday in the central market town of Lopburi.

Japanese authorities had sought his arrest over an alleged role in the shooting of a rival in 2003, after which he fled to Thailand, married a local woman and drifted into a seemingly peaceful retirement.

That was until a resident posted photos of the diminutive retiree playing a streetside checkers game with his intricate gang tattoos on full show and a missing little finger – yakuza members often slice off a fingertip to atone for an offence. [Agence France-Presse]

Modesty. Omerta ... what ever happened to the good ol' days? When even the crooks are as dumb as Donald Trump, what is the world coming to?

On the other hand, "In 355 days,President Trump has made 2,001 false or misleading claims."

starving from the inside out

I guess everyone starves from the inside out. That's just the nature of starvation from crackle-dried fields in Africa to the old age homes. What was gathered and utilized and brought to fruiting use is now nibbled-nibbled-nibbled. What was muscle is now mere sustenance ... rolling back, rolling back, rolling back. It is all beyond up-beat discussion. It is beyond loneliness. It is alone and it is sure.

The same gravity that compelled the rise and acquisition is thrown into reverse like some skillful skateboarder rolling up one side of his or her miraculous curve begs for a return and re-rise up the other side ... back and forth until gravity claims its due in the stillness of the middle, the bottom, the end.

I have eaten my fill. To eat more makes dwindling sense. I do sometimes wish things wouldn't dawdle so much. Obviously more gravity is required.

Trump advocates return to bribes

 U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested that refilling the Congressional "swamp" he once sought to drain may be the answer to a fractious, do-nothing atmosphere in the legislative arm of government. In essence, his passing remark advocated re-installing the bribe.

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump unexpectedly suggested on Tuesday that bringing back congressional “earmarks,” spending habits that were banished six years ago from the federal budget process, might help an often deadlocked U.S. Congress get things done
Known by their supporters as the “grease” that made Washington’s wheels turn, earmarks were funds allocated for lawmakers’ pet projects that helped secure votes needed to get broader legislation passed.
 “Maybe all of you should start thinking about going back to a form of earmarks,” Trump told lawmakers who were gathered at the White House for a meeting about immigration reform.

Of course, as usual, there is plenty of latitude in the remark: If it works, he can take credit; if it doesn't, he can blame someone else. Will anyone suggest a good reason to gainsay actor Robert DeNiro's characterization of this man as "the jerkoff-in-chief?"

As usual, vituperation and $2 will get you a bus ride.

another author reaps Trump manna

And you thought people who read books might be smarter than a box of rocks?!

When it was released 10 years ago, Randall Hansen’s book performed as expected, racking up strong sales that gradually tapered off. But this week the Canadian professor’s unexpectedly leapt back on to bestseller lists.

2008 book

The reason lies in the book’s name – Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945 – just a subtitle away from the Michael Wolff’s explosive exposé of the Trump White House....“It amused me and part of me thought, can people really be that dumb to be confusing these books?” [Hansen asked]
In a few cases, it appeared that this was exactly what had happened.

 

the louder the voice....

Thinking of Donald Trump, I wonder if it's true and half-suspect it is:

The louder the voice, the greater the cowardice.

instructing-the-monkeys photo

Jiyuan, China

Keen to learn some photography? Macaque monkeys look at a man’s camera at Wulongkou nature reserve

Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

white hats and black

Idling through the alpha waves of the television yesterday, it seemed to be true -- there is an uptick in westerns and black-and-white dramas of yore. What caught my attention was "Shane," a 1953 good-guy-bad-guy western in which the guys with the white hats squared off against the guys in the black hats and the guys in the white hats -- what else? -- carried the day.

Westerns and war movies and Three Stooges ... all of them throwbacks to simpler times at the same moment that real life is fraught with complexities abetted by the internet -- complexities that are woven with "fake news" and a U.S. president who lies as a matter of routine. Simultaneously, the Department of Defense (once more aptly tagged as the "War Department") is looking for/getting support for a patriotic, blood-shedding financial boost.

And who is likely to pay for the military uptick? Medicare, Medicaid, and various other social safety nets is a good guess, I think.

War is so much easier than peace. Just press the patriotism button. Just press the fear button. Just ladle out the laundry list of guys in black hats and ....

Watch a latter-day rerun of 1949's "Sands of Iwo Jima," a John Wayne flag-waver. No one ever accused John Wayne's movies of being complex. Things were simpler then and therefore (of all damned things) true-r. They were heroic and right and un-fake and the top-gun didn't lie.

Hunger and poverty and climate and racism be damned.

OK ... let's have another war. Boeing and kin could use a financial infusion. Seventeen years of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan barely scratches the financial surface.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration is nearing completion of a new “Buy American” plan that calls for U.S. military attaches and diplomats to help drum up billions of dollars more in business overseas for the American weapons industry, going beyond the assistance they currently provide, U.S. officials said.

Fuck diplomacy! Get out there and sell, sell, sell!

 

lofty stuff gets its chain yanked

Lord, I do love a little down-to-earthness, a little pointed humor, when it comes to the lofty realm of things.

...[A] case coming before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday explores whether some states are aggressively purging voter rolls in a way that disenfranchises thousands of voters....
One Ohio man, a Trumbull County truck driver and Army veteran, said in an affidavit supporting the plaintiffs in the lawsuit he was “completely blindsided” after learning he was no longer registered to vote for the 2016 election. The last time he voted, he said, was in 2008. He told a county election board official by email that he is a U.S. citizen born in Ohio and should be reinstated to the rolls.
If not, he suggested also purging his name as a taxpayer.
“We’ll call us square!” the man wrote.

Well, tickle me pink and sign me up!

kids! smoke 'em if you've got 'em

VALE DE SALGUEIRO, Portugal (AP) — The Epiphany celebrations in the Portuguese village of Vale de Salgueiro feature a tradition that each year causes an outcry among outsiders: Parents encouraging their children, some as young as 5, to smoke cigarettes.
Locals say the practice has been passed down for centuries as part of a celebration of life tied to the Christian Epiphany and the winter solstice — but nobody is sure what it symbolizes or exactly why parents buy the packs of cigarettes for their children and encourage them to take part.

Kinda makes me wonder about other revered traditions that Christians and others of other persuasions DO claim certainty about. Is crucifixion or enlightenment really good for you? Who says so and why? It's a funny old world.

the unassailable Ingmar Bergman

Liv Ullmann and and Ingmar Bergman during a break in filming on Hour of the Wolf in 1968. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

In an era when politicians and glitterati are dropping like flies in the face of sexual-predator accusations that are often 20 or more years old, an upcoming movie takes a look at Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. "Today the Swedish director would be called a predator, but he also created great roles in which women excelled."

A new Swedish documentary commissioned for this year’s centenary of the birth of Ingmar Bergman is to examine the sexual relationships in which the Swedish film director engaged with almost all of his actresses, and detail his shortcomings as a husband and father....
The two-hour documentary is in post-production and, if accepted, will premiere in May at the Cannes film festival, before launching in cinemas in Sweden later in the summer.
[Jane] Magnusson said she hoped Bergman admirers would be more willing to acknowledge the great director’s flaws after last year’s revelations about the systematic sexual exploitation of actresses by Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, which sparked the #MeToo social media campaign.

"Buddhism" meandering

Note to a Buddhist bulletin board moderator who expressed concern in the new year about wandering away from the topic of "Buddhism." Not sure it makes sense or is even apposite, but I thought I would save it:

I have a hunch that no matter how wondrous or rarified or specific, everything gets plain, ordinary and generalized. Put another way, if you visit a place often enough, it is bound to encourage a sense of "been there, done that." If "Buddhism" is roughly an effort to settle and stop fretting about the matter of "self," still there is only the "self" to work with. And if this is the case, personalized incidents -- with a side order of "Buddhism" -- is understandable.
In the send-up movie "Zen Noir" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_Noir), there is a half-remembered scene in which a woman monk tries to explain what a "lay monk" might be. It is, she explains as best I recall, "a monk who can still get laid." Getting laid, to stick with that example, is a very personal experience that is rife with what is beyond the personal, a self-no-self situation. No one thinks about "Buddhism" when getting laid and yet getting laid pertains to or touches on or is redolent with Buddhism. It's a mash-up....
How can anyone remain "on topic" when it comes to Buddhism? Yes, there are disciplinary pointers and yet what, in the end, is NOT Buddhism? And yet this question is simultaneously offensive and vague. Meandering away from the discipline and into a realm in which the dog pisses on the kitchen linoleum is too damned un-Buddhist in one sense. Let's stick to Buddhism, right? Your offending cuticle or mine is too self-absorbed ... and yet who can help but be self-absorbed when studying the self or an offending cuticle?
If there is a desire to "remain on topic," well that feels too tight. If there is a tendency to meander away from the topic, well, that feels too loose. I think the best you can do -- and you do it pretty well -- is to make sure no one gets unduly offensive to another. Otherwise the best you can do is to let the water flow downhill. If the task becomes too onerous, then stop. All of us have been through phases of interest and commitment. There is no over-arching imperative to defend and promulgate The Dharma: The Dharma will take care of itself. Or, as I like to say, "Just because you are indispensable to the universe does not mean the universe needs your help."
Does any of this make any sense? I can't tell, but I hope I will be forgiven for posting it. Meandering is my middle name.

thanking Donald Trump

Joe Biden

I am just one person in 2018. That's barely piss in a snowbank when it comes to the American electorate. And yet I suspect I am not alone ... don't know, just suspect....

Watching former vice-president Joe Biden on public television last night, I felt a loosening of some almost indefinable set of knots. Biden was beautifully made-up. He spoke quietly. He ducked questions as the need arose. And yet through it all, I had a sense of terra somewhat more firma. Dignity and decency and leadership and thoughtfulness and, who knows, maybe even honor, were woven into his words.  Of course I was just an arrogant faggot elitist who had helped create the "swamp" of Washington, D.C., but, listening to Biden, I was willing to shoulder those taunts.

And who had made all of this possible? Donald Trump -- that's who.

His illiterate, illogical, bullying idiocies and cruelties -- his unwillingness to read and reflect and consider and shape policy -- left former bits of Biden-era flag-waving bombast in the shade... or, put another way, elevated them to new and newly-burnished heights. To corrupt the old saying, "There are lies, damned lies and there is Donald Trump."

I was willing last night to be suspicious of Biden: He's a politician after all. But in the midst of his politician-ness, his words struck me as having a chance to succeed, perhaps despite him if nothing else. America might not be the greatest, it might have its hypocrisies up the wazoo, but how did it happen, as it has, that I am more likely to listen to the words of an alleged enemy -- Iran -- than I am to listen to the words of my own president? Sifting Iran's words strikes me as providing pebbles of substantive meaning; sifting Trump's bombast produces few or no pebbles.

Trump has forced me, for one, back to a time when bullshit treacle is positively bracing. Decency, clarity, diplomacy, leadership, democracy, and, sure, duplicity .... but duplicity in search of an honest or more-or-less honest outcome. I am exhausted as I nod my head in agreement with those who opine -- out loud and in the public square -- that the U.S. president is a "fucking moron."

Yes, he has paid off his benefactors with a tax bill that will screw vast swaths of the American public in years to come. OK, he accomplished that. But what policy initiative has become law on his watch -- the kind that benefits the country he is said to represent?

But I do have to say an exhausted thank you to Trump. His lies and bombast have forced me to realize that decency is important to me, even when it's flawed; that country is important to me, even when it's flawed; that thoughtfulness is important to me, even when it's flawed ... that there is a role for honor, even when it's flawed.

I hate thanking Trump, but I guess I need to do it.

PS And tack on this snippet of John Oliver's thrashing of the president...

'queen of the forklifts"

To mark her hands-on learning of forklifts and their licenses, I sent my daughter a mug:

"bomb cyclone" relief

What a relief -- a "weather bomb" advancing on the East Coast of the United States and some relief from the flimsy braggadocio of a U.S. president whose lies and moral ambiguities tend otherwise to dominate the news cycles. A big snow storm is real and white and accumulating and shows signs of being actual and factual.
A "bomb cyclone" is

... [A] version of a real weather term that applies to a massive winter storm that pulled together Wednesday off the U.S. Southeast coast. But as fearsome as the storm is with high winds and some snow, it may not be quite as explosive as the term sounds.
Meteorologists have used the term “bomb” for storms for decades, based on a strict definition, said University of Oklahoma meteorology professor Jason Furtado....
“We use the term bomb,” Furtado said. “We know what it means, but I do think it gets a little hyped up.”

Here, 90 miles west of the Massachusetts coast, schools have shuttered and closed, businesses have followed suit and the snow is a mere tickling and trickling. Governors, including our own, have urged constituents to stay home and stay warm. The coastal areas of Massachusetts are in for a predicted clobbering... 14 inches, perhaps. And it's a relief ... it may only be a twinkle in some future daddy's eye at the moment, but at least it has a practical ring to it.

It sort of reminds me of the word "alienation," which once had some scientific parameters and then was co-opted by the dystopian-prone masses.

Yo -- duck and cover before the "bomb" lands!

But at least it isn't the moral cowardice of a man who never met a fact he couldn't or wouldn't corrupt.

opera in Mongolia ... seriously

Wowsers! ... an example of how/why Mongolia has gone ape-shit for opera:

Ariunbaatar doesn’t have a typical background for a contestant in one of the world’s most prestigious opera contests. He grew up in the traditional Mongolian way, living in yurts with his nomadic family, herding cattle on horseback across the steppe. As a child, he rode some 60 miles a day, and he was always singing. He won a place at university in Ulaanbaatar but dropped out after two years when he couldn’t pay the fees, became a taxi driver and one night got chatting to a customer who happened to be the chief of police. Long story short: he joined Ulaanbaatar’s police ensemble, worked his way back to university, then onwards to the grand opera houses of Russia and Europe.

Whoooooeeeeeee!

sons ordered to pay mom

Court orders dentist to pay his own mother for raising him

Judges uphold Taiwanese divorcee’s contracts with her two sons requiring them to reimburse her for their upbringing and education...

Taiwan’s top court has ordered a dentist to pay his mother around £554,000 as reimbursement for the money she spent raising and educating him....

Cases of abuse and abandonment of senior citizens have been on the rise in Taiwan in recent years, prompting calls for a law to jail adults who fail to look after their elderly parents although it is yet to pass.

Let me see: I have three children. It costs an estimated $245,000 to raise a child in the U.S. Does this mean I'm owed $735,000 and never even knew it? I'm afraid this all falls into the category of the old logic silly, "All tables have four legs/ My dog has four legs/ Therefore my dog is a table."

richest religions

I guess it's not especially weird that the financially-angled news agency Reuters should announce the death of Mormon President Thomas Monson with a lead that reads:

(Reuters) - Mormon President Thomas Monson, who headed one of the world’s fastest growing and most affluent religions, has died at his home in Salt Lake City, Utah, the church said on Wednesday.

If the Roman Catholic pope died, would the lead make note of the fact that the Vatican -- home to a lot of simpering about poverty and simplicity -- is the richest religion in the world?

It made me wonder, Trump-fashion, which religions have the most dough. The broad-brush quasi-answer in a 2013 article, puts the top ten at: Roman Catholics, Islam, Judaism, Mormons, Church of England, Episcopalians, Televangelism, Protestantism, Freemasonry, Church of Scientology. Obviously there is overlap and room for confusion ... but it starts the ball rolling, I guess. Here's a Wikipedia take.

Is there a world religion that does not, in one way or another, ask for your money/sweat? And is there any shortage of people who credit some being or state of mind that would encourage them (to hear the pundits tell it) to give and keep on giving? True believers may scoff at worldly wealth and praise a lord of their choosing, but there's a lot of income in them thar woods.

Yes, I know, someone's gotta keep the lights on and besides, you'd just spend it on some worthless and ignoble endeavor ... but still ... just a small footnote.

'Christmas in the Trenches"

It wouldn't be the Christmas season around here without a nod to the following ... a true story for those unfamiliar with the incident. Every now and then a little truth is nice among the fairy tales.

bless the heat

At 6 a.m. it was -6 Fahrenheit ... imagine that. Not so much, "imagine the temperature" as "imagine talking about the weather." I feel like some rag-tag, fake-'em-out-with-endless-chaff TV newscast or one of those people who actually "snowbird" in, of all ticky-tacky places, Florida.

There's a new darts champion, and I'm muttering about the cold. Lawsy.

Or, Iranians who populate a country the U.S. insists on denigrating despite the fact that Iran seems to live up to its part of, for one thing, an agreement about curtailing nuclear advances, are out in the streets protesting the economic difficulties posed partly by sanctions and partly by average, every-day mismanagement and skulduggery. I can never figure out exactly why the U.S. should put Iran in its cross-hairs except for the fact that Iran sees Israel as a pain in the ass. Is that worth U.S. enmity? Is it blasphemy to suggest that Iran may have a point? I don't know, but I do know that I listen to Iranian politics with a slightly higher level of credulity than I do to Donald Trump. It's a sloppy approach, but there it is.

And in the meantime, the steam radiators click and clack in acknowledgement that they are working and producing and doing yeoman service against the plummeting hordes of cold and colder.

At the moment, heat is bloody marvelous!

Shortly (a few months), I will complain that it's too bloody hot!

vacationing with Donald and Bibi

Would it be possible to send U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a remote and uninhabited Pacific island where the two of them could unreservedly pat each other on the back and leave the rest of the world out of their machinations? They deserve each other.

JERUSALEM (AP) -- The ruling Likud Party's central committee has unanimously endorsed a resolution calling for the annexation of Israeli West Bank settlements.

Although the committee is only an advisory body, its decisions reflect the prevailing opinions in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's party.

Several leading politicians, including lawmakers and Cabinet ministers, joined Sunday night's vote to "impose Israeli law on all liberated areas of settlement in Judea and Samaria." Netanyahu remained silent.

Most of the international community considers Israel's West Bank settlements, built on land captured in the 1967 Mideast war, illegal.

The Palestinians called the vote "an outrageous violation" of international resolutions.

The vote followed President Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital - a move that has drawn heavy international criticism.

Facebook nitwittery ... again

Along, no doubt, with being crypto-racist (someone trying so hard that of course he cannot be accused of being a racist), I guess I have to admit I am also, increasingly, a not-so-crypto Facebook-ist ... someone who gags at the notion that the social media sold as bringing us all closer together is actually driving the great 'us' apart. Imagining that "friends" and "enemies" are confected on the internet is not only revolting, it's also wrong from where I sit.

Ralph!

And it is in that regard that I am linking to a Guardian column on the topic:

Former Google and Facebook executives are sounding the alarm about the pervasive power of tech. Will we listen?

Of course 'we' won't. Once you've been bitten by the asshole bug, it is harder to disengage than it is to kick opiods. But that doesn't mean, with the arrival of a new year, that it can't be noted: There was a time when there were actual friends, actual enemies and a lifestyle that relied less on cardboard cutouts... you know -- sorta like grown-ups.

hot and cold

-3F at 7a.m. here.
"Cold" by some standards.
"A heat wave" by others."
And as the Zennies encourage, "When it's hot, sweat. When it's cold, shiver."

happy new year

                                            HAPPY NEW YEAR
                                           !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mt. Everest ruling and drug smuggling

Urk harbor

It's a relief to think that Olympian Oscar Pistorius will no longer be endangered by an application to climb Mt. Everest. True, he's in the slammer for killing his girlfriend, but there is always a lurking possibility ... that has now, for the moment, been erased.

Solo climbers, blind people and double amputees have been banned from climbing Everest under new rules the Nepalese tourism ministry believes will reduce the number of deaths on the mountain.

Whew! Close call.

And then there's the tale of Urk, a close-knit Dutch community "where television and dancing are spurned by some as the devil’s work." Everyone's tight-lipped about it all, but several fishermen in Urk have been drawn into a drug trial involving the smuggling of 261 kilos of cocaine. No one is willing to talk about it, apparently, but still, this community of 20,000 has not dodged the bullet: A close call turned into a direct hit, it seems.

What's the link between these two stories? I haven't got a clue except that they caught my attention.

"Urk" -- who could pass up a name like that?

compendium of weird in the world of sport

It was less like baseball and more like archery practice. And wherever Stephen Piscotty went he had a bull’s-eye on him.
In a bruising, battering tour around the bases , the St. Louis Cardinals outfielder could not stay out of harm’s way. He was hit three times in one inning, as if being tracked by a GPS....

The list goes on and on....