In my youth I was apolitical. After 9/11 I became very politicized. I am now apolitical again. Don’t get me wrong; I still read about politics every day and vote in every election, but I invest no emotion in any political party or politician. Now, we can see more clearly than at any time in…
Dead son rising
October 29, 2023
I belong to a very small club. A one-man club. Actually, I belong to several: I’m the only person to be screwed by five Web designers in a row when creating one Website; I’m the only person to have had a spontaneous recovery from total hepatic failure; and I’m the only person in the world…
The stupidest thing you’ll read all day
October 28, 2023
Strangely enough, the author of the stupidest thing you’ll read all day is Oliver Stone: As Samuel Huntington aptly reminded readers in a statement of particular relevance to the United States, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence….
Swimming at last
October 28, 2023
Dave, The Best Therapist in the World, told me that my situation was similar to a person afraid of learning to swim. It wasn’t water that scared me but emotion. Feeling deep emotions was terrifying. I was raised to think that genuine emotions were dangerous. This was a tradition on both sides of the family….
Vergangenheitsbewältigung
October 28, 2023
The Germans are great at coming up with words to describe the complexity of human existence. Schadenfreude. “The humor one feels at another’s misfortune.” Laughing when someone’s pants fall off in public, for example. Backpfeifengesicht. “A face badly in need of a fist.” Someone who’s got the kind of face you just want to smash….
My sincerest wish for the U.S. Postal Service
October 26, 2023
I wrote before about the theft ring in the U.S. Postal Service. It’s based in New York. Postal workers steal valuable postcards sent from Germany and sell them to collectors. Nobody will do a thing to stop it. Not the Postal Service, not Congress, not the FBI, and not the Germans. Nobody cares. Well, it’s…
A very hard night
October 26, 2023
It was a very hard night, the worst since Mom died. I listened to people on the radio discuss their experiences with evil spirits, being possessed, having demons make them look like old women, and all manner of meretricious claptrap. The host had that super-earnest quality, like he was trying his damnedest to get across…
Optimizing the Website
October 24, 2023
Today I learned about optimizing the Website. The reason my Website is invisible to search engines is because certain things have to be done to make search engines happy. Why? “Because that’s the way it is.” As a child I got that answer from my father whenever I’d ask why we had to do something…
How things got better
October 22, 2023
I had a love-hate relationship with Howard Jones’s song “Things Can Only Get Better.” Though I wanted to believe, I just didn’t. There was no evidence that Howard was right. Loved the music, though. The bass line of this live version is one of my favorites. Carmen loved it too, the reason I never listened…
An apolitical look at “death panels”
October 21, 2023
I just read an article titled “Canada has Death Panels—and That’s a Good Thing,” by Adam Goldenberg. My plan is to avoid expressing political opinions. It’s not hard, because politics has become astonishingly negative and destructive. This is truly a shame, and it’s shameful. There are lots of things I’d like to talk about. We…