Words, Sentences, Paragraphs
I’m reminded I took great delight in this book some years ago, happy to learn that the lowly entertainments of the Gold Rush-era San Francisco that I sporadically write about were even more shameless and depraved than any I experienced there myself.
I chanced upon a fantastic review by Gary Kamiya, a respected observer and historian of our favorite city (and a fellow alumnus of Berkeley High School): Sex, sin and the gangs of San Francisco.
I would be very unpopular in my crowd for this but I don’t know what’s so bad about Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law. It only applies to kids under ten years old. Before ten, kids are pretty much just boys and girls with little idea of or interest in sex-related information. And a parent who thinks they should be so informed can always teach them themselves.
The problem with the law is apparently what it foreshadows. But that’s irrelevant. You can oppose a law as written, but it makes little sense to oppose it because of its authors’ presumed intentions beyond it.
For the record, I’m allied with the LGBTQ spectrum and have a number of friends who identify with it in just about every way. Of particular interest these days is transgenderism. I believe it is supported by science in addition to common sense, whether or not I can relate personally. I only mention it because while this fact isn’t relevant either, it’s common practice for people to take one little deviation from their dogma and throw you in with their enemy. No one who reads this would do that but I might as well be preemptive anyway.
I was always a Star Trek fan. But since it went behind paywalls and expanded into countless versions with a mythos beyond my comprehension, I’ve let it go. I’m not going to pay for a streaming service for it, nor try to binge an entire season in a free week-long trial subscription.
So I was pleasantly surprised when Prime, which I pay for, had the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. I sat down during dinner to watch the first episode.
It was pretty dumb.
It had a lot going for it. It follows the career of the Enterprise about 10 years before the classic show. The visuals are up to expectation. It features Captain Pike, whom us old folks remember as a badly scarred disembodied head tooling about in a wheeled box with little flashing lights on it. This takes place before whatever happened to him happened to him. All that is fine.
But the show has the same stupid flaws as all the others. It has two, no three, no four “features” that just make it dumb. One, they encounter a planet with inhabitants who are human except for fancy face makeup. Two, the planet happens to be at the same stage of development as Earth when the show was produced … and the people on it speak American English. Three, every away mission is performed by the most valuable crew members rather than by a specially trained and relatively expendable away team. And four, our heroes violate the Prime Directive in a major way and get away with it.
I was bitching about this shit in the ’80s. Can’t they have fixed it by now? Am I being too picky here? No I’m not, because a good story should not distract you with stupid shit. But this does.
The problem is, most people don’t care. And so Paramount etc makes a ton of money. Well, I gotta admit, a ton of money is a good thing. You get some creative license if you can pull that off. And they’re not really taking it too far. I mean it’s not as if they do some truly moronic bullshit such as, I don’t know, have President Lincoln hunt vampires.
I come from a long line of pack rats. I’m trying to break the spell and am going through a surprising volume of things kept by past generations. It ain’t easy because I fully have the gene for it and the space too. But I know it doesn’t serve me to just keep all the crap “for later”. Also my girlfriend is in the business of consulting with people who have too much shit and helps them get rid of it and reorganize their houses. Being as her background left her with nothing she didn’t get herself and has gotten rid of a lot of that too, she sees mine and just has to stifle herself. Except she doesn’t.
I found a box with newspapers. The SF Chronicle from when men landed on the Moon that my grandparents kept. A Sunday Chronicle from July 4, 1976 that I kept. A couple others from the ’80s that I threw in the trash. Elsewhere I found an envelope containing various family-related clippings and, at the bottom, a badly folded yellowed old newspaper. I opened it up.
I thought this was pretty neat. Until I did my homework and learned that if it has the picture on it it’s not an original edition. It’s a fake produced for promotional purposes at various times from 1880 to the early 1900s. For consistency I should throw it away with the others that are not fake but not interesting either. This one’s too old for that. I’ll just add a note to it so some hapless descendant doesn’t get all excited and then learn the truth and think I’m an idiot.
A certain salesman who once talked his way into the Oval Office may say “Happy Memorial Day” but I sure as hell won’t. Wishing a happy holiday for those who remember loved ones that gave everything for their country isn’t my style.
I believe the last time a relative gave that sacrifice was at Guadalcanal, but I haven’t been able to complete the necessary research. I honor him, though, and all others, too many to comprehend. Not all died for objectively good reasons. But that’s what we get when people, inherently flawed and layered in their motivations, run a country.
I put my flag up yesterday in its mount on the second story and will take it down tomorrow. I fly it properly. I’m not impressed by half-patriots who fly their flag all the time but care nothing for the protocol that shows respect. They leave it out all day and night, all year long, in all weather. On a random day you see flags faded and torn, draping themselves over untrimmed bushes, flopped up into the rain gutter, hanging limp and forgotten in the dead of night. I’m not the sort of patriot who has to remind the world of it every day, as if to remind myself, and then care nothing for the flag when my mind is on something else.
I fly it on certain days only. I fly it for the full 24 hours, and thus I rig up a spotlight to keep it in the light. In the dead of night my flag is nearly the only light in the neighborhood and certainly the brightest. It’s there now, and will be lit tonight as it was last night, and will come down, with no chance of touching the ground or the roof tiles, tomorrow.
Maybe I’m a stickler because I’ve come to hate false patriots. They are legion these days.
Chatbots are replacing humans on various telephone helplines. Wait until chatbots are used on various suicide prevention helplines. That will make a difference.
When he was around 80 my father reported that in a conversation with an old friend, they agreed that if they had known they would live so long they would have taken better care of themselves. I remembered that as I limped down the stairs just now. I’m in my mid-60s, and the 60s are a critical time. My body is changing faster and faster and not for the better. I have to decide to make serious changes in how I take care of it lest I live long enough to regret that I didn’t.
Every day I decide to put it off to the next day. It’s only one day.
I was in an intense conversation recently around the fact I don’t have a favorite cut of steak. That I don’t was completely unbelievable to the other party. It was as if by not knowing what my favorite cut of steak is, I don’t really know what I want in general and thus the wants I do express can’t be trusted.
That sounds crazy when I write it down. And it may be a simple and thus unfair characterization of my interlocutor’s position. But close enough, I think.
My response was and is that I’ve never felt I could afford steak so I’ve never tried enough cuts to see which is best. I know what kinds of beer I like and which one I guess you could call my favorite — pilsner — but beer is different than steak. It’s affordable. Similarly, I don’t know from cigars or whisky. I’m not interested in the former however fashionable, and the latter costs too much for me to go for it much. I know I prefer certain wines. But the wines I drink are affordable.
In time this conversation led to the strange idea that one can say what one likes is your favorite without having been systematic about making the choice. An example given was that someone could say Toyota was their favorite car make without having driven anything other than Toyotas. I thought that was crazy. How can you know something is your favorite without having tried others? But no one can try all the car makes, yet having a favorite is not out of the question. I was asked my favorite make of car. I thought a second and said Jaguar. Why? Have I ever driven one? Uh, I don’t think so. Helped a guy work on the engine once. But there was the Aha. If I’ve never driven it, how can it be my favorite? Touché, I guess. But then, if her favorite steak is rib-eye, has she really tried all of the others? I didn’t think to ask.
Yes, she. My girlfriend knows what she wants and knows what she doesn’t want. She’s not interested in anything in-between. And while this might mean I am not in-between as a choice of boyfriend, my personal wants have rarely been entirely clear to me. I live in a gray world where nearly everything has some merit and nearly everything can be questioned. This is my personality but it also arises, I think, from having a scientific outlook. My father was a research scientist and influenced me with an outlook wherein all knowledge boils down to hypothesis and theory and not absolute fact. Trained as an engineer, I see things similarly. While the famous test of an engineer is whether or not they will go on the maiden flight of the airplane they designed, they will always know there is something hidden somewhere in the details that could render the design something other than what was intended, i.e. make it something that looks like an airplane but is really just an earth-bound projectile. In my world of electronics that mostly meant letting the smoke out of a circuit but the idea remained the same. There are no absolutes. It’s all a calculation of the odds.
This also arises from the fact I never cared to be sophisticated. A lot of people do. They want to know their favorite whisky or fashion designer or classical composer because it makes them look and feel smart and worldly. But in the old online discussion groups there was at least one person who always looked for chinks in my armo(u)r and one of those, he thought, was my posing as someone down-to-earth and common-sensical when he knew I was neither. It was a weird charge but it came up several times.
So maybe not being systematic and collecting all the data doesn’t prevent you having favorites after all. Maybe I could just have answered the question. Maybe the problem was the question was about steak. I’ve always liked steak but I have also generally gone for the least expensive or the most familiar. I guess that would be the New York cut. It’s tougher and less tasty than rib-eye. But I don’t really know because — and this really frosted her pumpkin — I’ve never paid much attention. Order a steak? Get one of the three least costly. Flank, New York, I don’t know.. It’s steak, for God’s sake. You can’t lose. But suppose the question was about, I don’t know, classical composers. I actually do have favorites, being all unsophisticated notwithstanding. The top three will always include Beethoven. Right now I’m listening to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, which I’ve always loved. But, see (and I just realized this). She knows steak because she’s a gourmet chef. She doesn’t know classical music because, as she might simply put it, she’s not white. (Subtle sense of humor there. She makes fun of white people for all sorts of things I do.)
So: do you have a favorite something? Why not?! How the hell do you know?!
$70,000: made in one week by a woman who created an AI version of herself and charged dumb-ass desperate men a dollar a minute to be their online girlfriend. Seems to me if you have digital copies that can hold conversations, there’s no limit to how many dollar-a-minute sessions you can run at once.
Of course, once other performers follow her lead and do the same, the price of online masturchat is going to drop precipitously. This is bad for the professional chaturbaters who aren’t willing to risk having a computer program speak for them, but hey. It’s the creative destruction of capitalism, red of tooth and claw.
Something else that’s going to get out of hand is California’s drift towards reparations. Once they decide what to do with regards to injustices against African-Americans (only applicable by the way to those who were here before 1900), it’s only a matter of time before the Chinese speak up about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and other similar policies. And the line will grow.
Of course it will pass. What non-conservative politician will take the political risk of voting against it? I’m not entirely opposed, myself. I haven’t seen anyone mention this but it seems to me that if all that money is redistributed into a segment of the general population, it will flow back into the economy as people use it to buy things. Hopefully they’ll invest in houses and college educations. But people will be people and I wouldn’t bet on it. Never the less, cash will flow, generally a good thing. Wealth redistribution is a dicey business when it amounts to theft, even if it does increase what they call the velocity of money. I don’t know, maybe it always amounts to theft. Well, the purchase and transportation of humans across the Atlantic was wealth distribution on a brutally grand scale. What goes around etc.
We can anticipate a storm of opposition from people who (not wrongly) object to their taxes being used to “make up” for injustices performed a very long time ago by people they have no connection to. I can’t argue with that. I’m just looking at the economics. I see a weird and ironic sort of kinship between this radical left proposal and the trickle-down Reaganomics espoused by some conservatives. Both seek to put wealth where it will seep back into the economy. I don’t believe the latter worked (disclosure: I supported it for a long time). That might mean it won’t work either.
I’ve seen literally nothing of the Coronation, bar some stills at the head of news articles I didn’t read. I was all into it as a child and even had a tree of English royalty on my wall that went back to the Conquerer, but I don’t care now. Nothing against royalty. It’s oddly cool that some countries still have royalty. They just aren’t very interesting people. They’re rich people with fancy clothes, little personal freedom, and less power — except for kings who aren’t called kings, such as the twerp who runs N Korea.
I don’t make time to write these days hence my posts are short blurts about a subject chosen after two or three seconds of grueling concentration. My novel is buried in dust and cobwebs. I did make a neato art thing last week as a wedding present for my ex (the girlfriend of 2018-2021) but it didn’t turn out and I must make time to do it over. I make things. Maybe I’ll post pictures someday.
My girlfriend pointed out that my girlfriends tend to leave me and then get married. That’s a simplification but I don’t mind it. I have a character flaw in that I want everyone to be happy. It’s a flaw because when you want everyone to be happy you sometimes have to teeter-totter and that’s not always good for me, or for someone who’s close to me. I have an idea how I turned out that way. Maybe I’ll bleed it out here sometime, maybe I won’t.
Last night I took a new med and it has kicked my ass. I hate meds. But my girlfriend gets pissed if I rebel. So I took it. Doc said drowsiness was a side effect. She wasn’t kidding. Even though I got some sleep afterwards (five hours, hey, I take what I can get) I’m dragging ass today at work.
So here while on the clock I signed my unfocused self up to a social network. Not Mastadon, I looked at that and meh. Tribel. Name is potted_plant. How do.
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