Category Archives: Thoughts @ Large

•  I thought I had invented a new word, charmogram, as in, “He knew that he had said the wrong thing, so he sent her a charmogram.”  Sadly, Winx Club already thought of it.

•  I don’t know how leaders of other nations are viewed by their citizens, but when it comes to our president, Americans seem to have unrealistically high expectations.  We are always looking to elect President Superman.  But we usually wind up with hapless Jimmy Olsen.

•  Here’s a story that has been buried by coronavirus coverage.  On July 29, as reported in The Wire, a 15-year-old Pakistani teen, Faisal Khan, got past three security checkpoints at a Pakistan courtroom and gunned down Tahir Naseem, a U.S. citizen arrested in 2018 for blasphemy.  As a local cleric explained, Naseem “kept saying things like, ‘I’m a messiah or a prophet,’ and that caused great trouble in our village.”

Khan, the shooter, has been hailed as a hero by many fellow Pakistanis.  Lawyers across Pakistan offered to “defend Khan for free, to support what they see as the justified killing of a heretic.”  Needless to say, I find this shocking and sad.

So, how long ago did we more civilized people end our blasphemy trials?  400 years ago? 1000 years ago?  Try 1928…  I don’t mean 1928 years ago but the year 1928 in the U.S.A.  That is when Charles Lee Smith was convicted of blasphemy in Arkansas for distributing atheist literature.  Even better, he was not allowed to testify on his own behalf because he refused to take an oath on the Bible!

We may not condone stonings in 2020, but there’s still plenty of blowback when a person says the wrong thing to the wrong person about religion (as well as many other subjects).  Americans like to bluster about how much we cherish freedom, but far too many of us still don’t take kindly to people who don’t look like, talk like, or think like we do.  So let’s not over-congratulate ourselves on how unlike Pakistan we are.

•  I had to laugh at Trump’s recent insinuation that electing Joe Biden would “hurt God.”  If God could be hurt by Joe Biden, he (Biden) must be more powerful than we all thought.  Powerful enough to pre-ordain the outcome of the election, I would think.  This suggests that God and Trump are both in trouble come November.

•  In most countries, the god is elected by popular vote, not an outdated electoral college.

•  As a side note, if God can be hurt, it means that God feels.  But how can God feel or sense anything without nerves, neurons or substance?  I suggest that God — at least the popular conception thereof — requires far more explaining than how nothing became something.  There you have it, my gender-free atheist thoughts for this year.  No stoning please.

•  I have seen many red skies in the morning and never once has the warning come true.

•  Boomer Mystery Quiz: In the 1966 song “No Milk Today” by Herman’s Hermits (lyrics by Graham Gouldman), why was there no milk today?

•  ▢ Because she had Friday on her mind.
•  ▢ Because she was groovin’ on a Sunday afternoon.
•  ▢ Because she left home to meet a man from the motor trade.
•  ▢ Because she went up, up, and away in her beautiful balloon.
•  ▢ Because she don’t want to work, she just want to bang on the drum all day.

•  The other night, I dreamt that a stoner-type invited me to a party scheduled from 3 AM to 9 AM.  I asked him, “What will you do until 3 AM?”  He said, “Party.”

•  News doesn’t have to be fake to be unhelpful.  Take, for example, this screenshot of statewide COVID-19 figures that regularly appears on our (only) local TV station.  It enumerates the total number of cases, deaths, hospitalizations and tests performed in North Carolina, along with the increase in each figure since the last update.

While the death figure is important, particularly to the victims and their families, knowing the cumulative numbers of cases and tests since the pandemic began doesn’t help a viewer make decisions.  Journalists, of all people, know there’s a difference between statistics and information:  just reciting a screenful of statistics without interpretation is lazy reporting.  Nonetheless, news broadcasts, local and national, seem to thrive on big numbers.  

It would be more informative if (1) local figures were cited rather than statewide figures; (2) current figures (say, over the last two weeks) were cited instead of cumulative figures; and (3) figures were normalized, e.g., cases per week per 100,000 residents, or percent of total ICU capacity remaining.  This would give us a better sense of what it’s like out there, and it would let us compare our situation to other localities.  Is that too much to ask?

It doesn’t seem right that the days are already getting shorter in our fair Hemisphere. I’ve never been a fan of the summer solstice, the buoy in the bay that marks the turn of the sun’s race back to its winter harbour.  But the prospect of ever-diminishing daytime hours seems especially depressing this time around.  I wonder why.

I have gradually lost respect for the coordinator of the White House (emphasis mine) Coronavirus Task Force, Dr. Deborah Birx.  Her public statements seem designed less to inform than to market the effectiveness of Trump administration actions.  I like to give health professionals the benefit of the doubt, but Birx has become the Susan Collins of our government’s pandemic response.  You really can’t count on what she has to say.

For-profit hospitals should award their patients points for emergency room visits and overnight stays.  You would earn 1000 points for every hour spent waiting to be seen in the emergency room, 100 points for every minute between the time you push the call button and a nursing assistant arrives, 2000 points for each time you had to tell a doctor or nurse what was wrong with you instead of the other way around, and 3000 points for trying to understand anything a doctor says to you while you are laying there weak and exhausted.  You would earn one free night in a semi-private room upon reaching Silver status, or a private room if you reach Gold, along with a voucher for a complimentary breakfast and a delicious cookie.

No policeman arrests himself…. except that one time in Mayberry, North Carolina.

My high-school English teacher annotated my final report card with a two-star review: negative attitude.  Yes, I did write and circulate a mocking and disrespectful school-satire magazine among my classmates, but to this day I’m not sure how my attitude should have affected my English grade.  It’s not like I was making crude jokes about Dickens — because those wouldn’t have been very funny.

The Great Saharan Dust Cloud of 2020 has arrived here in the Carolinas. Looking out our family-room window today, I figured our visibility is about 3000 feet. And even with our doors and windows closed, our eyes have begun to smart. What’s next, locusts?

It is time for a poet to step forward.  Poetry has the power to make people “hopeful as a rainwashed hill of moonlit pines.” [Carl Sandburg, “The People, Yes”, 1936].  I hope we are not in a post-poet era but I fear that is the case.  Maya Angelou died six years ago.  No one has replaced her.  Who can name one candidate?  (Please, no votes for Taylor or Beyonce.)

One would like to be optimistic, especially if one is an optimist.  One would like to think that the course of human events can indeed be bent in a favorable direction, if only one makes the effort.  The rest of this thought is left for one (you) to complete.

• You know you are watching a bad movie when… the protagonist opens her eyes to find herself wandering through a bizarre and disorienting landscape, after which she proceeds to act out a violent subconscious wish, and then it is revealed that the scene was a dream.  Or was it!!

• “Let’s agree to disagree” is something said by those who won’t admit they are wrong and don’t want to be confronted with it.

• You know you are lucky when… you dip into this bowl of coleslaw your wife has made and you say to her, wow, this is delicious.  And you eat and eat until the bowl is clean.

And then there is more coleslaw the next day.  And you notice there is a lot more coleslaw in the refrigerator.  Looks like an eight- or nine-day supply of coleslaw.  And you say, I love coleslaw but maybe luck has its limits.

• For some mysterious reason, the maker of Kleenex doesn’t bother to advertise half the ways that its product is useful besides blowing your nose — such as capturing millipedes and stink bugs; degreasing the butter dish before it goes into the dishwasher; temporary blood-clotting aid for nuisance skin wounds; and wiping off the dipstick before you check your engine oil.  These uses all add value to your purchase of Kleenex.  That said, I think Kleenex engineers should work harder on the product’s usefulness as emergency paper.  Kleenex sucks as emergency paper — ink bleeds on it and the product rips apart with the slightest pen pressure.  Really, they could do a lot better.

• Until then, I have an idea for states like Kansas, Missouri and South Dakota — and all other ultra-conservative government-gutting tax-hating states — that you could save a lot of money by printing your election ballots on Kleenex this November.  Just a suggestion!  Think of all those hard-earned tax dollars saved — not to mention how your hard-working citizens could use those unreadable ballots to dry their tears after the election.

• You know you are getting old when… your notion of things lost overwhelms at times.

• Cities have limits; counties and states have lines; nations have borders.  These invisible markings have different names but serve the same function: to define areas where people within may make and enforce rules to their liking.  This penchant for those in power to draw imaginary lines and make self-serving rules can be seen in factories, stock exchanges, ladies’ neighborhood book clubs and police precincts, among countless other places.

• You know you are in a hospital when… things are done to you in a non-linear fashion with little or no explanation, followed by long stretches of inactivity, anxiety, uncertainty and discomfort accompanied by sleep-killing background noise, and then a Doctor-God shows up and makes some pained and undecipherable pronouncements, after which you are hesitantly allowed to get dressed and leave, with less of a nod to your stay than when you check out of a Comfort Inn.

• The Confederate States lost their racist, craven war and surrendered to the United States 155 years ago.  It is possible that someone alive today once met a participant in that war.  Let’s say a 15-year-old boy was conscripted into the Confederate Army in 1865 and lived to be 100.  That Civil War vet may have told his stories to a great-grandson born in the 1930s. The great-grandson would be near 90 today.

However — current support for Confederate symbols, statues and tenets is being voiced by young and middle-aged people, not 90-year-olds.  Evidence enough that, unlike love, hate is a story taught to younger generations unfamiliar with the events.

• Not incidentally, I support the removal of any statue or monument in the U.S. honoring persons who were “heroes” of the Confederacy or who supported slavery.  So, given that George Washington was a slave-holder, what do we do with the Washington Monument?  Here is my idea: paint the monument black for 77 years, representing the time from when our Constitution was ratified (with its abhorrent three-fifths-of-a-person language) to the time when its 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery, was ratified.  That could serve as a symbolic first paragraph of any reparations act.

• On a mildly positive note, NASCAR has announced that Confederate flags will be banned from the grounds of its future events.  But take heart, Southern Men:  you can still cheer the wanton burning of fossil fuels in car engines… there will just be a less-racist exhaust.