Presidential squabble, gobble, gobble.

Clamshells open, fingers fly, good ones here, bad ones there. 

It wasn’t all that long ago that I happened to be at the local grocery store, and just so happened to witness the craziest thing. There was a customer who had opened 5 or 6 cartons of blueberries and was picking out all of the bad ones from the carton that he had decided to take and was exchanging them for better ones that were in the other boxes.

This is only a rather disgusting story by itself, but if I add a few more details it becomes much more interesting. It’s not the sort of thing I would do, but from a consumers point of view it's somewhat understandable. However, this particular individual also happens to operate a local media outlet. Which begs the question, what kind of news does he/she choose to broadcast/publish? If he/she only chooses the juiciest berries, would it not also be plausible that the intended audience never really sees the whole picture?

Coincidentally the final Presidential debate will air tonight. It will be an hour and half spent talking about nothing. Yet, you can’t say that government doesn’t have a role to play. It’s just that nobody really cares about infrastructure, until it’s in a state of disrepair or about unemployment numbers until they’re out of work.  

Having said all that… it’s thanksgiving weekend… so relax, eat well, and buy frozen blueberries next time you decide you’d like to make a pie.   

Exeleutherostomized Coprolalia

I haven't watched the Force Awakens yet, it's not that I won't, but I really don't like the idea of adding my hard earned pocket change to the billions of dollars it has "forcibly convoked" so far. You would think that Disney's stock price would continue to climb, but, so far, it has done exactly the opposite. They are losing ESPN subscribers at a very alarming rate. They blame the millenials for cord cutting, which could very well be partially true, but I think they have a much larger problem on their hands. It's much more probable that the reason that they are losing customers has more to do with marketing overkill than anything else. Who really wants to watch 40 minutes of advertising for every 20 minutes of game time. Who wants to watch all stars, who are often paid an annual salary in the millions of dollars, pump themselves up with every sort of drug imaginable? What about the families that are affected by chronic traumatic encephalopathy?

The most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about - David Foster Wallace

When a husband says that his wife is a terrible mother...it makes everything Trump has ever said seem less maniacal. It isn't my place to say how anybody else should raise their family, but it is terribly upsetting to see an egoist claim that he's a "great father"in the very same breath. O'Leary might have earned his place on Santa's Notley list, but at least he recognizes that it's important to have (business) partners whose strengths compensate for his weaknesses. - It's a rather amusing reflection; even if it's marble topped, there are still some things that money can't buy.

Together we can face this wildness and walk hand-in-hand into the etcetera. - Margaret Laurence

Today's blog entry will be short and sweet, and might even end happily ever, but that would be too predictable. Instead I'll leave you with a beautifully tragic alternative, and we'll try to forget that global warming might very well spin out another Death Star.

...

Under a Streetlight

She could have had
Anything she wanted
My heart devoid of care
She set my soul on fire

She used me up
She left me drunk
On the cold cement
I could not speak a word

She left me
In the depths of my depravity
There was a sadness all around

My skin crying for a touch
No matter how cold
To bring feeling back

If you ever wondered
I'm right where you remember
If you ever wanted
To take my breath away - K.B.

Gridlock

It’s not the deep dark secrets that haunt you; it’s the awareness that sharing the things in your head is as ridiculous as trying to walk with stilts on wheels.  Anyone can write about happy things, but a writer sees more than that. It’s not very often that one wakes up to see hoarfrost on the spider webs and finds peanuts in places where the clever old blue jay had hidden them for the winter. - It’s rather odd to think that atypical weather patterns might very well be the new normal. 

     

I’m not exactly sure how history will remember Trudeau the 2^nd… but so long as twice the fool doesn’t become thrice the dunce...   but one thing is certain he’s making some of the things happen that he said he would, which was something governments aren’t usually known to do.

Trump says all sorts of things that he has absolutely zero intention of doing.  The part where he isn’t writing the script is rather remarkable. Somewhere along the way… his team of tycoons has convinced America that Patriotism always wins. – It’s not difficult.   The current administration is spending $1.6billion every single day on military operations; just think how many miles of fence that would build. He gives the illusion that democracy is working, and recognizes that people will do anything you want them to… so long as they believe that it was their idea.  Yes, his tactics are unconventional, but I predict that his presidential run will only be cut short by one of two things… assassination… or if the media refuses to give him any air time.

It’s rather unfortunate that racial and religious differences never seem to make it past the debate stage. The CBC recently announced that it will not allow any online comments on Indigenous issues.  I certainly recognize and understand why they have made that decision. However, I also think that despite the fact that certain comments and remarks are inappropriate, it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily wrong. We’ve all heard the phrase “We just want to bring attention to the issues that our people are facing.” Yet, somewhere along the way adjustments have to be made.

CBC Indigenous Commenting: Editors Blog

CBC closes comments on indigenous stories after 4th comments moderator dies

Political correctness only works until the people realize that the emperor doesn't have any clothes. Merkel is on the cover of time magazine today, but it won't be long before she is ushered out the back door.  - Trudeau was recently featured in Vogue so you need not despair.  

Jeremiadically Loquacious

One of the problems with reading really beautiful authors, is that it leaves you feeling like there’s no point in even trying to match them. It’s not that they don’t inspire thoughts, idea, and a million fragments of possibility, but it seems they escape the mind far too soon to be useful. 

Given that I also have the inexplicable tendency to voice that which is beyond comprehension; I’ll share  a previously unpublished notation: If it is possible to fathom the possibility of anxious lovers contending over an individual, then it is all the more likely that the said recipient may at some point reciprocate.  

Supposedly an adult makes thousands of decisions every single day, but nobody ever talks about the millions of sub-conscious assumptions that are made.

Wisdom grows out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion.    - Michael Ondaatje

Sometimes I make speculations about the most innocuous things. It seemed logical to me that the likelihood of blinking would increase whenever there was a natural break in concentration. So, I did a little bit of research and found that my theory was at least partially confirmed by a previous study: The synchronized blinks occur at “non-critical” points during the movie - at the conclusion of an action sequence or when the main character disappears from view.

… I can't trust that we do not extend beyond our persons because 

memory is a fickle, rudimentary executioner…  - wordofthewillow DA

Did you ever marvel at the fact that an outdoor trampoline is targeted by birds large + small alike? It's an anomaly that closely mirrors demographically targeted advertising. Just ask Kellogg’s to verify if in fact they sell more cereal because it’s the #1 fibre to promote your digestive rhythm. (Senior citizens will still have the majority... even when Harper doesn't.) 

I’m still not sure if it was Chad or Avril who wrote “ thought we were meant to be”… but clearly his someday somehow mantra wasn’t cutting it any more…. so much for the Pez dispenser.

Curmudgeonly Egregious

 Does anyone remember the days when their friends would talk about their Columbia House subscription?  Oh what a penny could buy!  (It's an interesting read, for those of you that have the time.) Coincidentally, the U.S. government recently announced that it will scale back their data collection of phone calls sent and received by regular civilians. Yet, up until Snowden blew the whistle on them… they denied that such a “program” existed.  

• I like the idea of using the letters NSA in an online document; it all but guarantees that “someone” will read it! 

Sometimes when the internet connection is pitifully slow, I’ll play Minesweeper while I wait. The game is designed in such a way that there is only one rule…  “If you don’t know, don’t go.”  I'm not going to make "insightful" generalizations about navigating the minefield of life… but I do think it’s interesting that we tend to make things way more complicated than they are.  How many times have you heard phrases such as… “Be the ball!” It’s rather like saying…. “Imagine that the spherical mass attached to your body has detached itself and you’ll do just fine!”      - The ox is slow, but the earth is patient.  

… 

Whether or not you are an MMA fan or not… those three letters, are all too often, on prominent display in the headline news.  I’m not going to go into great depth about how a young girl, but articles such as this are incredibly sobering. (Human Trafficking Charges. 

The anguish, the shame, and the horror etched in her face is nearly unbearable. 
* This image was originally included in the article.

I understand why they didn’t allow comments on the article, but what shook me to the core was the thought that by putting all of the blame on her, it somehow absolves the rest of us from any wrongdoing. It's easy to say that the system is broken, but I'm absolutely convinced that it doesn't have to be. 

Phonetically Frenetic.

For any of you who might be wondering when the new Lifehouse album would be coming out; the answer is very soon; which is great. Anyway… our good friend Wikipedia says that Jason Wade’s father was a marriage counsellor… but his parents divorced when he was 12. There likely isn’t an organization who would hire him now, based on his credibility, but in my opinion… does that not give him the most comprehensive of vantage points? It’s interesting to think that the anachronistic probability of this apparent dichotomy is so incredibly remote that its occurrence is all the more intriguing.  There tends to be a pre-conceived notion that simply by following the formulas prescribed by people with successful marriages that achieving the same results should automatically be replicable. Success and failure are about as predictable as the whiskey jack who follows you down a nature path simply because you’ve piqued his curiosity.

...

My personal data isn’t worth the time and effort of those who seek to sell it to the people who say they aren’t buying it. I don't really have any particular desire to feed the system any more than I have to though, so I’ve rather deliberately chosen to pursue a lifestyle of technological distancing; well at least theoretically .Unfortunately the economy of scale is all powerful and isn’t really interested in listening to querulous borogroves. - Certainly not when you could be drumming up market share by bringing the internet drone to whichever continent finds itself deserving of the most lucrative government contract. 

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

                                                                                             – Aristotle; Great Grandfather of the Goognormous Empire.

I am planning to cancel my internet subscription for the summer and I’m quite looking forward to it.  I don’t have any intentions of boycotting indefinitely, as it would come at the expense of losing connections that I wouldn’t otherwise have. It's interesting to think how thoughts and lives that are shared in the online is something that no previous generation has ever experienced. I’ve been part of an art community called Deviant Art for quite some time and I recently happened upon the following:

5:30 am, get up and get ready for them to pump poison into my veins. I don’t mind my hair falling out, it’s this damned pain that always returns, no matter what new medicine they give me. Four hours of sitting, doing nothing, then feeling weak and disoriented afterwards. Fun times, huh? I only need thirty-seven naps a day. Try to make myself eat and drink water. 124 lbs I weigh… my girlfriend looks at me with sad eyes. She thinks I’ll die soon. Maybe I will, I don’t know. But for now, it’s off to chemo.

Several people posted tributes in his memory. You can read one of them here if you wish; it’s short.  For Ron    Much of his work can be found here: http://bark.deviantart.com/

…

I don’t have any sort of fancy conclusion… but I will include one last quote.  Just because…  :P

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.
                                                                                                 –  Milan Kundera

Prescient Concomitance

Painters will tell you that first you start with the broad brush strokes… and then you fill in the details afterwards…. writing is sort of the opposite. You write about the things that you are thinking about, and then pray and hope that somehow it comes out right.

You can talk all you want about the armchair cynic, and about how ridiculous human nature is; It wants what it wants... until it has it, then it doesn't. Unless of course when you consider that the number of topics is illimitable, it makes the declaration of a stated direction more of an ambiguous prevarication than anything else.

Longing and desire goes further than instant satisfaction; that's human nature. - Anna Sui

Believe it or not, mastering of the art of public manipulation isn’t a particularly flattering self descriptor, but it will guarantee you a job pretty much anywhere. . However, for us melancholics sitting in the back row, it’s not difficult to see that the puppeteers hardly have to move a finger and yet they almost always get the desired result. There is a most peculiar correlation between genius and the coinciding belief in conspiracy theories. Even in the face of categorical and logistical evidence that points out inherent flaws, a fundamental belief isn’t easily overruled.

There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.- A. Tennyson

It’s easy to see how the argument for establishing a state of equilibrium via introduction of law + order quickly culminates with gradational equivocations. There is nothing particularly insightful to be gained by observing the world in the most perspicaciously unobtrusive way possible, but it’s even more curious still is the abundance of novels that feature reclusive gravediggers and courtesans.

You can only be so warm, so dry, and so full… after that it’s irrelevant. – D. Wells

I’ve never been very good at writing poetry, but often times it captures those rather curious incidents in life and expresses them… in the only way that they possibly could be.
That’s the beauty of writing, it’s black and white on the surface, but it’s so much more than that.