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The laptop freed the writer from his office, and the iPhone freed him from his laptop. An iPhone is compact and light enough to be carried almost everywhere, and the writer can now choose the setting in which to write his article: a park or a beach, for example. I began this blogpost on my iPhone while lying in bed, on my back. The choice of setting can enhance the writer's creativity, diminish his anxiety, and help him find more time during the day....
Gloomy Sunday
- 7:00 PM Sunday, October 5, 2008
[Dead people in the streets. Everywhere.]
Yes, it's Sunday, and yes it's gloomy. Not totally gloomy. In fact, the sun is out and it's near the end of a beautiful day. So why am I writing about this? Because I'm feeling kind of gloomy, and there's no better day to write about gloomy Sundays and about the song "Gloomy Sunday," which has an interesting story behind it. If you had read my last blogpost, you might have gotten the idea that I was skeptical about the huge financial bill that was pending before the US Congress, skeptical because the same people who caused the financial crisis were now lobbying hard for a $700 billion-dollar fix. And, although there is much evidence that the bill was opposed by a large majority of Americans, it was passed anyway. And, yes, it's October, autumn already, and yes, it's Sunday, the gloomiest day of the week second only to "blue Monday." My last two blogposts were grim, melancholy, and morose, and now: Gloomy Sunday. Will I ever pull out of this spiritual nosedive? You betcha. But not in this blogpost, which is all about gloom. Not gloom and doom. Just gloom.
The past few days I've been distracted by major political/economic events, which have caused me great concern, worry, and frustration. As I write this the US Congress is supposedly closing a deal where hundreds of billions of dollars of bad debt will be purchased at a discount, purportedly by zhlubs like me, the American taxpayer. My mind boggles. I am no economist, but I am caught between the threat (the collapse of the world economy!) articulated by our Hyas Muckamuck, US President George W. Bush, and the knowledge, reinforced by plain common sense, that the same muckamucks who got us into the mess are now promising to get us out. Fortunately, I have found another way of understanding this whole mess. You see, I have just returned from a vacation in Alaska.
September Song
- 7:14 PM Monday, September 1, 2008
[Like a kid coming back from summer vaction]
The first day of September has rolled around. The belladonna lilies warned me. Of course it had to happen. Summer has got to end. It's not officially over until 22 September at 1544 UTC. But here in the USA, today is Labor Day, the first Monday on September, reportedly established in 1882 by the Central Labor Union of New York, Brooklyn, and New Jersey. It's the last day of a symbolic summer vacation. Tomorrow is back to work.
A few weeks ago I saw Sergei Bodrov's movie about the life of young Temujin, the Mongol slave boy who grew up to become Genghis Khan, conqueror of Eurasia from China to Afghanistan in the early 1200's. Wow. It was quite a movie, somewhat long and detailed compared to a Hollywood flick. Some of the scenes were so fantastic that I thought they were fictionalized, so I looked up Temujin in Wikipedia and found that the same events were believed to be true. One recurring scene beguiled me, when Temujin, at various ages beginning in boyhood, climbs a mountain to commune with a sky god named Tengri, personified in the film as a mysterious wolf. That scene led me to more web searching only to discover that Tengri is/was the universal deity of the Turkic and Mongol peoples, and as such, an excellent point of departure for a Coffeeblog extravaganza about Eurasia, Turks, Mongols, and sky gods in general. There is actually a religion called Tengriism, labeled pagan or shamanistic, but the worship of Tengri brought me back to memories of my school days. You see, I am so old that I remember that, along with the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, at the beginning of every school day we recited a prayer.
When I was in junior high school in 1957, I thought I knew all an American needed to know about Russia, and maybe I did, for that era of the Cold War. They had nukes, we had nukes. They could blow us up, and we could blow them up in retaliation if they tried it. We knew what Caucasians were too: white people. It was a polite way of saying it. Even today, if you ask an American what Caucasian means he will probably say it is a racial term. Mountain climbers might know about the Caucasus range, but even news junkies who know all about the Chechen wars with Russia probably don't think much about the mountains. Georgia, of course, is a southern state where Jimmy Carter once grew peanuts and they had the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, where a bombing took place. Well, bombing is still going on in Georgia: Not Jimmy's Georgia, the other Georgia, the independent nation on the southern slope of the Caucasus mountains. That Georgia, the Georgia which wants to join NATO, the Georgia who has the big oil pipeline. Oh yeah: the bombing. The Russians reportedly bombed Poti, the port from which the oil gets shipped to points west, like for instance the USA.
