Trying to Stop being Clever

Still thinking about education, it's funny; when I was a kid, I didn't care about grades. I didn't put in any effort to raise or maintain grades. I didn't even pay attention to what they were. There are a couple of factoids I retained from my middle school years, and they're not anything to be proud of. Now, back in college since 1995, I started out getting good grades. I took classes that interested me, and I had little trouble getting As in them.  Then I started taking general ed classes, with a goal of eventually getting a degree. These classes started to challenge me. Political Science, Economics: these took real effort to succeed in. But once I did, and then I got back into taking classes I liked (I had decided to major in music by then), I once again had an easy time maintaining my grades; Music Fundamentals was very enlightening and enthralling. The other music classes didn't feel like as much of a challenge as some of the gen ed classes because music is ...

In a world with 8 billion people, or in a country with 330 million, it's impossible for everyone to get everything they (think they) want. We're always going to have some reason to grumble, even if we have to make something up. For many, complaining is part of our personality. We can't take every dissatisfaction in our lives and treat it as a life-or-death issue. I think personalized news feeds are one of the worst things we can do to a nation. If we're not all seeing the same stories, we'll never be on the same page. In the interest of not losing their users, websites filter out anything we aren't predetermined to want to see, to keep us comfortable and scrolling and seeing their ads. This shields us from the uncomfortable fact that things are going on that we don't like, and that people, who are otherwise just like us, have different opinions than us. I've blogged before about how we need a common enemy to rally us together, to unite for our own good. ...

Thinking about school this morning, for some reason I started to compare myself to my parents. I'm not a college graduate. Soon I will have an undergraduate degree, but not even the higher one, just the lowest, easiest one to get: the Associate Degree. I guess I will officially be an associate.  While I tend to look down on this degree as barely significant in the grand scheme, I am wrangling a little bit of pride in the accomplishment. That's when I started to compare myself to my parents. With an Associate degree, I've essentially matched my father's level of education; he earned his AS long ago, and had some supplemental education classes, I believe. So, technically, I have a broader general education than he received from school, because of the concentration of core/GE classes required between the Arts and Sciences degrees. In the "school of life" I believe I also have a broader education than him, because he has limited his experiences to mainly things he...

  I was reading a letter written by Pedro Almodovar about the Academy Awards ceremony. This isn't going to be about The Slap. Neither was Pedro's letter. Anyway, he mentioned early on in the story that he doesn't watch his own films. I've heard that about actors as well. I have a musician friend who once said something about getting "caught" listening to your own music is some sort of taboo. Well, I'm here to say that I do listen to my own music. For one thing, you can hardly help hearing it when you're writing it, practicing it, recording it, mixing it. But once it's done, does it go on a shelf, never to be listened to again? Is it "uncool" to listen to your own stuff? Well, I don't listen to my music because it's the cool thing to do. I listen to it for several reasons. First of all, I'm listening for ways that I can improve it. As I'm going through the production process, I listen to it in the office, in the bedroom, in...

I've seen a lot, and to use the modern parlance, a lot a lot a lot, of dramatizations of backward time travel. You know, where someone goes back in time to meet their parents, or to discover the answer to some mystery, or just by accident. Whatever the reason, there are many complications. We've heard of the "butterfly effect" that can cause untold changes in future history from the smallest change in the past. The dramatizations often address certain aspects of this, but they can't possibly capture all the many changes and the drastic result of such interference. There's also the fact that, if backward time travel were possible, wouldn't we be all too aware of it by now? The people who come "back" usually end up going forward again to where they came from, like time travel is a round-trip ticket. Aside from the presumption that, for this type of time travel to be possible, many (if not all) points in time must exist simultaneously, there are so ...

So-called "Cancel Culture" isn't about taking things away from you. The removal of possibly-offensive items from the offerings of some companies is not about depriving you of these things, it's about the companies wanting to no longer contribute to things and ideas that offend some people. It's a basic business principle: give the people what they want. If the majority of people are calling for change, most big companies will make that change in the interest of business. I can almost guarantee you that there are changes which have been made in the past for exactly the same reasons as the recent decisions, which have benefitted you. Just to get to where we are now, to where you have these things to be outraged about the changing of, has taken many, many generations of change and progress. When the few cry out that injustices are being inflicted on toys or cartoon characters by those who control said commodities, what they are really saying is, "I value the sta...

I'm glad someone is thinking beyond Drake's Equation and considering more aspects of the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations. But there is something they don't seem to be considering (I wonder if they are). It may seem juvenile to bring up dinosaurs, but there, I just did. In considering the evolution of an intelligent life form, and the development of civilization, do they consider the role that dinosaurs played? When narrowing down the likelihood of a life form going through a similar process as Earth humans did, you have to recognize that the odds of the catastrophic event that killed the dinosaurs happening on these other planets at around the same time in the evolution of said sauropods would be very slim. So, on a planet similar enough to Earth, where similar events have taken place in the evolution of life, doesn't that suggest that something akin to dinosaurs would develop first? With the unlikely event of a catastrophic end mirroring that on Earth tak...

I know there are ways to buy notoriety and recognition, but I'd rather earn them honestly, by having people decide they like me rather than shoving me down their throats so they have no choice but to recognize me, to then have me "grow on you." Do I want success as a musician? Yes, that would be nice. Do I want superstardom? No, I'm pretty sure I don't. How, then, would I define "success"? Well, I feel I am successful in life. Heck, I've even been successful as a musician, in that I've learned to play and continue to improve, I've performed for people and had positive reactions. I've even sustained myself financially as a member of a music group. The only thing I have yet to do is to provide for my family by way of playing/writing music. That's still my eventual goal, however long that takes. That's the dream. The question lingers about whether, once it becomes my "job" will it then feel like a burden and ruin it for me....

I want to tell you about my friend. My friend is a very talented instrumentalist. I met him a long time ago, a guitar player, a friend of friends of my brother's. After just hanging out and partying, like amateur rock-and-rollers did in the '80s, we ended up together around a cassette 4-track machine. He recorded one of my songs. It was one of the first times I can remember that someone else showed an interest in my music. Later on, it happened that we were in touch and decided to form a band. I still had my songs, and he still had an interest. Chocolate Zulu was born. Existing in the dining room of a house in Monrovia, CA (211 S. Alta Vista Ave), Chocolate Zulu wrote, played and recorded around the Los Angeles area for maybe a year and a half, two years. After that I moved to Atlanta. I had tons of new material from a musically active period, and I recorded a whole new collection of songs ( Up From Here ). I played around with the songs at open mic nights around the city, a...

The Rosemarys was a band from San Francisco in the '90s known for their light-tastic live shows. They were generally categorized as "Shoegaze" in style (Wikipedia calls then "shoegaze-dreampop"). I had never heard of them when I used to trade cds at my local used record shops, and I came across a used copy of their second, eponymous album. Some of these shops had listening stations where you could sample the used product before buying it. I picked up "The Rosemarys" based on the cover, and I went and put on the headphones. The vibro-guitar and the understated vocals grabbed me immediately, and I bought the disc. I, too, was dreaming of Manchester, and it really "struck a chord" with me. This was in the '90s (they were probably still playing shows at the time) before the internet was a household thing, so all I knew about them was what was printed on the sleeve of the cd (come to think of it, I might have started with a cassette and bo...

It disturbs me that people ignore serious side-effects of leadership on the presumption that they are getting what they want. People turn a blind eye to one or more drastic things because they believe they're getting what they want on one or two other issues. This is partisan politics, I guess. We need to burn this whole shitshow down. I know people like to feel a part of something, a member of a team, accepted on some level. Because of this, people allow their opinions to be informed, if not formed, by the collective opinion of the group. Because of this, and because of the wide variance of the two invisible ends of the sociopolitical spectrum, people get buried in a belief system that they may not even understand or recognize. All they know is what they've been raised to believe, and that others are the enemy. The first thing we learn about politics is that we oppose each other. It's important to recognize that we disagree, but it's also important to learn how to do...

If it’s expected that everyone (or most everyone) has a gun, then you increase the chances of the criminals having guns to nearly 100%. Criminals are going to do what they do, whether it involves shooting people, or gassing people, or blowing people up, or whatever it takes to do “their job.” Like it or not, crime is what some people do for a living. They will find a way. If everyone has a gun, a criminal will plan their job with the intention of killing as many people as necessary. By carrying a gun, you are making yourself a target to criminals. If someone walks into a convenience store to rob it, and that person has a gun, and he knows that a high percentage of other people in the store will also have guns, he is likely to kill more people than he otherwise might. Rather than discourage criminals, I think it will encourage them to be more ready to shoot. Same thing goes for police. If they believe that most people have guns, they will be more anxious to shoot anyone they fe...

"If you bother me I'll kill you." The gun rights activists' attitude. Like we would have toward an insect. That's how they see democrats, children, criminals, anyone they disagree with. "If you don't reason with me (give in to my viewpoint) quickly enough I reserve the right to end your life." People are not insects, and should not be treated as such.

Mike Watkins, a cop–turned–firearm instructor at the Kennesaw range, put it this way: “If I'm a bad guy, and I know this place has guns, it's not a place I'm obviously going to want to go and do something bad.”  Source:  Scientific American Question 1.: how can a cop say what a 'bad guy' thinks? He is so on the other end of the spectrum from that, thinking he's fully righteous and justified. Question 2.: what about the suicidal mass-shooter types who usually end up dead, often by their own bullet? Question 3.: how can you automatically discern who the "bad guy" is to make sure you shoot the "right" person? Question 4.: why do so many Americans want a fatal solution to situations they don't like? If you're unhappy then somebody needs to die? Question 5.: how many of you, as individuals, have ever used a gun for self-defense? I don't mean the intimidation factor of a gun; intimidation can be caused by many things. Fatal f...

So if we can't believe the media, who do we get our information from? Is word-of-mouth gossip to be believed? Every freak who says we're nothing but lied to and brainwashed by chemtrails is more accurate and in tune with reality than the institutions with journalists (who actually do live by a code) and resources and, believe it or not, a responsibility to the people? I've said it before; the media exists for and because of the people, and the people will call bulls**t when they see it. Yes, there is a certain amount of manipulation going on, and that is unfortunate, but it also means that there is something to hide, and when we find it we have power over the corrupt establishment. Journalism has done it in the past, and will do it again. Mainstream media outlets ARE owned by the richest people. These outlets WILL manipulate stories and facts to support their owners' goals. That is a failure of the OWNER, not of JOURNALISM. Putting blanket statements over things like th...

In an effort to talk less about myself, I'm going to try to replace all unsolicited outgoing comments with "I can relate to that on multiple levels."

WARNING: This opinion piece includes the subjects of rape and race. These are things I have no authority on, but I argue that I have the right to express my opinion on them. Does that mean I SHOULD? Not necessarily. In fact, I'm coming up short on reasons why it's a good idea at all. Knowing your surroundings is a survival instinct. We rely on our instincts for many things, but there are a lot of areas where we have overridden our instincts to allow ourselves to let our guard down and to allow ourselves to become victims. We no longer listen to the voices in our heads saying "don't get too comfortable." Our legal protections have caused many to assume that they won't become victims. They believe that, because something is wrong and/or illegal, that people won't do it. But we know better. We see all the time stories about how someone did something horrible, that laws were broken, people were victimized. Yet many of us seem to tempt fate for the sake of ...

This is definitely wrong. The lack of civil rights for people of color (or any other meaningless distinction outside of behavior) is wrong and we, as a compassionate race, should not stand for it. However, these people were likely raised to believe that blacks were different. There were rules. Laws. They were taught that there was a “right” and a “wrong” and segregation was “right.”  Believing that everything you’ve been taught is wrong and forging a new path of your own design where none exists is not that easy for social creatures such as ourselves. Like with the gun control debate, it is often pointed out that the “good guy” and the “bad guy” might not be so easy to identify when things go down. Things aren’t always as they appear. If you break the rules, you are a bad guy.  So the guys in this photo believed they were doing the right thing by trying to get this man to leave this counter. I am IN NO WAY saying that they are right and that segregation is okay. I...

How could so much of the media be so far off that we have absolutely no idea what's really going on? The people essentially drive what makes it to the media with their dollars. Sure, there are a lot of things left out, but if the people care about it, the media covers it, and there are far too many people out there looking to call "bullsh*t" when they see it for the media to get away with too much. Redirection, distraction, one-sided reporting? Yes. Absolute flat-out lies? Rare. Underground and "revolutionary" media do exist, and they do have an impact on mainstream media. If there is a legitimate problem, it will be called out and recognized. People who tend to believe in the conspiracy theories seem to buy into them wholesale. If you believe one, you likely believe a bunch more. So these people will refute pretty much any claim made by the mainstream, the same as they jump to extreme conclusions as "evidence" that we are being lied to and fooled mo...

She sits on a corner with buckets of flowers. It looks as though she is a vendor, selling the flowers to passers-by. If you come through the intersection, either from the north or from the freeway offramp, you pass her on the right side, on the far corner. If you think about it, it’s not a good place to stop. Just as you’re leaving an intersection with a signal. The light is green behind you, traffic is coming through fast. There’s virtually no foot traffic. It’s on a hill. It’s just not a practical place to set up shop. Picture this: a relative, probably a child or grandchild, was killed in a traffic accident at this corner. The family’s custom is to leave flowers and decorations at a spot where a loved one dies in traffic. Then picture the city not wanting those decorations on this corner, and they quickly take them away whenever the family leaves them. The family then finds out that it is not against ordinance to set up as a vendor on the sidewalk. So the lady sits th...