Tuesday, December 31, 2019

Update and Relax

essaysbysean.blogspot.com Update and Relax

Being a post “including” (which does NOT mean limited to) two mini parts:
1 Blog News Update
2 Let us Relax

Hello Reader,
Got relaxation?


(1) Blog news update:
If a weekend band, after a break, plays another set (of songs) then, for variety, a solo will never be the first song. For my blog, I seldom have two poetry-posts in a row, and for each poem I try to tack on a wee essay.

From my manuscript Tracing the Martians of H.G. Wells I have been posting, for variety, poems out of manuscript order.

I have already finished the sections Prologue and The Coming of the Martians. During January, for folks with a  “New year’s travel resolution,” over two blog posts I will finish To The Home of H.G. Wells. (I stood outside his house and talked to a neighbour) The sole remaining section—half the poems of which have already been posted—is After the Martians.

As for visitor statistics, 
my web site stats have not changed after the screening of The War of the Worlds BBC miniseries taking place in Edwardian times. Too bad, as I would hope fellow-fans around the world would like my poems. Here in town, of course, I’m the only one obsessed with Martians.


(2) Let us Relax

Let’s relax, after the bustle of the holiday season. Yes, a few artists who are household names will be hard at work at their craft, even on new year’s day, but you and I can take it easy. No? Then maybe not.

As for my own artistic ambitions, both in my blog life and my personal life—… I will wait until I have something to show; I try not to tell anything to anyone in advance.  As I advise new fiction writers, “Show, don’t tell.”

(3) Because last week’s post was so long, 
today I merely invite you to scroll down and peruse more of my Gay and Sad URLs piece.

Happy new year.


Sean Crawford
Calgary
January
2020

Footnote: Has something changed? I have no idea why people in the U.S. of A., if you write “including,” have recently started making you add the phrase “but not limited to”—(exasperation deleted) Come on, can’t regular adults be reasonably expected to use the Queen’s English? 

Here is the start of my Oxford computer ROM definition:

including | ɪnˈkluːdɪŋ |
preposition
containing as part of the whole being considered: languages including Welsh and Gaelic | weapons were recovered from the house, including a shotgun.
include | ɪnˈkluːd |
verb [with object]
1 comprise or contain as part of a whole: the price includes dinner, bed, and breakfast | other changes included the abolition of the death penalty.
2 make part of a whole or set: we have included some hints for beginners in this section.
• allow (someone) to share in an activity or privilege: there were doubts as to whether she was included in the invitation.

• (include someone out) informal specifically exclude someone from a group or activity.
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Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Sad and Gay URLs


Cheerful Note: This is the closest I’ve ever come to a “Merry Christmas!” gift post.

Note on links: For this post, in my mellow mundane life, I surely have plenty of time to place super-quick (for you) colored links, but no-o-o-o. I have NO desire to offer links on a silver platter, and no felt need to encourage search engines (SEO) to find me. 
(As explained in No Links is Good Links archived July 2012)

Hello Reader,
Got gay links?


I once did an essay on bringing “brights” into work and play, such as sneaking a rubber fish into the water cooler, called Brights in a Grey Life, archived December 2013.

Similarly, sometimes I like to brighten my posts at the end by footnoting a link. Most of my foot-links are gay, some are grey. 

In order to easily find my links again, I have slowly gathered most of them to this one blog page, trying to group similar links together. I thought you might like this post, so I have added some partial explanations. 
(Complete explanations would be found in the original essays)

Of course, the comforting moon has a dark side, and some of the links are darkly sad. An example would be this top link, 
(I assume you know to copy and paste into your search or website header)
a lengthy news article, complete with photographs, about an award-winning teen hero, who is bullied

Homeland Songs
Charlotte Church sings I Vow to Thee My Country

The Pogues sing Dirty Old Town

Billy Bragg sings Jerusalem

Billy Bragg sings A Full English Brexit song (a pun on ‘full English breakfast,’ as distinguished from a ‘small continental breakfast’)

At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 
Pictures of Road Signs, hacked by an artist
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-46139025

Doctor Who, three songs without a chorus
In a tune, the purpose for having a chorus is like why the 6 o’clock TV news has an anchor: For the comfort of returning to something known. Mornings while shaving, I like to hear three lyrical videos in succession. Because these songs don’t have a “proper” chorus, and are repetitive too, they might seem boring to you. 
But not to me, not when I am deeply moved by the episodes the songs are from.

  1. Abigail’s Song, a live stage version by an opera singer
  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVGilpd0e4s

(… And for my preferred version of Abigail’s Song that does show the plot

(2) in Latin, here’s the song the gentle Ood sing for the tenth doctor to “sing him to sleep” at the end of his story.

(3) “The Long Song” with still photos from the episode where religious people sing. Their song had been constantly sung for generations…

The sad, defiant words on screen at the end were by the doctor, “nothing left, only me,” as the last of his kind. He’s “the last” because he killed his entire home planet—men, women and children—to save the universe from the Daleks. Hence he is not quite sane. He often tries to have human companions with him so he doesn’t go totally mad… and also to make sure he doesn’t become emotionally closed off and dead to the universe. Song link:

Songs On Stage
On stage, a seasoned Jonie Mitchel (Companion of the Order of Canada) sings Both Sides Now
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKQSlH-LLTQ

At the proms, Dame Judy Dench sings Send in the Clowns

At the proms, from War of the Worlds, two very powerful songs, with some narration by Sir Richard Burton

*** *** Start Doctor Who *** ***

Context for award-worthy Speech clip:
War is grim: Earlier in space and time is the War Doctor, played by John Hurt. In his life where he destroys his home planet, he is never given a number because his later incarnations want to forget they were ever him. He once met Doctors 10 and 11 together: “the one who regrets and the one who forgets” (the number of children present on that final day)

Speech clip, four minutes, (filmed in one take)
With his war doctor background, one of the most powerful speeches is by the 12th doctor, the “Zygon Inversion speech,” where the Zygon in human guise, Bonnie, symbolizes all sorts of violent revolutionaries… including Quebec FLQ “pure wool” separatists who won’t admit (according to former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau) 
that other Quebecers, not “pure wool,” would some day want to separate from Quebec in turn. 

I grew up hearing periodic tests of atomic air raid sirens: During the speech clip, two horrible opposing boxes, set up by the doctor, symbolize the “The Button” of the cold war, as well as symbolizing every “go/no go” point of “peace/or war.” 


Regarding the episode and the speech:

pastedGraphic.png
Giovanni Magnus

I think this episode was broadcast at just the right time; following the Paris Attacks and on the day before Remembrance Sunday. With so much talk of revolution and vengeance, something like this hits home.

*** *** End Doctor Who *** ***


Youtube songs
England swings. The song that starts, “Pendulum swings like a pendulum do, bobbies on bicycles two by two,”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip6pHbAmjiU

Music Video by Winnipeg’s Crash Test Dummies
Mmm mmm mmm mmm 

Music video, Superman’s Song

For isolation, a Simon and Garfunkel song
 
One-page funeral article on a very small service for a writer once very well known, Eric Nicol
https://bcbooklook.com/2012/09/16/authors-remembering-eric-nicol/

Speech, impromptu, with music, by Robert (Bobby) Kennedy, on the night Martin Luther King was murdered.

Special note: Even in our 21st century, I can still feel sad from knowing that if Senator Robert Kennedy had lived, and become president, then he would have got us out of Vietnam. Swiftly. Without any patience for stupid well-meaning excuses about how hard and lengthy it would be to extricate such a mass of men and material.

Note: a John Denver song includes the lines, “and your mother called last Friday, Sunshine made her cry;” the music from the movie Sunshine is used under the above speech. I think the film was first shown on TV, but I forget, it was all so long ago. I read the book, back in the day.

Song, of Abraham, Martin and John

Lengthy blog page about a lonely “digital nomad” world traveler, to which I linked for the sake of a small quote about belonging, near the end.
https://www.fluentin3months.com/vagabond/

Anya, with no last name:
The four video links here are in my essay, Anya, Friend of Buffy 
(But I should have called it Death of Anya to get hits and match my Death of Buffy piece) 
where I explain WHY Anya fears bunnies, and why that fear leads to her friend Buffy fighting her with a sword.

Note: Anya was born human, and is finally human again, but after being a vengeance demon for about a millennium, she has forgotten mortality, hence her monologue:
Anya, ‘death of Joyce’ monologue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ96c7IOIPQ 

Very short light Song, of Anya’s paranoia of bunnies
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLMaSII_URU

Light Duet, by Anya and her live-in fiance “I’ll never tell”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooD4mmmYrTg

Anya’s cheery upbeat death song, from living with her fiancé, reminding us that after many horrible centuries, she finally had a happy life, with dreams.

Drama clip, 
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, from just outside the doorway, overhears the two grown men in her life, her librarian father-figure and her vampire boyfriend-figure, state the grim, iron prophecy that she is to be killed. So she goes into shock, laughing an unnatural laugh.

(Incidentally, my most popular essay, by hit count, is Death of Buffy from January 2012

Youtube
Bonnie Rae, with Bruce Hornsby
I can’t make you love me, if you don’t

Sting, from a few years before the Berlin Wall ‘came a-tumbling down’:
Russians (“What can I do to save my boy, from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?”)
(Note for nonChristian readers: The “tumbling down” phrase comes from a rousing spiritual song, which I memorized as a boy, where “fought” is pronounced as “fit”: Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, and the wall came a-tumbling down.)

Lengthy essay with photographs. A writer who has been to Dachau takes his daughter to see an empty old missile silo and talks to her on the drive back, without meaning to scare her.
http://whatever.scalzi.com/2007/12/21/a-month-of-writers-day-seventeen-jay-lake/

News Story, interview on television
London Marathon staff being abusive to slower runners
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-48130690/london-marathon-pacesetter-says-slower-runners-abused-on-course

Trailhead for news stories, where a pretty young actress, who has lived all her life in her dear mother country of Taiwan, on the island of Formosa, hopes her country would never be annexed by big China, not like how big Germany did an Anschluss of Austria.  
(The annex was during the Third Reich; Austria, with its German-speaking culture, regained independence after WWII) 
The link was made regarding ideology in an essay on how to hack together a speech.


Prose, read aloud 
British Actor David Tennant, in his own voice, reads his forward to the autobiography of actress Elizabeth Sladen, better known worldwide as Sarah Jane Smith. Takes six minutes and has lots of stills. “She inspired absolute devotion from everyone who worked with her.”

Lengthy Open Letter to Brazil, calling on Brazilians to reform because of shortcomings including
(—but my lawyer insists I add ‘but not limited to’ because he says you might not know what the word “including” means—)
the sort of “amoral familism” we see (or once saw) in southern Italy, but not in northern Italy.

Youtube of a lengthy memorial at my club for Michael Cody DTM
For ease of download by dial-up, my blog has no bells or whistles, no photographs of me. But as for what I look like: Near the end that’s me on camera asking about Michael’s belt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGLC5VizmSk&feature=em-upload_owner


Sean Crawford
Calgary,
Merry Christmas readers,
2019

Footnotes:
~Today’s blog has a lighter page of URL’s. You may have seen the “heavier, darker” sequel to this post which was archived back in September 2019.

~How queer, to think the “new, exciting” World Wide Web is no longer “new.” In fact, social media-wise, I have heard that Facebook is now only for the “older generation.” (People over 30) 

Back when the web was exotic, newspapers would feature reviews of URLs. 
(And I suppose even the folks with computers would have FOMO) 
It’s been years since they reviewed Internet sites. Now they only review video games.


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Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Despite Desolation


Hello Reader,
Got recovery from desolation? (“I feel desolate”)

I believe individuals, and entire societies too, can recover from emotionally (or physically) desolating events. Perhaps even become “whole.” Just the other day I read the memoirs of the man who co-founded Second Cup, with money he made in sales while attending recovery meetings. I learned the fellow had first been a homeless alcoholic street bum for years. People are not leopards; people can “hit bottom,” find their soul, and leap up higher than any beast. 

Of course, then the man lived forever “in recovery.” Joyous, grateful and cautious. 

Maybe for us mortals, becoming “whole” is only an abstraction, an ideal never achieved here on Earth. Still, to live is to try. History tells us that people in a community, even after fire and famine, or drought and population recede, will still seek out a time and place to sing together. As the bumper sticker on a time traveling DeLorean car reads, “If I can’t sing and dance, I don’t want to be part of your community.”

Here are two serious poems:


For this poem, you may recall the narrator found his sisters. At first they survived in their old house, later they joined a community. 


On Brighton Beach

I know my sisters would understand
me taking time to go see where we 
had holidays at the seashore.

A lost orange shovel lies abraded on the beach.

I stand before a slate horizon.
Dark waves swoosh flecks of oil,
and swirl onto the grey sand.
Gulls arc in the cold sky,
and scream to each other.

People are nowhere.

Soon, with Martians gone,
people will come flowing in.

My hands are cold.

People of tomorrow,
as seen on my mind’s TV,
won’t warm me today.

Gulls screech on the chilly wind.



In this poem, we are told the narrator is “a stranger.” How so? Is he passing through, perhaps a tradesman, a journalist, or merely a man with a journal? Or has his emotional desolation, remembered in italics, made him forever a stranger on earth?


In the Music Hall (By day a community centre)
Outside,
it is too dark to work.
Inside,
we sit wearing sweaters.
Onstage,
Joan Keats plays guitar.
Folks are happy.


Among hard working yard and field growers
I am a stranger in a strange town,
with a smile
deep inside me
and my notebook plunked on the table
before me.

Easy to pen lofty revelations
while everyone else
holds a stylish Mona Lisa smile,
as Joan’s grace notes
like champagne bubbles rise to the rafters.
Folks are happy.

Death on three legs walked past me
I was spared and my uncle was not.
A file of cars was immolated
They were active and I was not.
A church was filled with bodies
They prayed and I did not.

If there’s an answer
I know it not.

Here I can watch and feel. 

Joan stabs a frown in my direction,
“Hey!” Why the notebook?
“This isn’t the Oxford Library.”
My mouth holds a straight-line repose.
At last
I stab a smile back.
I guess I don’t do the Mona Lisa thing.

Folks are happy.



Sean Crawford
December
Camrose
2019
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Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Russian Trolls Meet Social Media


Note: As you know, Karl Marx invented communism, or Marxism, while writing in the library of the British Museum. These days the library door, across from the main entrance, is blocked off—I checked.

Does social media have a soul? I ask because when Doctor Frankenstein created a soulless creature he cried, “I have created a monster!” But (in the book) no one else realized the monster existed—How lonely.

Hello Reader,
Got Russian trolls?

Question: What do the evil of communism, the troll farms of Russia, and the devil from hell have in common? 
Easily Answered: Their main strength, historically, has been people not believing they exist.

Vladimir Lenin (the first marxist-communist leader of Russia) referred to “useful idiots.” He meant individuals in the western democracies who, not knowing the evil of communism, would support it.

 Did you know Russians (Soviets) caused the Six Day War?

I was a boy during the horrible, un-glorious, Six Day War between the democracy of Israel and the the folks who believed in dictatorships, folks surrounding Israel in the Middle East. There’s a reason (besides it being their watershed) why Israel still refuses to give up the Golan Heights, formerly Syrian, along the Syrian border. Here are two paragraphs from when Canada had been a state for a hundred years, 1967.

(Incidentally, Arab belief in dictatorship made it hard during World War II to persuade them to ally against Hitler and the Axis)

QUOTE
A consulting Soviet delegation met with Egyptian leaders on May 13, revealing that Israel had concentrated eleven to thirteen brigades in preparation for an imminent assault along the Syrian border. 
When the Soviet claims came to light, Israel denied any military buildup or aggressive intent. Middle East peacekeeping forces, the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization, stationed on the Syrian border to safeguard Israel from Arab terrorist attacks, also denied the Soviet claims. 

Days later, Syrian troops lined the Golan Heights, ready to respond to Israel’s imminent attack. Battle-ready, Nasser announced, “The Jews threaten to make war. I reply: Welcome! We are ready for war.” Jordan’s King Hussein signed on May 30, joining… the Iraqi president… His army then joined…

No longer waiting for the Israeli invasion, later revealed to be Soviet disinformation meant to destabilize the region…(bolding mine)
UNQUOTE

In those days, back before social media, the Russians (Soviets) used work-of-mouth for their disinformation.

What happened next was: After the Soviets propagated their fake news, the army buildup went on to include almost everybody in the region: 
QUOTE “Algerian, Saudi Arabian, Iraqi, and Kuwaiti armies set station on the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian fronts. A combined air force of 810 planes, 2, 880 tanks, and nearly half a million troops prepared for the battle of all battles…”  UNQUOTE

Israel still exists as a state. She survived (footnote) by having her armed forces focus on only one front at a time, in an operation code named Moked, in English, “focus.” 

Such a hellish waste of lives, that need not have happened. But at least the Russians and everyone else learned a lesson—or did they?

Today I see the Russian leopard hasn’t changed its spots. I accidentally read a little obscure line the other day, in web article on some North Americans being against vaccination: The Russians are using social media to put out fake news to encourage the antivax movement here in the west.

When I read that little line I was shocked awake—wow!—while realizing others would read it too, but then stay sleepy, and surely have forgotten it by the next day. Forgive me, for I’m awfully skeptical about my neighbors. I would say to them: Forget “big pharma,” worry about “big troll farms.” 

The Russians can put a man in space; their computer nerds surely know their science; therefore to me it’s obvious: 
if computer nerds under Vladimir Putin put out stuff in English to give credence to the antivaxers, 
then that is to help destabilize the democracies.

Why? Besides not liking our freedom? Probably for reasons of economic competition. After all, they destabilized the middle east in 1967 because they hoped to profit by selling arms.

Am I a conspiracy nut? About Russian efforts to destabilize? No, not unless you think the whole nation of Finland is nuts. They have a national effort, as reported on the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) website, to inform their people about the existence of big Russian troll farms. (footnote) Despite that BBC story, I suspect the average person over in Britain is still as unaware, and as trusting of social media, as we are over here.

In conclusion, I have—

Don’t touch that mouse! 
After a pause for blog identification, I will tell more:
  • a professor, and why people want him fired 
  • The Finns, and their national efforts against Russian troll farms
  • The anti-vax study, the original one that kicked off the modern anti-vax belief

—I have Three Points, consisting of Two don’ts and One do:

First: Unless you are dealing with traditional media having journalism ethics, don’t believe “It must be true or they wouldn’t have printed it.”

Second: If you are reading social media, don’t believe “It must be true or my brother-in-law wouldn’t have forwarded it.” 

(as they still believe in India, despite government efforts to get village mobs to stop killing complete strangers. Have you heard? Some troll started a post about child abduction by strangers, and it is now going viral, unstoppable by anyone with common sense—mobs even killed a young government man who went to a village to warn them to please stop killing, stop believing forwarded social media.)

Third: Do believe the Russians are using big troll farms to destabilize the rest of us. After all, “X million Finns can’t all be wrong.”



Pause for blog identification:
Your are reading
Sean Crawford
Edmonton
December
2019




Part Two, (but do feel free to get a Second Cup first) 

On the importance of PAX and VAX

PRAY FOR PAX 
(peace)
Some “useful idiots,’” as Lenin called them, still refuse to believe: In Canada there is now resistance to erecting a national memorial to victims of communism.

In my province last month, a Canadian professor, at the University of Alberta, who had recently run for election on the ideals of the Marxist-Leninist party ticket, which, by definition, means HE BELIEVES in the Russian party line, 
(I remember the Soviet ambassador publishing a letter to my student newspaper to say the Ukraine famine was solely from bad weather) 
denied on his social media (not in class) that there was any Ukrainian holocaust, or holodomor, (man-made famine) by Joseph Stalin. This made a lot of people upset, partly because, for the sake of having a jolly good outrage, the first social reactors (pun intended) did not mention that the prof was a Marxist.

I know for sure an idiot can achieve a Ph.D…. yet continue being a “useful idiot.” I wrote about Marxist professors, the “Regina 16,” back in April 2010, archived as Socialists Reject Soldiers. They didn’t want poor children of soldiers killed in action to be eligible for special financial help to attend university.

Forewarned is forearmed
Finland
Got useful idiots? From Russian-speaking areas of Europe, folks allegedly “believed” what they saw spread on social media, and then they viciously launched assaults on the mental health and reputation of a journalist, Jessikka Aro. She told her experience in a BBC interview. How bad are the Russian assaults? You would have to read it to believe it—because hey, those troll farms won’t defend themselves.

I realize that some people, proud to members of a ‘new improved’ digital generation, believe in “the joy of having outrage,” but as for me, I still like Jessika more than I do her attackers: She had journalism ethics, and she had won a prize for her reporting about Russia’s state sponsored social media. 
This web story interviewing her is in prose.

Regarding Finland’s national effort, this web story is in video form, 
with speaking parts by the Finnish prime minister, Jessikka and the communications minister.



VAX
~As an adult, during my military service, I was immunized against lockjaw, also called tetanus.

As a boy I saw a  television commercial, a cartoon, advising vaccinations to protect against three characters: Dippy Diphtheria, who was foolish, Locky lockjaw, who couldn’t talk because his jaw was stiffened shut, and Rolly Polio, a mean guy in a wheelchair holding a crutch to smash people… characters who would not be politically correct to show today.

By the time I saw those commercials, I had already caught mumps, measles and chickenpox—but at least I had never caught smallpox or German measles, also called rubella. 
Catching these “childhood diseases” gave me, just like my mother and brother before me, an immunization against ever getting those diseases again. Happily, no one in my family suffered complications. I wonder if anti-vaxxers would deny such immunity can happen? 

Luckily, when I saw those cartoons, I was young enough, praise the Lord, to have already been vaccinated against poliomyelitis… Very, very lucky. 

And hey, do you know about that notorious FAMOUS STUDY that set off the original panic storm, the one that linked vaccinations to autism? That study could NOT be replicated; there was a sample size of ONLY 12—count ‘em, 12—AND the researcher had not disclosed that he had a financial vested interest. (link) He has since been kicked out of the medical community.


A baby born when that discredited study was published would be 21 years old now. Time enough for straight citizens to check with reality and continue getting their blessed vaccinations. 


Footnotes:
~How to Lose a Battle subtitled Foolish plans and great military blunders, edited by Bill Fawcett, Harper, 2006, specifically from the chapter The Six Day War by Edward E. Kramer, page 307.

~Here’s a very lengthy N.Y.Times think-piece interviewing experts on the future of social media.


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