My Five Hundredth Post

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello reader,

Got life change?

Let's end this blog
   to live anew,
for my dear life,
   and this blog too.

I have moved 
to
seanessay.com

About my new, exciting, delicious, IMPROVED blog, seven FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)

1  Will there be nice long posts?

A: No, nothing over 900 words. Guaranteed.  

2  Will it be a different sort of writing?

A: Yes!... Surprise!

3  How different?

A: Sorry, I don't quite know, and I dare not tell you in advance, in case I fail in my "life renewed."

4   Your last post was a “focused letter” to Derek Sivers, about One to One Conversations.

Will there be more focused letters to Derek?

A: Yes, letters are fun. Besides, I end up revealing more about myself, which is healthy. My first new blog essay is a letter: My Child to be a Leader

UPDATE: Actually, my very first piece is a post to introduce me, called  Me In My Own World.

5  Will there be journalism posts that are “dull but good for you?” Like broccoli? 

A: No, but neither will I write about dogs in funny hats.

6  Will you finish posting your War of the Worlds poems?

A: Maybe, but only a half dozen poems are left, about after the Martians are gone.

7 I like how for years you kept making an essay per week, for 500 essays.

A: You're welcome.... After all those man hours, let's hope I learned something!

Sean Crawford

June-July 2020 (Note to self: My last meta-blog was in February, called How You Learn) 

Warm Fuzzy Comments

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,

Got warm fuzzy comment?

Just as modern readers may enjoy a two page “flash fiction” as much as a normal short story, so too may I offer a careful web comment as if it were a “flash essay.” Hence my best writing is often my comments on other people’s blogs. Queerly, I never make copies for myself as souvenirs, instead, I let all my darlings rush away like sparkling salmon in the stream.

Recently another-commenter replied to my comment. This time with a difference: He took my words and made a poem!

The blog was by novelist John Scalzi, called Whatever. Scalzi’s post was entitled Behold My Drinks Fridge (August 29, 2019) It included a photograph of his second refrigerator being turned into a “beer cooler.” There were—get this—scores and scores of comments in the thread. My first comment is below. My second comment was a short one: “As of Saturday midmorning…” and then just before I hit the “post” button, I hit the “return” key to add:

“Strange: Nobody’s written a poem yet.”

As for ‘no poem,’ a couple comments later were my own words, sent back to me:

QUOTE

Kevin McLeod Bailey says:

AUGUST 31, 2019 AT 12:56 PM

Sean:

Are you sure?

As of

Saturday midmorning

I count

125 comments

about

a humble refrigerator

With all

due respect to world peace

sometimes

the simple pleasures

are what

we talk about.

UNQUOTE

Now, that’s a warm fuzzy.

Say, dear reader, as salmon swim away in the stream, in case you’re curious, my first comment was: 

QUOTE

Sean Crawford says:

AUGUST 29, 2019 AT 8:25 PM

Nostalgia: Only a few years ago, as a tourist, I visited a regional dump serving three towns, it was just like the dump of my childhood (In the city we use garbage cans) Chatting with the old gate shack guy, he explained that a fellow comes around with a rod to suck out the (R-14?) from all the refrigerators, as an environmental thing, protecting the ozone layer.

In my own big city dump, the young guy at the gate won’t let you in unless your vehicle has a load to drop off. Those are his orders.

As for refrigerators, sometimes, like Philip K. Dick reaching for a light bulb string that isn’t there, I wait for my refrigerator to go click when I close the door. But no, it’s all magnets now. As a boy our fridge had a round plastic handle on the inside, (cool!) so a trapped child could get back out.

Here on the Great Plains, nearly all my city’s streets were laid down after ice boxes were no longer needed. A fellow in my toastmasters club did a speech explaining the new fangled technology behind his modern “beer cooler.”

UNQUOTE

EPILOGUE 

Regarding comments being read, and being Noticed:

Recently (September 2019) I sent an e-mail to a world famous blogger, Derek Sivers.

You may wonder: 

If Derek gets hundreds of comments for most of his posts, (sometimes six or seven hundred) 

then is there any use in commenting? Would he ever notice little-old-me or you?

Sure he would. I e-mailed Derek, to warn that his mass mail out wasn’t reaching everyone. Part of his reply included:

“…Good to hear from you. Thanks again for your comments on the blog. I see and appreciate them all. :-)”

I guess the overall lesson for today’s post, coming from a poet-commenter and a big blogger, is that everything we do gets noticed, at some level. 

Sean Crawford

On the romantic rolling prairie,

September 2019,

Posted April 2020

The Uptight Aftermath

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got emotional suppression?

How do individuals, and communities too, become normal after things like an abuse or the loss of a town factory? I don’t know; I can only grasp parts of the truth.

To me it’s normal to be uptight and to insulate one’s emotions, for however long it takes to process healing inside… and of course to also change circumstances outside…

I can imagine someone processing things at one level while playing with his grownup toys and gifts. In my family when I was a boy any Christmas gifts with store-bought gift wrapping would be from the Legion or father’s workplace. Relatives used newspaper. In today’s War of the Worlds poem, I imagine all the fancy electronic toys have been rendered inert by a Martian magnetic pulse, and the economy shattered, worse than when Sherman marched through Georgia.

All my future poems to be posted here, of heroic survivors, will be from my last manuscript section, called After the Martians.

Uptight Man

In a boy’s mechano set

screws and nuts extend steel plates and girders.

After every Gameboy got pulsed out,

the kids enjoyed their flat black mechano engine.

Hook it in and wind it tight

to have a mechano moving truck.

Just swivel the black lever,

release the hidden spring—whir-r-r-r-r.

Maybe I grieve for lost dogs, and birdsong,

and Mother Nature, so bent over her walking stick.

She’s not the upright girl in the smooth green dress 

she used to be.

I grieve for gentle Uncle Jack. 

Maybe I miss my mum and dad,

and childhood,

and I don’t even know what I’m so sad about,

but I know I’ve lost something.

In my grief I am a mechano man,

wound up tight, unable to whirrr.

I still walk and talk like a man,

tough like the other guys,

to hide my flat spring heart.

Beneath the open ribs of a church,

with sagging stained-glass windows,

I tightly curve over my prayer book,

in a silent congregation of strangers.

Can a single blade of grass, poke through a wasteland?

Will a warm church of fellowship, ever form here?

I swivel my jaw, “Amen.”

A tear falls to the page.

Splat!

Everyone can hear it.

Sean Crawford

Calgary

March

2020

Two Footnotes: 

A book I regret not buying:

In a London library, I found a collection of pre-television children’s games, many more than I ever played. It was being discarded for a (dollar) pound but I had too many books at home, or so I thought at the time. Too bad, for I could have taken it from the shelf anytime the world was getting me down, the nerd reader’s way of having a playground in my mind. You know, like in the 1972 hit song. (link)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFONCfjewgM

A question posed by our principal which no child in my elementary school class could answer:

Where does nylon come from?

SIDEBAR ON TOYS

In place of big leggo, we had small red blocks like bricks that snapped together along the tops. The blocks came with a cardboard green roof you could cut to shape. 

The counters in the monopoly set were carved round wooden abstracts; the most “real” was a “milk bottle,” the houses and hotels were wooden too. In the affluent 1960’s there came along plastic toys, including a plastic cannon that did everything, including having a flip up grenade launcher. (like a fancy vacuum with attachments) That was the “Mighty Moe,” hence the song kids still sing today:

Jingle bells, 

Christmas smells, 

Santa Claus is dead,

Someone took a Mighty Moe 

and shot him in the head.

Plastic swept in during the 1950’s, and was still rolling along at the time of The Graduate. But the age of cheap plastic only lasted a few decades. Now toy soldiers are tiny, cheap and squished, and you just cannot collect figures in the cereal boxes anymore, not since the Arabs raised the price of oil.  

…Economic Interlude…

—Oh, if only the U.S. economists, capitalists and the public had WAITED, knowing from Pareto’s law that cartels don’t last more than a few years—I suspect the former two did know, as it would be business school 101, but didn’t tell the public— 

Instead of waiting, capitalists invested in big oil wells, the Arab cartel predictably broke up, and then the Americans needed to keep the price of oil HIGH so big capitalists could get their investment back—I suspect Americans then purposely inflated their money supply, without telling the U.S. public about the “mysterious new inflation,” to help with their balance of payments to the Arabs… 

(Of course, this all makes me sound like a conspiracy nut, I mean, surely someone else would have noticed while inflation was screwing with us. And raised the public’s ire. So you are welcome to check into my suspicions yourself) 

My favorite essay to leisurely “sneak up rather than throw truth in your face like a wet dishrag” is called Conspiracies and Inflation, mostly about inflation, not climate-gate, archived November 2013. https://essaysbysean.blogspot.com/2013/11/conspiracies-and-inflation.html

…End of Economic Interlude…

The pre-sweetened cereals never had the toys because those junk cereals could already count on kids to want them. I collected sports figures, Robin Hood’s merry men, the jungle book animals, Eskimos and even “computers wearing tennis shoes.” Never any wee dinosaurs or soldiers in the cereal, though. Those I had to buy as tiny critters in a store-bought package. But hurray—Now that I’m an adult, I can buy big dinos! 

(For a while I had a big Dino with a leg hooked over my flat screen to help me see if I had the wrong picture size) 

Many of the toys of the sixties were silly novelties, sold through silly TV commercials showing pretty people smiling too hard for real life, made for affluent families with too much money on their hands. For example, a collection of beetles that would flip through the air, using the principle of squeezing soap, if you hit them with the plastic bat. The target was a big frog. 

Bop, bop, 

bop the beetle;

hit, hit, 

hit it right.

When you hit the frog,

It’s mouth, 

Shuts tight.

Living Past Poverty

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

Hello Reader,

Got determination?

After the Martians passed on, leaving behind a ruined land, I imagine the remaining society: A few people would have wimped out, escaping into addictive substances and unhealthy attitudes which they would defend as being perfectly natural. But others would have found reasons to carry on, perhaps for the sake of their surviving children, or other people’s children yet unborn. Grief can be a dragging sea anchor, but still, I suppose, good citizenship is possible when all your neighbors are trying as hard as you are, trying to get healed while stubbornly appearing normal, trying to “fake it till they make it.” 

God bless the wounded healers. 

When my parents were little, back in the old country, children got an orange just once a year, at Christmas. There is a reference to this (blink and you’ll miss it) in the Tilda Swinton and Ewan McGregor art movie, set in 1954, Young Adam. (review) 

Immigrating to Canada helped my parents, food-wise. In Canada, during the Great Depression, my father felt badly about sometimes having nothing to feel the dog; my mother had sores in her mouth, stopped speaking in class, until the public health nurse advised grandma to get some fruit for vitamin C.

Here are two poems.

Guitar by Firelight

As I walk from the cold

into the warm tavern

 my neck is bent down slightly,

my gait is slightly uneven

and things are out of joint.

A man bends over a guitar in the tavern.

Some say he’s not meant for television prime time,

not for satellite international broadcast.

I say he is meant for here,

where plain people get a life.

We can see his face shining above his guitar.

Here we know our lives,

tensed then relaxed,

as guitar strums by firelight.

Once, when there was still a power grid,

back in my living room,

I lived in a dying-room

with instant coffee and instant feelings

and paper dolls posed flat on my screen 

as I escaped into the mute button.

Such a muffled life. 

The artist in the tavern locks his gaze on mine,

strums my heartstrings, and I feel what I feel.

Memories squiggle free.

From my radiant fellows infra-heat billows

around me like a firemen’s rescue hoop.

Such a raw life.

After midnight, a loose upright man

walks out the tavern door.

I am not the same man who entered.

Yearly Orange

The Martians had swept over the land like a plague,

felling people in the streets and poisoning the crops.

Like a rash the Red Weed had smothered farms

jammed canals and blocked harbors.

The Reading rail yard is still a jumble of silent rusting cars.

The Red Weed has gone, crumbled to dust.

Our ruined land is a harsh world.

Thin children are excited

as lean adults quietly talk 

about goods speeding under the sea

from the new world, to the old.

In the holds and tubes of a submarine

are spare circuits and seed stocks

artfully stowed without a wasted inch

clean and never contaminated

speeding towards us from New London.

The surface fleet was beamed and shredded,

the same day a storm of silent particles

made dead every child’s device,

every Nintendo, Atatri, Playstation, Gameboy,

leaving the children nothing.

Nothing but the timeless games:

Kick the can.

King of the castle.

Kite flying.

Robin Hood.

A tired adult perks up as children run by,

laughing and smiling.

A girl feels 

life is good, 

she raises her arms saying,

“It’s all carrots and apples!”

The children will never grow as tall as their parents.

The submarine will be an early Christmas.

Excited kids tell each other,

“Everybody gets an orange!”

We don’t tell them

oranges are good for their health.

Some day,

we will give the children

peaches and cream. 

Sean Crawford

Central London

February

2020

Sipping Suds in the Spotted Dog

essaysbesean.blogspot.com 

With an essay of 

both travel and philosophy, 

to introduce a poem of history, 

both fictional and real,

both past and present.

Hello Reader,

Got suds to solve the problems of the world?

Yes, I know you and I aren’t truly that smart, but just as having tea inspires noble thoughts, so too does beer in good company lead to fine world-saving solutions—at least they seem good, within the walls of an authentic British pub.

I was in south England, and my companion across the table said he had once golfed in my home town, Calgary. I instantly knew, and I eventually got him to admit: He was an oil patch guy. (North Sea rigs) Turned out he was a geophysicist. A common job in Calgary. I said, “I bet you just tell people you are a geologist.” I was right.

What I never got to ask that night was why he was so reticent to admit his occupation to me. Here in Calgary you can’t join any club or hobby without tripping over rich petroleum engineers and executives. 

(How rich? Reporters aren’t allowed to even enter, let alone photograph, oil tower executive washrooms) 

Calgary is “the Denver of Canada.” And U.S. citizens, thanks to petroleum and natural gas, are our largest minority group. And me, as a happy joiner, I have no issues around drinking beer and hobnobbing with rich people. But I wonder: Was that man worried that poor little me would be uncomfortable with him? Is the British class system really that bad?

Maybe so. Back in the 1970’s, on various NATO bases, talking with various British servicemen, they all complained about the class system—but I half-thought they especially meant within the armed forces— just as readily as we Canadians, at that time, would have complained about this new fangled mysterious inflation.  

(Back then, as our prime minister Trudeau was trumpeting his plan for everyone to observe “six and five” for wages and prices, no one, including gentlemen of the press, realized our government already secretly knew the cause of inflation) 

It’s queer how entire populations, just like individuals, can be ignorant of knowledge they are not ready for, such as the cause of inflation: Like some sort of mass defence mechanism. Like how all the Germans after the First World War thought their army hadn’t been defeated, only “stabbed in the back.” Like how in Canada, at the time of the Quebec referendum on separation, all the people in Quebec—but not in Calgary—didn’t know their province was being being propped up by “equalization payments” from the three (out of ten) “have” provinces, payments that would vanish if Quebec were separate. 

(This is true of, say, the time-space 2,000 A.D, when the four provinces east of Quebec have a 50% unemployment rate, with many of the jobs being seasonal… but I guess this has changed: Ontario stopped being a “have” province to go to having the largest debt in the world of any substate, (non-country) and recently Alberta has been groaning from lack of pipelines to tidewater—the Yanks refuse to pay market value—amidst low oil prices)

We can be alienated from our own society, and maybe rush off to join the communist party, OR we can clink our glasses in fellowship, rich and poor in the same club, and feel that life is alright. Is that escapist? Nothing wrong with escape. Even the president of the United States needs to escape to go golfing at Camp David. Like how I escaped to south England to romantically follow the Martians of H.G. Wells in his classic The War of the Worlds. (They advanced north on London) 

As for the Spotted Dog, the tavern in H.G.’s novel, my local beer buddies, who of course studied Wells in school, were disgusted to tell me the age-old tavern had been knocked down to build a car dealership. Here’s a poem:

The Spotted Dog

A man rushes into the Spotted Dog

interrupting the landlord’s conversation.

Someone has just offered the landlord one pound.

The man says forcefully, “I’ll give you two pounds,

and I’ll have it back tonight.”

The landlord is amazed, “What are you talking about?

And why bring it back? I am selling a pig.”

The man rents a horse and cart, 

but he doesn’t tell the landlord to flee.

Surely there is shame,

surely there is survivor guilt,

but it’s pushed way down.

A boy reads with a torch under his blanket:

Boilers on stilts

crossing fields “as fast as flying birds.”

Fighting Machines wade among coastal shipping

facing the defiant HMS Thunderchild.

Teachers in Woking make students read.

Surely the novel is classic,

surely it will last for generations,

down the years.

Adults drink suds in the Spotted Dog,

the same tavern they had read about as children.

The visible pub connects them to the invisible,

to age-old fears and shames, hopes and resolves.

A frightened man keeps his promise

to return a horse and cart

through dark of night 

past frightful looming Things.

His efforts end in ruin.

If he hadn’t been a man of his word

he would have been in Leatherhead with his wife,

safe and sound, but he kept his promise.

Surely when the Spotted Dog is struck down

it will be rebuilt.

Sean Crawford

January

Calgary

2020

Footnote: 

~One of my few essays to be translated (into Spanish) is one where I expose the secret of inflation, archived November 2013, Conspiracies and Inflation.

Sad and Gay URLs

essaysbysean.blogspot.com 

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

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-48065405

Homeland Songs

Charlotte Church sings I Vow to Thee My Country

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yxUp08IK_g

The Pogues sing Dirty Old Town

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SK99y22uLv8

Billy Bragg sings Jerusalem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMC08TyvGNk

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07X_yk1v8S4

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Radrh60tAUk. )

(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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bs_isWP71FE

(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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPisDzhYrCg

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvZex3Qf7QQ

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvm7HgkNL7E

*** *** 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.” 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJP9o4BEziI

Regarding the episode and the speech:

Giovanni Magnus

2 years ago

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 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTeg1txDv8w

Music video, Superman’s Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeyhKWjQaKk

For isolation, a Simon and Garfunkel song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6iFNk60xP0

 

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoKzCff8Zbs

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlxAFq_9Mak

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2QYSvca40

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcCOZSMpILQ

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

https://essaysbysean.blogspot.com/2012/01/the-death-of-buffy.html )

Youtube

Bonnie Rae, with Bruce Hornsby

I can’t make you love me, if you don’t

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTIu4UbkK94

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?”)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHylQRVN2Qs

(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.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46250674

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.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUNDkw3KBVM

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.

https://markmanson.net/brazil

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.