culture

So Many Weird Grammar Moods Give Me the Blues

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Weird moods such as… 1 Realis moods 1.1 Indicative 2 Irrealis moods 2.1 Subjunctive 2.2 Conditional 2.3 Optative 2.4 Imperative 2.5 Jussive 2.6 Potential 2.7 Hypothetical 2.8 Inferential 2.9 Interrogative 2.10 Deontic Mood vs. Epistemic Mood As do weird modern remakes of classic Moody Blues mood music… #newisnotalwaysbetter  

Two Learnings from My Recent Rememborizing Efforts: One cool; One cautionary

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As I discussed in my last post, I’ve embarked on an effort to memorize stuff that interests me. I’m finding that the more I memorize stuff, the easier is to memorize and retain new stuff.

So as I just finished up memorizing the poem Invictus, I decided to go large and take on the grandest, and perhaps greatest, of all letters penned on behalf of these United States, The Declaration of Independence.

Yeah, maybe I am getting a little cocky/in over my head taking on such a significant body of work — significant as in packed with meaning, and, especially, significant as in packed with a lot of words. One-thousand, four-hundred and fifty-eight of them to be exact.

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Shackled To History

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Back in the wonderful Nineties (Nirvana, 2Pac, The Matrix, Fight Club, etc…), I took a break from my normal Navy telecommunications gig to spend a few years in a special assignment as an Equal Opportunity Advisor.

To become qualified as an EOA, I had to attend three months of very intense and in-depth training at the military’s Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute at Patrick Air Force Base in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

Let’s just say becoming an EOA is not the typical choice of an extremely White and WASPy dude like myself; so, due to the lack of other white, WASPy dudes like myself enrolled at the institute, it was one of those rare times in my life where I was in both the racial and gender minority for any significant amount of time.

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Poetry is for Girls

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humor-image

I may occasionally write the junk, but rarely do I read it.

And it is not because I don’t like it that I rarely read it…

It’s because it, the really good stuff anyway, is so durn hard to read.

I’m talking Poetry here…

Poetry with a big, bold capital P.

And it is so hard for me to read (And by read I mean read. I mean really digging into the poem and fighting through the initial confusion and the complicated and often archaic words. I mean, not just reading the poem, but studying it and trying to close the gap in time from when the poem was written to when the poem is being read by learning about the poet and where and when and why and how he or she is from and where and when and why and how he or she lived and then coming to my own understanding of what I think the poem means and then trying to apply that meaning to my own life and where and when and why and how I live it. That’s what I mean by read.) because it takes more than a little bit of effort to read it.

I certainly don’t have time for all that junk.

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Fake News is so Poe-thetic

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I read an Edgar Allan Poe story today entitled The Angel of the Odd.

It’s a fun, fast, Kafka-meets-Twain, easy to forget kind of read.

But what is most memorable to me about the story is that it is entirely set up around the protagonists drunken dismay over what we would call the “fake news” of the day…

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No Point In Asking

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When I first began articulating this post in my head, it was framed around the question, “When will it all end?” But after just a few seconds of contemplation around it I quickly realized that question is quite ridiculous. Obviously, we are no where near a point in which we can even begin speculating about … Read more

No Gun, No Respect…

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First off, I’m not anti-Second Amendment (if you’re an American (of the U.S. persuasion) and you don’t know what the Second Amendment is then that’s a problem)… See, I live out in the sticks and I had to call 911 once because I thought there was a gas leak somewhere in my house and all … Read more

Crossing One Thin Line After Another

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History shows us there is a thin line between outrage and unrest, between unrest and riot, and between riot and revolution. And it seems lately that we are constantly crossing these lines, that we are constantly on the edge and on the verge of being pushed to the limit, that every day, somewhere in the … Read more

English is for Everyone

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Within that old stash, I also found many of my old English lessons, and old worksheets, and old handouts. They all bring back fond and funny and fortunate memories. I miss all my — I hesitate to call them students because it seemed as if I ended up learning more from them than they did from me, so I’ll simply say, I miss all my friends from that period of my life.