Computers are making people easier to use

If you're on Facebook or Twitter you are an algorithm, an equation to help advertisers extract your facts Jack. You're in an unpaid focus group used to sharpen the aim of our commercial thought police. You're also a sitting duck for hackers to steal your credit card information and passwords. The inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, warns of the ingenious filter bubbles and centralized corporate control that is quickly abolishing your privacy. But that's only the menace of the marketing department, love is still off limits isn't it? Or is it? Eharmony, Match and all the other electronic yentas have their own tricks to shape and seduce you for profit. Forget poetry: “How do I love thee, let me count the ways”. Now it's let me count the guys. Shakespeare wrote: “Love sought is good, but given unsought is better”. But what does he know? Welcome to the bliss of megadata, data breach, wire taps and the NSA. Don't say Orwell didn't warn you. In a comic panel two kids are looking at an iPad and one says: “I know what a face is but what's a book?”

Writing that's unafraid to be great

I've just finished reading a great novel you've never heard of. It's called “Stoner” and it was written in 1965 by the late John Williams. It has gone out of print twice but has made a remarkable comeback and currently tops best seller lists all over Europe. It is a “quiet” novel about an English professor in a midwest college. The plot is slow by current slam-bang trends but those who love literature, language and the mystery of the mind and heart will cherish it. My daughter is a book curator for a magnificent store in Tampa called the Oxford Exchange. She tells me that over 300,000 titles are published every year, mostly an inventory of junk including the dubious best sellers. Even Stephen King despairs of James Patterson's poor writing. There is a new film called “Words and Pictures” about an English teacher in a high school. He meets the girl, loses the girl etc. etc. and in the last scene they are kissing and hugging. That's the arc of the film but life writes the arc in “Stoner”, not Hollywood. I ask people what their favorite book is. Some say they don't read books, or they read so many they don't remember a favorite or they only read when there's nothing on TV. To me that says they have never really tasted literature. I don't care if it's only Black Beauty, it shows that a book meant something to them. In one of his NY Times columns David Brooks says, “If you want to learn to write, the best way to start is by imitating George Orwell.” The thing that Orwell and Williams have in common is clarity and a respect for language. After a troubled marriage, an affair that ends abruptly, a daughter who turns her back on him, Stoner dies unmourned and is quickly forgotten. This illustrates one of Orwell's hard truths that you are forgotten in one generation and in two no one will ever know you existed. Orwell's close friend, Cyril Connolly, had a mantra: “only write masterpieces”. “Stoner” is one of them.

I can have you speaking Russian in three minutes

That's my cheap party trick where I teach all comers that “da” means yes and “nyet” means no. I don't promise to take them farther since scaling that strange and beautiful language is like climbing Mt. Everest. I am not fluent in Russian—my ace is an authentic accent, one that fools Russians everywhere. That picture of me on the blog was taken at the dock in Vladivostok. Our guide said, “your mother is from Russia”. Nyet, she was from Halifax. All the credit goes to UCLA and my wonderful teacher Prof. Alexander Mornell who tragically died during our class! Of course I can read the language but I saw something in the paper this week that gave me pause. At the St. Petersburg Economic Forum there was a word 20 letters long ending with a pronunciation “sign”. It meant “competitiveness”. Russian has a much larger alphabet than English as well as two pronunciation signs. Homer Simpson got tossed out of a costume party and the host yelled after him: “I was going to make you a Russian Count”. And Homer replied. “Well, as they say in Russia, Goodbye!..in Russian. He meant “Dos vi danya”. Try it.

Archie Bunker in a cowboy hat

Way out in a tumbleweed corner of Nevada is a rancher named Craven Bundy—I mean Cliven Bundy. By now you've probably heard about his staredown of the BLM over his theft of $1 million in grazing fees he owes. He was backed up by a ragged mob of red necks all armed to the teeth. They fantasized that they were at the OK Corral but in reality they were nothing more than the moronic townsfolk in “Blazing Saddles”. The whole thing was a hit of the week on Fox News and CNN. They were even called patriots by our first term second rate Senator Dean Heller. Not content with his 15 minutes of fame, Craven, I mean Cliven Bundy rattled off a full throttle statement about negros, welfare and the Federal government plus authentic gibberish about freedom and the social benefits of slavery. Oh oh this frightened off the right wing media and made Dean Heller swallow his words. Meanwhile, our long term first rate Senator Harry Reid, who had called the mob domestic terrorists, didn't have to retract a syllable of what he said. My disappointment with Bundy is that he isn't funny, wise or thoughtful-- just an old windbag wearing a ten gallon Stetson on a two gallon head. Where does all this take place—in the wonderfully-named Bunkerville where the spirit of Archie now resides.

Why I still read the local newspaper

It's certainly not for the police blotter with all the stabbings, beatings and murders. Not for the melancholy of the dozens of pedestrians killed on the roads including 2 year old toddlers. Not for the tiresome right wing diatribes. No, it's for the comic strips, especially one called “Frank & Ernest”. They misuse the language in a delightful way, including “Malaprop Man” who is a caped klutz who mangles his words and syntax. This week Frank instructs Ernie that the longest waterway in the Ukraine is the Dneiper, not the Crimea River (see my last blog and listen to Julie London) and at the F&E bakery Frank questions a seasonal promotion titled “April is the crullerest month” (TS Eliot's Wasteland). I also like Hagar the Horrible but he is in the category that Marshall McLuhan liked least: the berated husband nagged by Maggie on Jiggs, Dagwood's boss Dithers and the sarcasm of Hagar's wife Helga. But hey, I like to laugh at something in the paper. I mean besides Senator Ted Cruz.

Crimea River

Putin has put the moves on Crimea and it's his. All the blather about protecting Russian citizens is baloney, This was an “anschluss” right out of Hitler's playbook on Austria. I think every leader should get out his copy of “The Guns of August” and not go off half-cocked like the jingo Senator from Arizona or the blowhards on Fox News. Let Putin have his ego trip, the bills will come in soon enough. An interview with some old folks in Crimea said that they wanted to join Russia because “they had better pensions”. They also happen to be broke, so pony up Putin. There was a visual on the internet this week that showed how national borders changed in the past 1000 years. You've never seen such furious map-making. I've seen the Russian fleet mothballed in Vladivostok and it isn't pretty to see all that military waste in one place. It will surely come to Crimea in time and then what, “Russo-Disney”. Remember the playful plea from the Hitler in Mel Brooks' “The Producers”: “I want peace, peace...a little piece of Poland and a little piece of France!” Perchance?

Putin is poutin', Ukraine is floutin', everyone's shoutin'

Things are getting dicey in Ukraine or as Jimmy Fallon says, “maybe we should start calling it “Twokraine”. But what would you expect of a shirtless, narcissistic autocrat like Putin. He plays hardball and realpolitick and couldn't give a fig what Europe and the US think. Someone told Stalin that the Pope disapproved of his military exploits and Stalin said, with a sly smile: “how many divisions does the Pope have?” We get it. I've just finished a little book called “1913..the year before the storm” that's the storm called The Great War one hundred years ago. Everyone wonders how it started. It was mostly poor choices and the fact that the Kaiser and many others were delusional and had fantasies in their creative and let's stop listening to the jingo nonsense of John McCain who has Teddy Roosevelt's axiom backwards: “Speak loudly and carry a birch twig” It probably comes down to the only person Putin fears and listens to, his wife, the Russian recording star Dolly Putin.