Thank You for Laughing

 

My “humor” doesn’t always translate in Spain, and it took me a while to get my speaking ability up to a point to where I could even dream of making a joke in Spanish. So this morning I was overjoyed when the woman at the supermarket cash register laughed out loud at the gag I fed her as I was paying for my five items.

The store had been closed for a month undergoing a major remodeling overhaul. When finished, they had thoroughly rearranged the entire inventory so nothing was where it was before. When it was my turn, I set my stuff on the belt.

“In spite of all of your recent changes, it didn’t take me long at all to find these five things,” I said.

She looked bored and surprised that a customer was addressing her, but she took the bait.

“That’s nice. How long did it take you?” she asked.

I looked at my watch.

“I got here last night at about eight.”

I swear, it didn’t sound like a fake laugh, like the sort she might do just to get rid of me, but maybe she's good at fake laughs.

The Republican Covid End Game

 Watching all of these Republicans spewing bile over Biden’s vaccine mandates drives home the idea that conservatives are simply weaponizing ignorance. Their policies do nothing to aid the lower-class prols, the brown-shirted thugs who do the party’s dirty work. No rich person could ever be bothered to picket an abortion clinic, or storm the Capitol, or go to a Trump rally. The genius of their movement is to keep their people stupid and constantly angry about something. It doesn’t matter what it is.

Any reasonable person knows that abortion is a really complex topic, except for the fetus-lovers, to them it’s murder, and maybe it is. But it’s a lot more complicated and when anyone tries to point this out to the morons, they are branded as a murderer. You can’t win that argument, not with the base. I’d bet anything that someone, somewhere deep in a conservative “think tank” has crunched the numbers and decided that it’s worth it for Republicans to be anti-vax even if they lose a million of their base to the virus. I truly believe they are that cynical.

We obviously have no collective memory in our society, so Republicans aren’t worried that anything they say and do now regarding Covid will come back to bite them in the ass later. Look at the Afghan War. According to Republicans, it’s all Biden’s fault. They are doing the same thing with Covid. They will just deny their disastrous stances, or better yet, move on to the next outrage du jour, whatever that will be. I have been saying for years that American conservatives are always able to control what we are discussing as a society. Biden is one of the few people who refuses to listen to them. Bravo, Joe.

My Favorite Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher Tutorial

 

We’re* all busy these days, so if you only have time today to watch one eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher tutorial, look no further. When I asked in a shop here in Spain about purchasing an eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher, the woman called the vice squad on me. I can’t blame her because everything in German sounds dirty.

*Except me, I’m not busy at all, so stop by anytime if you want to drink beer and watch TV (please bring beer and a TV).

Rock Bottom Cinema

On the TV in the café where write seven days a week, I always turn on the TV because I like the clamor, the noise. The Spanish word is “bullicio” or background noise. Sometimes the “bullicio” interrupts my process and I’m forced to direct my attention to the flat-screen above me. The only thing worse than a really, truly shitty movie is a truly shitty movie dubbed into Spanish. Let your imagination run wild.

War Doesn't Work

War doesn't work. Viet Nam, War on Drugs, War on  Terrorism: they were all failures and expensive as hell. Of course, these were all hugely successful for defense contractors, but the rest of humanity lost a lot.

If we learned a single thing from 9/11 it should be that war is a terrible tool to solve problems. We lost 3,000 lives on that day and then turned around and killed at least one hundred times that many innocent civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq trying to satisfy some sort of misguided blood-lust for revenge.