Spectacular Autumn

We've had only one day of rain that I can remember in the last five weeks or so. I'm still wearing shorts and flip-flops and sleeping with a fan.

It's Not the Time to Talk About Gun Control...Again!

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Doing absolutely nothing about mass shootings seems to be working so well, so why fix something that isn't broken?

Yet another horror committed with legal firearms, and another tsunami of propaganda from the NRA and their many minions about how guns aren’t the problem. I'd call this routine a broken record, but you can only break a record so many times before it would turn to dust, yet mass shootings occur every few days in the U.S. NRA, your message has been received, loud and very clear. None of our politicians can even mention the word “gun” without surrounding it with heart-warming stories of their families, or their childhoods, or their adult lives that are filled with these wonderful killing tools. 

I love how American conservatives always say after some horrific outrage like the Las Vegas massacre that we shouldn’t politicize the issue of gun control, and how we need to wait, how we need to “honor the dead,” how it’s just not the right time. That’s like saying we shouldn’t patch a leaky roof when it’s raining even though it’s suppose to rain constantly for eternity.

So gun control doesn’t work…except when it does work. I happen to live in a country that experiences almost nothing in the way of gun violence. “If guns are illegal only criminals will have guns.” Sorry, not true. Crimes in Europe rarely have guns as a component. I live in a city of over 800,000 and I’ve never heard of a gun-related crime. But if gun control doesn’t work there must be some other reason why guns aren’t an issue here.

I wouldn’t waste a second of my time arguing over gun control in the USA, because it’s gone way beyond rational discussion. Gun ownership has become some sort of creepy sacred right. Don’t believe me, just look around on YouTube to see all of the fetishizing of guns. For the last 20 years in America we have been losing our minds over guns and are completely unable to legislate any sort of restrictions on guns and ammunition. Can someone please explain to me how a man can buy dozens of firearms in a year without raising some sort of flag to authorities? The gun nut crowd wants to make silencers legal. Because mass shooting are too loud?

I think we should start with movies. All too often guns are seen as a great way to solve a problem. Even the cops in movies abuse guns. Don’t believe me? Name five movies in which the cops arrest the criminals instead of executing them.

Guns and violence should be at least as taboo as sex in movies, so if someone dies violently it should be rated XXX. You can’t show a woman’s breast on TV for a split second, but families will sit down and watch Terminator together, a movie in which at least 50 people are murdered, including a bunch of cops.

The press on all sides are frantic to find “the motives and reasons” for these mass shootings. “In 99 percent of the cases,” the perpetrator of a drastic killing offers some kind of justification, however twisted,” as reported in a NY Times piece. We seem more comfortable thinking that the murderer was a Muslim terrorist, or a racist or a White Power fanatic, or whatever. I would say that they all have only one reason for these outrages: they are mentally ill. Motives and reasons shouldn’t preoccupy us for a second. 

Up until now, we’ve only had these lone, dickless morons on killing sprees. What happens when a semi-organized group decides they want to use guns to effect change? If one disgruntled idiot can buy dozens and dozens of high-powered rifles, what would happen if some religious cult did the same thing? 

Here is my prophecy. If and when people start targeting rich people in their massacres, we’ll see gun legislation enacted so fast it will make you scratch your head and wonder what happened to the Second Amendment. Until that time I suggest running serpentine and, although it’s not my thing, praying.

*I resisted the caption "Viva Las Vegas!"or "What happens in Vegas..."

New Practice Method

Since I bought my piano I have wanted to know exactly how much time I spend practicing every day. I tried timing myself every time I sat down but I kept forgetting to turn the timer on or off so this method didn’t last even a single day. I thought that I had been practicing a lot—and I was—but I never knew exactly how much. At times I would sit down and play for only a few minutes which as a block of time is probably not much use to me at all.

I came across this piece in the New York Times and immediately saw how this could apply to my piano practice. Now I set my kitchen timer for 30 minutes and turn it on when I sit down. This breaks my sessions into half hour blocks. A half hour, as I’m finding, is a really good amount of time to practice at one sitting. Anything less and I tend to avoid the tougher parts of a song but with 30 minutes to kill I’m forced to face these demons. Anything longer than 30 minutes tends to get tedious.

I only wish that I had stumbled on this trick a lot sooner. Better late than never but I still feel like an idiot for not figuring this out much earlier.

I Don't Even Own an Apron

Whenever anyone accuses me of being a good cook I have to point out that as I walk down the stairs and smell what people below me are cooking I’d rate myself as the 3^rd or 4^th best cook in the building—and there are five floors of possible chefs above me who I’m not even entering in the competition.

No Complaints

Once again, I just like to post about the weather from time to time so that in years to come I can look back and compare. This has been one of the coolest summers that I can remember here in Valencia. I had to close most of my windows last night to keep out the cold, yes, cold. This morning I put on a cotton t-shirt when I usually languish around my apartment bare to the waist because of the heat.