Author Archives: Curtiswselby

I’m awake, it’s 39 minutes to the New Year. I’m watching UHF as my last movie. I’m reading Encounters With Merton as the years last book, possibly next years first book. I feel compelled to share some of the words of Merton. The following paragraph is quoted from his “Letters to a White Liberal”:

Now, my liberal friend, here is your situation. You, the well-meaning liberal, are right in the middle of all this confusion. You are, in fact, a political catalyst. On the other hand, with your good will and your ideals, your fine hopes and your generous, but vague, love of mankind in the abstract and of rights enthroned on a juridical Olympus, you offer a certain encouragement to the Negro (and you do right, my only complaint being that you are not yet right enough) so that, abetted by you, he is emboldened to demand concessions. Though he knows you will not support all his demands, he is well aware that you will be forced to support some of them in order to maintain your image of yourself as a liberal. (Side note, the emphasis is mine). He also knows, however, that your material comforts, your security, and your congenial relations with the establishment are more important to you than your rather volatile idealism, and that when the game gets rough you will be quick to see your own interests menaced by his demands. And you will sell him down the river for the five hundredth time in order to protect yourself. For this reason, as well as to support your own self-esteem, you are very anxious to have a position of leadership and control in the Negro’s fight for rights, in order to be able to apply the brakes when you feel it is necessary.

Encounters With Merton by Henri J. M. Nouwen, pgs 96-97.

Just….ya know….random musings at the years end.

Happy New Year to all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIn4C7Ip6tE

So, folks are getting onto Ron DeSantis for being AWOL during a spike of Covid. I don’t know if I have a dog in this fight or not. I’ve read a couple of articles about this topic, both of them condemning the governor.

https://www.newsweek.com/where-ron-desantis-photos-fuel-speculation-whereabouts-florida-governor-covid-19-1664577

https://crooksandliars.com/2021/12/ron-desantis-mia-spokesperson-calls-it

Let me start off by saying, I’m a Republican myself. I’d really love to say that this is just crass politics, and the poor guy deserves a vacation, and if I had the power to choose my vacation time I’d likely choose the Christmas time for it once in a while. So I’ll try to leave politics out of this and just talk leadership.

My political opinion is right, and yours is wrong. Happy New Year!

Ok…seriously, it’s not a matter of party or ideology. It’s a matter of…..what the heck ever happened to the idea of leadership? I know these guys aren’t marines, so they don’t have the ideals of your soldiers eat first and then you do, or the ideal of the Airborne Rangers that the commander will be the first on the battle field and the last off.

And yes….I do think they should be allowed vacations. But still….the timing of some of these guys is terrible.

Example one being Ron DeSantis.

Example two comes from my own great state of Oklahoma. Good ol’ governor Stitt was out of state when a record snow storm hit.

https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/politics/state/2021/02/17/gov-kevin-stitt-family-back-in-oklahoma-after-new-mexico-vacation-during-weather-emergency/329598007/

Then there is of course, Governor Cruz from our great neighbors to the south, Texas. I still have a “Marvin the Martian melts Texas” shirt from twenty years ago, but I digress.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/18/politics/vacationing-during-crisis-ted-cruz/index.html

And of coarse, both Obama and Trump were criticized by their political opponents for playing “too much golf” at what were considered inappropriate times. You will note the slant from both articles.

https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/zoey-dimauro/during-times-crisis-president-obama-goes-golfing-fundraising

https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/25/politics/fact-check-trump-obama-golf/index.html

And just in case you fellow Republicans think I’m dissing my own party too much, here are some sources blasting the Democrats for similar foibles.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/02/19/who-cares-about-cruz-where-was-the-outrage-mob-when-obama-was-mia-during-times-of-crisis-n1426869

Nor is our nation the only one that has people who fiddle while Rome burns.

https://en.mercopress.com/2021/12/29/bolsonaro-criticized-for-being-on-holiday-amid-bahia-rainfall-crisis

Of coarse I could go on and on. And it literally does go all the way back to Rome burning while Nero played some confounded instrument (the violin had actually not yet been invented, and while the story may be apocryphal, if you believe even half the stuff about Nero from Seutonious Twelve Caesars you know that madcap scamp was capable of all kinds of wicked fun).

But I also sometimes wonder how much of this is just bad politics. Honestly, if you waited till there was no catastrophe going on to take a vacation or go golfing, you’d never do it.

I think that a large part of the controversy comes from people noticing that there is a different set of rules for “them” than there is for “us.” The Prime Minister doesn’t want to wear a mask during his party….no big deal. If I show up to work without one, it is the end of the world.

For at least the last six thousand years we have record that the rules apply differently to different social scales. And people like Jesus and Socrates who hinted that maybe that was wrong, maybe we are all the children of God, well they had to be silenced. Permanently.

We feel insulted. We feel enslaved. We feel disrespected. And we don’t feel heard. I really don’t mean to sound like a snowflake here. I don’t really care who took what vacation where. I just wish there were some way to get the haves to understand that the have nots are people, just like them.

And I just found out Betty White died. Happy fricken New Year!

I’ve ranted about what I think, and shared articles about what other folks think, but what do you think? Please share your comments and let me know if you think this topic is worthwhile, or are we all just being petty and should mind our own business? What kind of instrument would you play while Rome burns? Where would you vacation if you were a powerful political mogul? And if you are a political mogul, any chance you’d take me to see the bikini clad….what….my girl friend is mad? Oh….just white out that last comment.

Happy New Year to all. May the weeping and gnashing of teeth begin anew.

Next year, surely the wealthy and powerful will learn their lesson……

So it’s another New Year, and resolutions are the thing. We all hope that next year will be better. Surely things can’t be as bad as this year was, we tell ourselves. And the world continues spinning it’s merry way to a chaos most can’t deal with (unless professionally medicated). But then, maybe there are some folks that just wanna watch it burn.

I didn’t used to believe in New Years resolutions. When I was very young, the first life lesson I learned was “you cannot have what you want.” Now don’t get me wrong, it is true I likely got way more of the things I wanted than I gave life credit for. But it become a core foundational belief that forty plus years of effort hasn’t entirely erased. So if you couldn’t have what you want, why want anything at all?

So my goal in life became the abolition of desire. Buddhism, while I never converted, resonated with me in the idea that you won’t suffer if you don’t want anything. Spock was my ultimate hero before I was introduced to The Lord of the Rings. I decided that I would emulate him. I would be indifferent.

Eventually a time came when I realized that this simply would not work.

• First off we are built to feel things. We can’t shut off our emotions unless we are either on drugs or massively exhausted.
• Second, I found that the more I tried not to feel, the more I felt. Specifically, the more I felt bad
• Lastly….maybe a bad excuse, but I found the users, abusers, assholes and narcissists make no effort to control their feelings. The trick only works one way. You better control your feelings buster, but mine…well, mine are important. You just don’t understand how passionate I am.

These efforts only exacerbated problems with chronic depression and anxiety. Once I learned that killing my desires was essentially the same as killing myself, it was very nearly too late. Stuff happened, one abusive parent stopped abusing, the other became an alcoholic, and I….

I ended up running away from home. I’d learned how to want things. The trouble is, an alcoholic doesn’t care if you want things. I walked the four miles to town and talked to the school administrators and ended up basically in a weird in between state.

So I spent a year with my pastor. I wasn’t quite on my own, but I also wasn’t quite not. The guy did his best, and I’ll always think highly of him, but I was messed up. I had just learned to want to live, just learned to want things and pursue and achieve goals. I became a state champion speaker, president of my FCA group, and earned a National Merit Scholarship.

The story of my life goes on, and it has had ups and downs. I won’t say more about me in this post, I’m only relaying that I know both sides. I know what it is like to think that goals are a complete waste of time, and I know how it is to be driven and goal focused.

Like the successes and failures of my life, I keep going back and forth on it. One year I’m driven, another year I don’t care. Likely the lack of consistency contributes to the times when I was not at the top.

My best friend recently challenged my belief that goals are important. He queried me with “what is the goal of goals?”

While it sounds like a copout, I don’t think he meant it as such. It’s not a terrible question, and I’m not sure I have great answers. My response now would be twofold.

First, studies show that those who focus on their goals, while they rarely accomplish them, do usually get more accomplished than those who do not.

Second, to paraphrase Jordan Peterson, “What the hell else are you going to do?”

The black pit of despair is no fun place to be. So….even if it feels like a waste of time….dig out those planners. Dig out the self help books. Try to focus on even just a handful of things that you think would have a positive impact on your life. Make your bed. Clean your room. Weed your garden.

One day at a time, you can build a better life. I’ll leave a link to the ten most chosen New Years Resolutions. Look through it. Pick at least two, so that if you fail at one maybe you succeed at another. And maybe one person, one goal, one day at a time, we make this world a better place.

https://www.goskills.com/Soft-Skills/Resources/Top-10-new-years-resolutions

I’m actually old enough and crazy enough to very vaguely remember the ill fated Star Wars Holiday Special. I was maybe nine at the time, and while we only had one movie to adore back then, and my family had no VCR or anything, the memories of the movie, along with read and reread comic books, and the novel, well in my young mind Star Wars and Star Trek and super heroes were the crux of my imagination.

Since then my mind has been opened to many different things, and even the real world no longer seems so bland and disinteresting as it seemed when I was nine. But Star Wars is still a part of my psyche.

Boba Fett was introduced in that special, but I don’t actually remember that. I think I got board (the cartoon if you remember is really the only half way entertaining part of the special) and played with my space sword. By the time I got back to the special it was nearly over. All I really remember is the beginning with Han and Chewbacca being chased by Star Destroyers, and the ending where Han punches a Stormtrooper who falls to his death.

The rest of the special was a blur to me for many years. I’d nearly forgotten it till Weird Al bought a bootlegged copy from a “gangsta” in “White and Nerdy.”

A couple of years back I got a job at a factory. I was recovering from terrible illness and needed a less stressful job, so I took one at this factory. I worked Christmas Eve night, and would not pick up my son till the next morning. Twelve hour shifts on top of myalgic encephalomyletis made me just want to crash in bed. But it was Christmas Eve, and I was missing my son terribly.

I turned on the tv, put it on Youtube, and the top AI recommendation was Rifftrax riffing the Star Wars Holiday Special.

I stayed awake for about thirty minutes or so, sinking in the joy of watching these master riffers ripping apart this execrable tv production.

It was SO BAD. With the exception of the scenes with Harrison Ford, and the cartoon, the entire production made me long for the quality productions of Roger Corman or Ed Wood.

But the riffing was so good. MST3K and Rifftrax, along with the great internet critics Red Letter Media, The Cinema Snob, and Brandon Tenold….these are the great comforts of my old age.

So Bobba Fett was introduced, and I had missed it thirty five years earlier.

While I got to see the original Star Wars in theaters, it would be many years before I would actually see The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. I read them as comic books, back in the heady days when Marvel was just starting to give DC some real major competition, when they had the rights to Star Wars and it wasn’t Dark Horse Comics or Sat….I mean Disney that was running the ink. Bobba Fett somehow came across as a major threat, someone to be feared almost on a level with Vader himself.

Watching the movies years later, I was disappointed. Maybe the comics did it better, or maybe my young imagination had just inflated the “bad-assery” of the character. I thought of him back then as a kind of sifi Clint Eastwood. Someone who wasn’t about justice, but sought the highest bidder with cold cunning calculation. Or maybe like a James Bond in armor.

When I saw the movies finally some eight or ten years after they came out….Bobba Fett didn’t seem like the strong silent type.

Honestly, grown up me saw him as more of an afterthought. “We need to sell more action figures Mr. Lucas.” “Oh….hell….I don’t have any new ideas….I know! Let’s pull that Boba Fett guy out from that mistake we made a little while ago and sell him!” “Brilliant sir!” “Kaching!”

So in summary…..what is the tired blogger really trying to say?

The shine has been pretty badly worn off of Star Wars for me. The prequals were just irritating, and frankly, all I can say about the latest trilogy is that it makes the prequals look good. For a cutting but very wonderful critique of the prequals and the Force Awakens the Last Jedi to raise up Skywalker, I highly recommend Red Letter Medias critiques. But be warned….there are hours and hours of material, you need to clear an evening to hear even half of it.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=Red+Letter+Media+Star+Wars&&view=detail&mid=B1D573C5BB114881E6C6B1D573C5BB114881E6C6&&FORM=VRDGAR&ru=%2Fvideos%2Fsearch%3Fq%3DRed%2BLetter%2BMedia%2BStar%2BWars%26FORM%3DVRIBQP

In the end, I do appreciate the effort to revive the franchise with quality work in The Mandalorian. Having said that….if they could get the tv series right…..couldn’t they have gotten the movies right too?

What do you think? If you loved Star Wars, let me know, if you hated it, let me know, if you are Jar Jar Binks….I’m coming for you…..

They’re what’s for dinner.

Ok….so there are two things I’m totally sick to death of seeing on the news.

Donald Trump and Covid.

I think today was the breaking point for me about Covid. New CDC guidelines come out announcing that those who test positive only need to be corralled….I mean quarantined for five more days after the first negative test.

At first I was fine. I mean, five days after having a clean bill of health sounds reasonable to me. Then the bubble headed bleach blonde talking head (or maybe it was the CDC talking head….they were both pretty well coifed) said something about how “of coarse, nobody should ever be forced to work while they are sick.”

I spoke out loud, more to the tv actually than to my life partner who happened to be there at the time. “This is the reason why I don’t watch the news anymore. These news pundits have no connection to reality. How many times have I had no real choice but to go in and take care of my job while I was sick? Anyone who has ever worked in retail knows that we are often forced to work when we are sick.”

The intent with this post is not to whine. The point isn’t that I’m tired of a topic being ground into the dirt for several years.

The point is that the news has largely stopped being relevant. Even the weather serves little purpose, if you have an iphone you can just look it up and be done.

Recently I watched a news segment on CNN about how the news on CNN is accurate. I heard a figure reported, but I didn’t remember it. I polled myself about the accuracy of my blog posts, and learned that 100 percent of the people polled found my blog posts to be totally accurate.

According to the website Pew Research Center surveys say that people actually feel that the news has gotten less and less accurate over the last two decades. Perhaps the media should be checking their own poll numbers when they report on the popularity of any particular politician. The link is here

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2009/09/13/press-accuracy-rating-hits-two-decade-low/#:~:text=Just%2029%25%20of%20Americans%20say%20that%20news%20organizations,were%20accurate%20while%2034%25%20said%20they%20were%20inaccurate.

Several clicks later (in which I learned…the same thing as reported above…..and that Fox News has an accuracy rating of 10 percent with the folks polled by the competition….I’m sure that study was reliable, and that China is doing shady stuff again….) I finally learned something that at least seemed like a legitimate study.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339150199_Evaluating_the_Accuracy_of_Social_Media_News_Reports/link/5e41deb9458515072d919648/download

I’m posting this 1) to give readers some real figures to look at, and 2) I want to point out something in this study.

On page six of this study we are informed that:

As expressed by Branston and Stafford (2007) two points are often made about news within media studies:

1. it is not transparent, it is not unbiased, not the ‘window on the world’ it often sets itself up to be.
2. Its constructed vision of events usually serve dominant interests.

This being the case, other than simply polling people about how they feel about the media, is it even possible to do a scientific study on the accuracy of the media at large?

So the reader is likely wondering, “what is your point tired blogger what blogs at midnight?” My point is, who is fact checking the media? Facelessbook fact checks our random posts about flowers and Peanuts characters, but who is making sure that CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and all the so called “alternatives” are actually reporting facts?

And while everyone notices the bias of News Media that have the opposing ideology (Oh no tired blogger…..my side only reports the FACTS. It’s the opposition that throws all the editorial commentary and opinions and disingenuous editing at us), so many of us are either blind to the ideologues on our own side, or are eager to justify it with some kind of pointless “yeah but.”

I don’t know if this was very coherent or not. But in the end, 1) I don’t need the news to tell me if I’m sick or not. 2) I don’t need the news to tell me if I need to stay away from work or not. I need the fricken news to tell me what is going on, especially with our government and megacorps that attempt to run our lives.

Is that too much to ask?

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

One of the most iconic scenes in film history: George Bailey is running madly down the streets of Bedford Falls. He crunches the manufactured snow in the ninety degree heat of the filming season. He shouts a crazed “Merry Christmas!” to all and sundry. And the town denizens, long since used to George Bailey’s madcap ways, joyfully respond in kind. Thank God there is someone that stands like a stone wall as a beacon of hope and and bastion of kindness against the economic and political machinations of the evil Harry Potter. (Wait….what was the guys name?…..oh never mind…..). Why, I would still have to be living in Potter’s Fields (bringing to mind where Judas was buried, and for those of us born in the 70’s, Elvis Presley’s poignant “In the Ghetto”…..”In the Ghetto…….as his Momma cries….”) were it not for that crazy scamp George Bailey. (Fun fact…..a bailey is an outer wall of a castle). And Mr. Potter responds spitefully (yet joyfully also) “And a happy New Year! In Jail” How Ironic this holiday season we are likely putting Kim Potter in jail.

Yesterday, Harry Potters long lost great granddaughter (you might want to fact check that) was convicted of manslaughter because she pulled a gun instead of a taser and a suspect ended up dead. While I’ve been irreverent here, I have to acknowledge that the loss of a human life is a serious thing. Really nothing to laugh about there.

In real life, as in fiction, we have to have someone to blame. And when there isn’t someone to blame, we have to put our sins on the scapegoat and have them leave the camp. A person has died wrongfully, so we have to destroy someone. An eye for an eye.

And to be somewhat fair, she did do wrong. She made a terrible, horrible mistake. Frankly, if you examine it she basically made the same mistake Alec Baldwin did. Not being careful enough with a gun.

Do I have the answer? No. I’m simply the humble tired midnight blogger what blogs at Midnight. But I wonder if that same jury were trying Alec Baldwin, would they come to the same conclusion. Should she have been convicted? Should her life (let’s not even consider her career…..I think that one goes without saying) be over because of this mistake? Should Alec Baldwins?

Should we be merciful? Or is justice served in this? Am I not merciful?

Please leave comments letting me know what you think.

A handful of kind folks have viewed this site, and some have “liked,” followed, or commented. I certainly appreciate that.

I honestly haven’t enjoyed Christmas in an agonizingly long time. And honestly was never much of a fan of Seinfeld.

But the idea of there being some holiday, some reason for the rest of us to celebrate, has always appealed to me. When I saw the episode (one of the few Seinfeld episodes I ever both watched and enjoyed) something about the joke rang true to me.

And now I guess it has become kind of a thing. The whole airing of grievances should be part of some festival. So…in the spirit of Festivus…

Why did I have to be the child of an alcoholic? Why did my crushed self esteem attract a woman with borderline personality disorder? Why didn’t I perceive her issues before I left her? Why does society make it so hard for a divorced father to have a part in his son’s life? Why has it taken me fifty years to find love?

Ok….I’m at work, so I have to get back to it. Maybe some night I’ll actually post one of these blogs at midnight.

But I am very grateful for Pooja G for liking a post. If I weren’t at work I’d look you up and like your posts back. I’ll hopefully remember to do that when I get home.

Your mad blogger what blogs at work (and/or midnight): CS