out there

Oh my goodness, I'm a babe in the woods. After viewing the radio interview with Billy Bob Thornton (his band members must be nothing but embarrassed, oh, and mad because they had to cancel their tour), I thought of the notorious Alec Baldwin phone call to his daughter. I found that and listened. Then I wanted to look around for other views, more background. Found a blog that at first I thought was a straightforward. Then realized it was satirical. I mean, the blogger is calling himself Jon Swift. Wasn't it Jonathan Swift who wrote the piece about eating your children during the famine in Ireland? (Not sure if I have the facts all correct there. It's been decades since I was in that English Lit. class in college. And I teach 7th grade math and science. Not really set up to keep my memory fresh on Beowulf, The Cantebury Tales, et al). And this Jon is writing things like what good parenting this 11 or 12 year old girl is experiencing when not only does she get call from her father, angry at the rude treatment he is receiving from her, but her mother releases this recording to the Internet. Parents will now realize that they can use this sort of thing as a threat to their kids he goes on to say. When I first started reading I was appalled, since I had just this evening heard a woman call Obama a Nazi because his health plan will kill old people, so I was in the frame of mind to believe that he believed what he was writing. When I figured out he was writing tongue in check I enjoyed it. And then I found on this blog there were other blogs listed that this blogger follows - what a word, blog, is it like smog, smoke and fog, blab and log? - and I find A Well Informed Citizenry, with a beautiful repro of an old picture of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Well, I made a quick judgement that that's what they were doing. Something important was going on since all had their white wigs on. But when I saw this beautifully presented page I realized that I'm jumping into an ocean of experienced, interesting, informed, erudite folk. But that's never stopped me. You know, pretend you know what you're doing and you can get by till you really do know what you're doing.

I sometimes have thought that if there were a God, and she could see everything that everyone is doing, then she could show what everyone is doing to everyone else then everyone would behave better because it would no longer be "let your conscience be your guide". And here we are, everyone is watching. Rodney King being beaten just came to mind. But we're not watching everywhere. People still cut you off on the freeway. And of course, much more serious things occur. But along the same lines I just thought of the movie I watched earlier this evening, Ben X. A Flemish film about a teenage boy with Alperger's Syndrome who had been harassed intolerably by his classmates. Another classmate had filmed an especially terrible event and this was later used cleverly to bring justice. Oh, that's a spoiler. If anyone is reading this...

One of my facebook friends from school sent me a msg. saying she enjoyed reading my facebook postings. So maybe someone will like my blogging. For me, for now, it's a log.