Category Archives: No category

“To Change The Subject”

China, No category

We are always the same age inside. Gertrude Stein

…but not on the outside. me

My first business partner was Sam Berland, and he had two pet peeves: people who said “Consences of opinion” because consences already includes opinion, and people who said “not to change the subject” and then changed the subject of the conversation. I used to argue with him on the use of the second peeve. And now, maybe forty years later, I think he might have been right. In my defense, when Sam and I owned bas in the 1970s, Sam liked to hold a weekly staff meeting. Like a lot of City Council meetings I’ve sat through, the staff meetings would often get bogged down by unimportant details to avoid the real problems. I would try to change the subject, not to change the subject, per se, from what seemed unimportant to me, but to what I considered actually important.

In this case, I want to change the subject away from what I think are the important issues of our time to something much less important, a trip to China 16 years ago. Issues like Ukraine is locked in a war of attrition with Russia (that Ukraine is either winning or losing, depending on where we get our information and what that particular commentator originally predicted). Issues like Trump running amok, or Trump and Epstein having sex with young children, or even whether Taylor Swift is really writing a screenplay inspired by her relationship with Travis Kelce, are all more important than an old trip to China.

Well, maybe not more important to me, but more reported on. I want to re-post on Michele and my trip to China twenty-six years ago for three reasons. When I first started this blog, I was using a platform called Typepad, which is now defunct, and I read that everything I blogged will soon be permanently deleted (shortly after I started blogging, at Michele’s prompting, I switched to WordPress as my platform, so most of this blog will stay around). When we went to China, we were twenty-six years younger, and much of that trip was to areas that would be much harder, if not impossible, for me to do today. Lastly, I process my photographs with Adobe Lightroom, which has vastly improved over the last twenty-six years, and I want to reprocess the pictures taken in China in 2009, when it was incredibly smoggy, making the photographs flat and grey.

In 2009, we flew into Hong Kong with no reservations except for a hotel reservation for the first night and tickets to fly out of Shanghai three weeks later (which, even then, was easier than it sounds because of the internet). I’m going to skip repeating Hong Kong and Shanghai because they are cities and, while very different than San Francisco or New York, or Paris, for that matter, are still very familiar with streets bordered by sidewalks and lots of buildings with stores on the ground level. The two things on our agenda were the karst formations around Guilin and the Li River and the Zhangjiajie area’s canyons, which we had read were similar to Zion National Park.

This photographic remembrance of our trip to those areas starts somewhere between Guilin and Yangshou.

Burying The Lede And ….Awww!!! Is Anything On The Web Real?

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As part of an innovative regional protection program, AAA is providing a limited number of Premier Roadside Assistance Collections to residents in your area.

Since last May, my life has pretty much revolved around my bladder cancer. Actually, it is more accurate to say that since last August, after two relatively painless surgeries, my physical life has pretty much revolved around the cure for my bladder cancer, not the cancer itself.

My body is still reacting – overreacting in my humble opinion -to past BCG-TICE treatments. In a way that seems almost random, the pain moves around. Yesterday, my shoulder was stiff, and the pain slowly moved up my neck to give me a headache. Today, my right hand is sore and weak. The pain, where and how much, has taken over my life. It seems to always be there.

A side effect of this is that I spend hours scrolling on my computer, waiting for my hands and arms to hurt less so I can pay more attention to something else, anything else. Gemini tells me that this scrolling aimlessly even has a name, Zombie Scrolling Syndrome: This term was coined to describe the effects of cell phone addiction, specifically “mindless scrolling out of habit, with no real destination or benefit.”

All the above is true, but it was written three days ago. Over the weekend, after being off BCG-TICE for three weeks, everything is calming down (relatively speaking, my shoulders and neck still hurt). More importantly, my doctor thinks I am cancer-free. I know I should scream, I”M CANCER-FREE, but it seems too early for that. My next cancer checkup is in three months, and then, maybe, I’ll start yelling.

In the meantime, all that scrolling has changed my opinion of the internet. It no longer seems like the repository of all the world’s information. I have learned that my web portal, and probably everybody’s portal, is stuffed with scams and misinformation.

About three weeks ago, give or take a couple of weeks, I got an email saying I would be getting a gift. All I had to do was go to the AAA website. Well, it wasn’t actually the website; the website was something like AAA.gift, and Google told me that it was a possible scam and to stay away (in slightly more time than it took Michele to yell from across the room, “Don’t go there,” after I commented on our gift).

The next day, I got another email from – allegedly – AAA with the same offer. Since then, I’ve been getting essentially the same offer – allegedly, again – from a variety of companies, many of which I have no relationship with. Today, I got basically the same email that started with Hello valued Tractor Supply member (what are the chances of getting a hit on that in Coastal California?).

Way before I was sent that probable scam, over in YouTube land, I saw a video – my feed is very heavy in cat videos – that showed a hero cat. It sure looked real to me then, and it still does.

Recently, I saw this cute interaction. Although I’ve never had a cat like this, and I’ve had seven, it seems real

Then I saw this.

Then I saw this with the bear sort of running through the fence at the end.

This short clip, clearly marked “AI”, seemed very real.

Now, looking at the first video, I’m far from sure it’s real. First, it starts with a shot of the dog from the other side of the car. How did that happen?

Now I think that trusting the web is a little like trusting a random stranger. They may be telling the truth, but don’t bet on it.

An Interlude

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Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.– Franz Kafka

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. George Bernard Shaw

I turned Eighty-Five in June of 2025 CE, and it was my roughest birthday yet. For years, I’ve thought of myself as a much younger person than my actual age. If I had a physical problem – and I’ve had a lot of physical problems – I sort of thought about it as something that could be fixed, a repair like a leaking radiator on a car. Fix the leak and zoom away. Even then, when I really think about it, I knew I was getting old, but not really…old.

A couple of months before my birthday, I fell on a wet flight of stairs, breaking a little bone in my hand, from which my hand is still numb. At about the same time as my birthday, I had my first of two cancer surgeries, two cataract surgeries, which made it difficult to read, and a major problem with my jaw that is probably arthritis related. All this over a background of arthritis that is getting worse. It is not the first time that I’ve felt old, but the first time I’ve felt chronically old. I feel like I’ve become obsessed with ageing and its associated degradation of my body and mind.

To add to that, I lost, left really, my phone in a cab in Paris, and it is now tied up in French Customs. I don’t consider myself a big phone user, but I really miss it. Then our house phone battery failed, so I felt completely isolated. I thought I did, that is, until my computer’s hard drive started freezing and I lost my email connection.

I probably will not find out if I’m cancer-free for a while, and even if I am now cancer-free, I will have six weeks of chemotherapy to be sure. On the plus side, I passed my driver’s vision test, and I can now read the New Yorker’s cartoons without glasses. We have a new house phone with the same number but no saved numbers of other people. I now have a new 2-TWO-terabyte hard drive, which is pitched as being faster and more reliable than my old drive.

Meanwhile, back in Paris, we went to a David Hockney show in a museum designed by Frank Gehry.

The Fighting Oligarchy Tour

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A lot of people were ready for this years ago, but it kept getting swept under the rug. More people are listening now than ever before. Rebecca Katz, a Democratic strategist,

I heard that someone was flying a plane with a banner that said This is Trump country… It sure don’t look like it today. I don’t think this is Trump country. This is our country. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez just before her speech in Folsom, California.

I’m gonna be honest: I did not have Bernie Sanders introducing Clairo at Coachella on my 2025 bingo card. Lexi Williams in msn which – according to itself – is a A general-purpose Web portal from Microsoft that includes news, sports and entertainment as well as the Bing search engine.

Out in the West – and more in the red Republican West of Idaho and Bakersfield than the blue West of the Coast – something is happening that I have never seen in my lifetime: two politicians, neither of whom is currently running for office, are drawing huge crowds on a protest tour. The tour is called “Fighting Oligarchy” and, not surprisingly to me, given the name, one of the politicians is Senator Bernie Sanders. Still, I am somewhat surprised that Bernie is not alone; Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is also on the ticket.

Bernie – as he is known to his followers, if followers is the right word – is 83 and clearly will not run again, but AOC as she is known to her followers, is looking at a higher office and just as clearly as Bernie isn’t running, I’m sure AOC is running…for something and this is her introduction to the nation, especially the red parts of it. Running or not, Bernie and AOC are drawing huge crowds in red territory, such as Boise, Salt Lake City, and Bakersfield, but are receiving very little attention in the eastern mainstream media, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.

And this is the problem, the mainstream media is owned and controlled by people who brought us the oligarchy in the first place. Most of them are rich almost beyond comprehension, and they want to stay that way. The Ochs-Sulzberger family holds a controlling interest in The New York Times worth more than $8 billion, with a significant portion of the remaining shares owned by Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire worth about $88 billion. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times is owned by Patrick Soon-Shiong, who is worth approximately $5.5 billion.

We – I’m going to go with Democratic Socialists because that’s how Bernie and AOC most identify themselves – Democratic Socialists have a lot of common goals with the Ochs-Sulzberger family, Patrick Soon-Shiong, and even Jeff Bezos, starting with equal rights for everybody, or as the Trump administration has phrased equality, DEI. Still, they differ from them in policies that will cost them money or diminish their power and influence, such as raising the tax rate on the ultra-rich, implementing a minimum wage that people can live on, or expanding Medicare to include everybody. They are not reporting on the Fighting Oligarchy tour because they are The Oligarchy.

I’ve listened to AOC’s speeches at Folsom and Boseman, Montana, and came away energized. Here is a sample of AOC on the stump.