Item: Dalai Lama, persona non grata.  The Scandinavian countries have a reputation for being progressive and wonderful places to live, albeit too cold.  But the Daliai Lama was dissed by the Norwegian government.  Turns out they bowed to Chinese pressure.  Now, China invaded and took over Tibet.  Sound familiar?  Reminds me of recent decisions made by ye olde ex-KGB homophobic dictator of Russia.  No wonder Norway says nothing about the Ukraine.  They’re afraid of the giant shadows China and Russia cast, even though they have plenty of oil.

Of course, Mr. Lama was just there in Norway for the silver anniversary of his Peace Prize.  I guess even the Norwegians are hypocritical.  Maybe it’s the effect of all those Northern Lights putting them into a hide-our-heads-in-the-fjord-sands stupor.  The Dalai Lama was one of the more justifiable Nobel Peace Prizes (why does Norway hand out that one and Sweden the rest?); Obama’s and others didn’t make sense.  Yet, twenty-five years later, they throw it back into the old man’s face.  I’d be pissed even if I were the Dalai Lama.

Item: Sotheby’s bomb.  No, Sotheby isn’t some wacko English terrorist.  Sotheby’s Spring Auction was a bomb in the sense of kaput, failure, crashed, etc.  One-third of their art items didn’t sell.  The official explanation—from the NY Times, as official as I can get because I’m not a Snowden working at Sotheby’s—is that the art work was overpriced.  I bet!  My explanation is that no one wanted those artworks because they were crap.  Or, we can just write it off to a bad economy—the one-percenters don’t think artworks are a good investment anymore.

Some of this theme is found in the Chen and Castilblanco mystery I’m currently finishing, called The Collector, where an art gallery owner is murdered (better than an owner of a bookstore featuring rare books and first editions, methinks).  An excerpt is contained in Aristocrats and Assassins.  From the excerpt, and maybe these comments, readers already know that the art business plays an important role.  Didn’t buy A&A?  Then don’t complain!  Go buy it so you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Item: U.S. education in the toilet.  It’s time for a cultural change.  Maybe it’s teachers’ unions that are more interested in preserving their benes than educating American kids.  Maybe it’s stingy local, state, and federal legislatures with their slash-and-burn budget cuts to education and science while continuing subsidies to oil companies and pumping money into Pentagon programs not even the Pentagon wants.  Maybe it’s because we now have evidence that regressive taxes like property taxes just don’t work because the one-percenters never pay their share.    And maybe it’s just all those video games, iPods, iPads, and smart phones kids start using before they even walk.

Whatever the cause (there are probably many, including an anti-math, anti-science, anti-education climate in the U.S.), only 28% of high school graduates have proficiency in math, and only 34% have proficiency in reading, across the land of the free and the brave…and now stupid.  We don’t see the effect of this right now, but we will very soon.  I’m not chest-thumping here, but the baby boomers were and are the most educated group in American history.  (They’re also the most progressive in spite of Fox News’ claims.  Think same-sex marriage would have evolved the way it has without boomers?  And we protested about serious things, like against the Vietnam War.)

How they measure those numbers is probably debatable and probably swing widely, depending on whether you’re a teacher going after that next pay raise or a high tech CEO despairing about bringing R&D efforts back to this country when he knows it can be done better elsewhere.  Notice I said “better,” not “more cheaply.”  Amerian workers have great enthusiasm; they soon won’t have the required skills.

Whatever the numbers, they aren’t good.  Unless both proficiencies are 70% or higher, we’re condemning the next generation to failure.  Of course, the smart-ass kids might be contributing to their own failure.  It’s a question of necessary and sufficient conditions again.  There are NO SUFFICIENT CONDITIONS for educational excellence.  We, as a nation, can only supply the necessary conditions.  If students don’t want to use them and we can’t motivate them to do so, America will take its place on the trash heap of history.  ‘Nough said.

Item: Light v. heavy.  Because the last item was pretty heavy, let’s lighten up a wee bit.  I’m thinking about writing vampire romances.  Nah.  Just late Cinco de Mayo effects.  But Twilight (books and movies) and many pop culture books and movies focus on supernatural or paranormal romances.  So, for all those readers and writers of the books and viewers of the movies, I have an important question that needs answering.  You might have heard there’s a new drug out for circadian sleep disorders.  Whoever makes it has a clever commercial on TV—not so clever, I guess, if I don’t remember the name of the drug or who makes it.  Here’s the question: Do vampires have a circadian rhythm sleep disorder?  I suppose the same question applies to werewolves?  X-Men?

Item: More light: And the Beat goes on….  Apple wants to buy Beat for $3.2 billion, creating the first hip-hop billionaire.  While pundits debate Apple’s move—do they want the hardware technology or are they ready to replace iTunes with streaming music?—my take is they just want to buy some cool.  Maybe the present Apple pickers running the corporation don’t think all those sliding icons are cool enough?  Of course, those sliding icons represent one of the problems I had with Win 8.1: how to get rid of them!  You’re talking about an old UNIX and VAX VMS programmer here.  And, respect to the hardware, I’m still in the continuing project of turning all my old LPs into MP3 files (for the uninitiated, those are files playable in iPods and the current iTunes)—and now they tell me I should stream them?  Gee, Hip-Hop Master, how do I do that?

And so it goes…. 

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