The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Suppose the Nazis came to your state for a rally. You remember the Nazis, right? Swastika waving skinheads who hate, well, everybody but white folks. And some white folks too. Gays, liberals, Jews, scum like that. And suppose the governor of your state came out and instead of denouncing this hate-group rally of Holocaust deniers, claimed instead that it was a stunt by the Democratic Party to embarrass him. Well, this is Florida and maybe your governor would rise to the occasion, not dig a deeper hole in his political basement.

These are the times we live in. Trump came out this weekend at a rally to promise that if he were elected once again or the Congress flipped GOP, he’d pardon all those patriots who trashed the Capitol and screamed for Pence and Pelosi’s heads. The Commission to investigate the assault on the Capitol, he heatedly suggested, should look into the crimes of Pence and Pelosi. Then he claimed the Georgia folks looking into his so-called attempt to overturn the election results were really racist prosecutors . Needless to say the Prosecutor has asked the FBI for protection from potential harm from patriots motivated by this kind of accusation.

This would be sadly humorous coming from a man who is under assault from so many legal suits you can hardly keep up with them if it weren’t for the fact most of the Republicans in Congress seem willing to either ignore this stuff or else repeat it as truth. Stolen election, tampered ballot boxes, dead zombies voting, witch hunt witch hunt fake news witch hunt. And you thought it couldn’t happen here in the Yew Ess Aye. Well, it’s happening.

I thought Trump was a piece of work, a fluke who parlayed fame from a dopey reality TV show into a desk at the Oval Office. I figured he flim-flammed a lot of folks into believing he was a savvy businessman, a carnival barker with an ego the size of Mt. Rushmore. What I never believed was a whole lot of folks out there in the purpled majesty were just waiting for a bigot to roll out the red carpet for them to say and act what they’ve kept a little quiet in this oppressive political correctness that asks that we respect one another. You don’t respect people you hate. No telling if you might do what you always wanted to do. Just wait for the word. Just hope for Trump or another one like him. Yeah, it gives me the creeps.

As most of you careful readers know, political correctness down here on the partisan shores of the steamy equatorial South End is probably not one of our more valued virtues. Maybe because we’re all trapped down at this skinny dead end backwash cul-de-sac, we’ve learned — the hard way usually —- that if we want to get along without civil war, we have to disagree without resorting to a full blown arms race. And believe me, we disagree. On most everything. That’s why we all ended up down here at the end of a tilting island at the end of America on the edge of a continental shelf sliding herky-jerky under another tectonic plate.

This week the talk down at Jolene’s Beauty Salon and Boutique revolved exclusively around the passage of the same sex marriage bill. Scissors and tongues snipped and clucked, but Jolene says no blood was spilled. Ronald, her frothy new beautician, might have intentionally miscolored Mrs. Adeline’s silver perm a tad on the electric blue side when she made the comment that ‘gayness’, seemed to her, was a lifestyle choice, but mostly the banter was affable.

Rhonda Wilkins did wonder out loud if the bill’s passage meant she and her no-account husband Tom’s opposite sex marriage would be annulled now. “That’s wistful thinking,” Wanda blurted from two chairs away in the middle of a henna touch-up on the minister’s mizzus who steadfastly refused to be drawn into a curling iron showdown, and if Rhonda hadn’t been curled herself and heat-lamped into her chair, she might have stormed out, but by the end of the drying cycle she was cooled down and still unhappily married to the love of her life whose zenith of ambition was to reach retirement before cirrhosis.

So Valentine’s Day on the metrosexual South End this year promises to be a cross between Mardi Gras and a Pink St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe no parades by the Diner, but a lot of closets opened for an early spring cleaning. Believe me, the South End could always stand a little more love…. And just in case Mrs. Adeline is right, some of us should think about renewing those old marriage vows. On the outside chance there really might be a statute of limitation.

It is only rarely that I agree with our President-in-Exile but when I heard that one of his tactics to dispose of presidential memos, meeting records, calendars, love letters from his Korean buddy and anything else that might be used as evidence to indict him for various and sundry crimes, was to flush them down the executive toilet until a call to Roto-Rooter was necessary to unplug the paper mess that had clogged the royal crapper, I thought how appropriate. Better than saving them for the National Archives or the very empty Donald J. Trump Library. Good call, Mr. MAGA!

Folks are taping together some of the ripped up documents down at Mar-a-Lago for a return to the Archives after a summons for their retrieval. Undoubtedly no one will attempt a sewer search and we can say goodbye to the documents that were burned. Worst case: we can let historians piece together the shredded legacy of the Trump Presidency. Or hopefully let the Justice Department sort out the crimes.

The days of secret recordings in the Oval Office probably ended with Nixon and Watergate, the poor guy hoping to burnish his legacy with an audio tape revealing to future generations the profound wisdom of Tricky Dick. Instead it revealed a crooked and paranoid President that even his Republican compatriots abandoned. Trump, well, unless you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of conspiracy media, you don’t really need tapes or taped together memos to reveal a sinister and criminal thug bent on destroying all evidence that might be used against him in a court of law or the court of public opinion.

The future Trump Library, fittingly enough, should be a simple billboard with the words: CLOSED FOR PLUMBING RENOVATIONS. OPENING DATE UNCERTAIN.

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The hot news on the Future Shock front is that Amazon has opened its first Amazon Go grocery stores in select cities across this Great Grid we call America. You walk in their futuristic A&P, grab yourself a cart you still have to drive yourself, load it with all the goodies you want and then sail out the door to your Tesla. No checkout, no waiting in lines, no self-check, all done for you and by the time you make it home, your credit card will have been charged. No fuss, no muss.

Amazon claims there will be no facial recognition software used to track you through their store. Just cameras everywhere covering your every move, no big deal. According to the company, they’ll use instead computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion to manage the store, you know, stuff like that. How the hell they know your identity, much less your credit card information, I couldn’t tell you, but I suspect they use the nano trackers from your vaccinations or something similar, nothing to worry about, all good, all for making your life a bit easier. Isn’t that what we were promised in the digital information era? Time saving? Computers doing your chores? Sure it is. And how is that working out for you? Your life less stressful now that you’ve got access to the internet? More time for those hobbies or for reading a book?

The Olympics are opening up over there in Beijing this week. All the athletes are required to use special apps that can monitor their every tweet or conversation. And no, Amazon didn’t have a hand in this Chinese version of Big Brother. They’re a little bizzy using Artificial Intelligence to monitor your every move in their grocery store, the one coming soon to a neighborhood near you. If you’ve got nothing to hide, why worry? Shoplifting should be a thing of the past along with criticism of your government. Kind of a neat trade-off. Now if only we could get an android to help load and unload that cart, life would be nearly perfect.

The Republican National Committee today censured Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the congressional hearings on the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, alleging that the actions of those in the protest were ‘legitimate political discourse’. Maybe the RNC didn’t watch the tourists scaling the walls of the Capitol, smashing in doors and windows, calling for Pelosi and Pence to be hanged, stealing laptops and documents, threatening the Capitol police and causing bodily harm to some. Maybe they missed the deaths of a few of the officers. Maybe they witnessed a different attack on the Legislature than I did. Some other footage maybe from some 3rd world country.

The RNC doesn’t need an investigation. The RNC has decided that the folks who invaded the halls of Congress were simply protestors exercising their right to disagree with the election results that declared Donald J. Trump the loser in the 2020 presidential election. What’s the big deal? Nancy and Mike weren’t lynched. No legislator was castrated or raped. Nobody was killed or mutilated, so why make a federal case over this? Go home, everybody, nothing to see here. No need to conduct a sham investigation into what preceded this happy tourist event, right? Just some good American citizens smashing their way into the Capitol to register their disagreements. What could be wrong with that?

Call me a Liberal Stooge and slap me with my battered hat, but c’mon, Legitimate Political Discourse?? Maybe if I was an Oath Keeper or a Proud Boy, but this is the Republican National Committee we’re talking about here, not the Neo-Nazis. Or … maybe we are. At some point we have to take a good hard look at these people. If you quack like a duck, if you smell like a duck, if you defecate like a duck, well, maybe, just maybe, you are a duck. Legitimate Public Discourse?? You sound like a Nazi, you smell like one and by god, I suspect you might just be one. The Republican Party just crossed a line that I can’t see a way to forgive. That was no tourist protest January 6th. That was a putsch. Quack quack.

Statistics don’t lie but they fib a lot. I’ve been trying to recreate my glass biz website this past month after my evil host deleted all my data they’ve been entrusted with the past 13 years. Relax, I’m not going to reiterate the pitfalls of web design for beginners like myself. But in the course of noodling around the edges of my site I came across another site that, lo and behold, ranked mine according to all kinds of semi-useless statistics.

For instance, archibaldglass.com received an Alexa ranking of 858,808 in the world. In the world!! Now, this may seem to you like a ridiculously low ranking and for all I know there are only 858,809 websites in the world and I’m rock bottom, but … the surprising part to me was that it’s ranked at all. And furthermore, it tells me that the site gets 3500 visitors a day and 4100 page views and over 100,000 a month. Work with me here now. If we extrapolate — and statistics love to be extrapolated — that means I have over one million people checking out my glass every year.

Just like you, I figured these folks were trying to sell me something but no, they were just number crunchers and if anybody needs number crunching, it’s probably me and my sad little website. Of course once I sat down and stopped congratulating myself, stopped imagining the advertising revenue I could generate off one million hits a year, stopped fantasizing about a retirement in Rio, I got to thinking, there aren’t one million people interested in stained glass, no way, and certainly not my glass, c’mon, get real, probably hardly anybody. But … statistics don’t lie!

Or do they? So I went to this blogsite, skeeter daddle diaries.net, and wowee zowee, this site is ranked 714,233 in the world with 25% more visitors than the site ranked 858,809. I beat the socks off my glass website, no doubt a lot more folks interested in the South End than public glass art. But, let’s come down to earth here, not really very many.

What I realized is that the real money isn’t in glass or blog sketches, it’s in web design. I may finally have found my niche in life. Give me time and a few more websites to design and you bet I’ll break through the half million ranking. Eat my dust, web.com!

So you’re wondering what exactly the Metaverse will look like when you take that first virtual stroll into La-La Land. I’m here to help. Imagine you’re inside your TV. Okay, imagine you’re in your Laz-Y-Boy watching your big fatscreen TV, the one with the excellent surround sound and the bass. You got your hi def and you’re on the joystick. Okay, the remote. Mr. In Control, captain of your own destiny. Okay, not your destiny exactly, your virtual world. Close enough.

The Metaverse is the Matrix. A simulation, a construct, an algorithmic extrapolation of your present world. Think of all those blogsites you check on for Qanon updates, Bigfoot sightings, extraterrestrial abductions, vaccine caused deaths, Trump tweets … but in 3-D! Sure, you got to put on the google glasses, no big deal. Basically, see, you already live in the Meta. It’s the parallel universe you live in when you got tired of facts and ordinary reality. And … it’s way more exciting! It’s a better reality. Otherwise, why would you go there?

Plus, you get to be the hero in your own simulation. Go anywhere, do anything, be whatever you want. Course, you’ll probably stay with the conspiracy theory stuff, maybe hang out with the gaming crowd, mostly violent war simulations, bang bang boom boom. Not that you’d have to stay with that but c’mon, it’s what you do now basically, just better graphics once that 5-G is universal. You can pick your own avatar, better looking, buff, a real babe magnet. Or not. Your choice. You’ll be able to buy clothes for your virtual self. Shoes, combat outfits, weapons, the works. It’ll all be available in the Meta, count on it. And count on those pop up ads letting you know what’s on sale, what’s a great buy, where to get it, all on the virtual store’s inventory. Great! You got it covered, little buddy. A world of your making.

Okay, not quite. A world of high tech’s making, but … one you’ll definitely love living in. Better than the analog world, right? Right? Of course I’m right. Otherwise, why would you spend time in that universe instead of in the boring old world. Buckle up, you’re gonna love the ride. I know, you’re halfway there already.

I think if I hear one more news story about Covid or the omicron variant or vaccinations or mask wearing or social distancing, I’ll go out and overdose myself with horse dewormers . Enough is never really enough for the news media. Pandemic pandemic panfriggingdemic already!

So now I’m saturated with warnings about the coming war in Eurasia. No, wait, Ukraine. The enemy is massing troops on the border, the enemy is waging cyberwarfare. The enemy is staging war games in Belarus. The cold war is about to get hot! The war is imminent! There will be heavy sanctions if the enemy invades. The drumbeat is insistent, the drumbeat is getting louder, the drumbeat is driving me batshit crazy!

And we’re not even talking yet about Taiwan.. Well, we are, but the drumbeat of the Other Enemy drowns out the warnings about the Not-so-Sleepy Tiger. I swear, it’s enough to drive a man to drugs. Geez, yeah, there’s that opioid crisis too. And partisan politics. Don’t forget the January 6th insurrection or the voter suppression laws or the Roe v. Wade reversal coming. Book bans and critical race theory fights, the Big Lie and Republicans who are convinced Trump won by a landslide. I don’t want to get out of bed in the morning and I sure don’t want to hear story after story repeated endlessly. I think I got the Message already!!!!!

And don’t even think about bringing up Global Warming or Climate Change. Let’s just agree that those whackjob goobers who think Armaggedon is tomorrow, welcome it in fact, well, okay! The anti-Christ is on his way, the End is Near, the Time is Now, I get it, I live in an insane asylum and I no longer assume I’m the sane one. Happy?

Let’s just say it’s time to turn the damn dial. Time to put on some music, read a good novel, play a banjo and take a walk on the beach. Time to check out for awhile, listen to the tide turn, wait for spring. I got fruit trees to prune, a garden fence to build, wood to split and bring in for next year, a life to live. Gotta start somewhere, maybe today. I want two plus two to equal four again. Is that too much to ask?

Neil Young has always been a hero of mine. Great songwriter, curmudgeon extraordinaire, a guy who doesn’t mind stepping on toes. So when he got wind of Spotify paying 100 million dollars to Joe Rogan for an exclusive platform and Joe used his podcast to promote anti-vaccination guru Dr. Robert Malone, Neil issued an ultimatum to the company to remove Rogan or remove him. Spotify dropped Neil like a bad rash. 100 million dollars, in case you think inflation is out of control, is still a lot of moolah, enough to convince Spotify that a little misinformation about the pandemic and vaccinations really isn’t too big a deal. Course Neil thinks it’s potentially killing people.

A few dead Covid deniers really doesn’t add up to 100 million dollars, now does it? Be honest, how many would it take to convince you, if you were the CEO of Spotify, to drop Joe Rogan and his huge fan base? C’mon, a thousand? Ten thousand? We’re talking real money here, not chump change. If my little blog was on Spotify and I started spouting off that vaccines actually kill more people than Covid, you think they’d keep me on and let Neil stay? If you think that, I got some bitcoins I can sell you cheap….

And if you think money is always the primary driver in the world, keep in mind that Neil just gave up tons of royalties by dropping out of Spotify’s playlist. Sure, he’s rich and maybe if you were that rich you’d do the same thing. Maybe. Neil’s got an old song ‘This Note’s For You’ that mocks all those musicians who sold their songs to commercials. What’s wrong with rock and roll capitalism? you ask. Don’t ask me, go ask Neil. He’ll give you real thing. And it ain’t Coke.