I had liked Pope Francis, and was even prepared to respect him, but I was forgetting that, after all, he's a Christian. And Christians believe in (and fear) the "Devil,"

Just as they believe in the literally Divine inspiration of everything that Saul of Tarsus ("the Apostle Paul") said: Like the ignorant pre-Enlightenment Peasants that they, in essence, really are--who believe things simply and solely because their fathers and mothers believed them; not because they are true, or because they are likely to be true.

This isn't something that most 3rd-worlders--or the inhabitants of Red States, or even the inhabitants of Blue states who were raised Catholic--can readily understand, but: believing in the existence of the Devil, or Satan, and "the Powers of Evil," is ordinarily summarily dismissed as a ridiculous barbarism by liberal Protestants (like myself), who are, after all, the majority of Americans.  When I (culturally Protestant, despite, or, really, because of my lifelong atheism), for example, just a few years ago, was apprised of the fact that my friend Roseanne (raised Catholic) actually believed in (and feared) the existence of--that Fallen Angel, the former Lucifer--the Devil (Sic!), I could not help being appalled, and, woundingly to my old friend, repulsed, by this trait of sub-human (as I blurted without thinking) barbarism in her character--quite as if it had been revealed to me that she had been raised by wolves in the woods without indoor plumbing.  It was the "sub-human" which really struck a nerve (as I know because she has mentioned it resentfully several times since), and which she now tries to mitigate by pointing out the very Pope's deep-seated and long-abiding belief in the wicked intelligence of the Author of Lies--about which to be sure, I had had no previous awareness. Pope Francis, indeed, goes very far towards irremediably crass barbarity in attributing personhood to the Devil, which Milton for all his personification of Satan, at least, avoids doing--a subtle point, but necessary to a civilized understanding of the difference between angels (however non-existent and theoretical) and human beings; and which the vulgar many, almost as proof of their vulgarity, utterly fail to grasp when they make "the Devil" a person like themselves, albeit much more intelligent than they are.

I sat up late last night at my computer, planning a sojourn in Agra, from the middle of February to the middle of March,

that being the only month of the year when the weather in Agra is at all tolerable, with a fair prospect of seeing the Taj Mahal by the light of the full moon in Virgo (on the first of March), if, as I hear, the Bureau of Tourists has in fact lifted its ban on nightly visits to Mughal monuments. Which are, of course, the only reason one would want to sojourn in Agra in any season. Not that I mean to be cruelly dismissive of modern day Indians (I love them, their movies and their culture--despite their reputed persistent, incessant public defecation).  Anyway, the "Grand Hotel Agra," with private bath, air conditioning, breakfast and wifi, at a very reasonable $2,000 a month (which is about the same price as minimally comfortable round-trip air fare from Honolulu) tempts me strangely.  As do the readily available rickshaws.  And it would be such an adventure.

Anyway, I'm five years shy of being an octogenerian, WITH (thanks to a fairly generous insurance settlement) a sufficiency of cash on hand, probably enough to last me till I die...

Which is not how most people end their lives in America--and certainly not how I had Imagined I would go out.  The last few weeks, I have been making myself little gifts that have enormously improved the quality of my life:  The first being the radical and thorough fumigation of my apartmentino--No more cockroaches!.  The second (if not the third) being the purchase of a no-fail/no-fuss tea-making/coffeewater-heating apparatus, plus several hundred dollars worth of tea and coffee (tonight's special first-time treat being Nilgiri, which is scrumptious, and everything I ever dreamed might come to me from the Western Ghats).  The third (if not the second) being an array of Armani Acqua di Gio toiletries, far beyond my means as a poor person (in the $200 range), but which , like lavender (without lavender's suggestion of the Rococo and the Antique), make me smell delicious but not effeminate, and tout de la mode moderne, without any affectation of juvenility--"Cucumbers?" said Kirsten, That's nice."

And already I have forgot the first things I purchased (so much a usual part of my life they've become):  $700 worth of printed music from Amazon (everything from Frescobaldi and Byrd to Debussy and Joplin), and an interesting and adaptive Casio electric piano to play it all on.  I played Les Barricades Mystérieuses and Les Ondes yesterday for my Filipina maid (whose name, though she speaks no Spanish, is Estrella), thinking she'd like them, if anything, and-but I have to report that the music of Couperin is as total a miss with criadas filipinas, as the music of Beethoven is said to be with cows (who don't care for Sturm und Drang).  When I asked her if she'd liked Les Ondes at least, she had to pause to think what if anything I could be referring to--since what I'd played had made so little impression of any sort whatever on her.  Nonetheless, I gave her $140 for Christmas, which caused her, in the fullness of her gratitude, to hug me several times.

Ce n'est plus le bel age...

But you'd think, having attained my seventy-fifth and a third year, I'd have learned to be a tad more gracious, perhaps a wee bit less shrewish and quarrelsome; but--OCEAN or CANOE so be it (with or without Humble Honesty), those damned ineluctable Personality Traits make me Open and Extraverted as all get out, and Agreeable to absolutely no one: a punch in the nose just waiting to happen.  Rather like my sexuality, now't I think on't:  I can't help being what I am--And a fairly large portion of my fellows just can't help wanting to punish me for it.

Behind all the recent hysterical pother about Sexual Misconduct lies, unexamined,

the fundamental assumption--proper perhaps in the female of sexually dimorphic species--that all sex (except sex within the bonds of state-sanctioned monogamous marriage) is bad, harmful, wicked, degrading--so wicked in fact, that statutes of limitation of culpability cannot be held to apply to sexual transgressions (in the minds of women) any more than they do to murder. "After all," screech the fair ones, "is not sexual misconduct a kind of murder"?  Certainly, women and effeminate men, feel it to be so, in the absence of any proof that it is so, or that it it is so for men in any way comparable to what it is for women. Feeling--Had you noticed?--in this age of transsexual delusion, has completely superceded all other evidentiary proofs.

A Mysterious Interstellar Object of Unknown Origin, in Shape unlike anything ever seen before (by Astronomers),

is just now hurtling through the solar system--at this point, about 200,000,000 miles from the earth--and is being examined by the Green Bank telescope In West Virginia for signs (radio signals) of alien signals.  Whatever it is, it's 400 meters long and ten times longer than it is wide, and is traveling at 196,000 mph.  Why it might emit radio signals has not been said.  Nor has any reason been given for the "artist's impression" of it as a giant turd.

So much twaddle, so little Time...

I read today, in my this month's allotment of free New York Times articles, that Rex Tillerson (the Secretary of State--Remember him?) is accusing the Cuban government of causing or allowing "bad things to happen," accompanied by "ominous noises," to unnamed persons on the staffs of the U.S. and Canadian embassies in Havana.  What things?--None specified.  How?--almost ingenuously, Tillerson says he doesn't know; but it's their island, so the Cubans should know.  

And this, I kid you not--though somewhat de-verbified--is fuckin' news in the fuckin' New York Times.   I'm not angry, nor sad--just a wee bit nauseated, and very slightly amused.  I assume that as the Prompter (flesh-eating lizards from outer space?) breathes, the Puppet squeaks.

Might I suggest...

It's quite true that the world is warming up from its latest long ice age, and soon (perhaps within a few hundred years) much of its land surface will be inundated.  Students of geology know that this is something that the earth does periodically over hundreds of thousands and millions of years. There have been ages when the earth was completely frozen over, like a giant snowball, and other ages when all the ice in both polar caps was melted and the land surface of the planet was reduced by as much as a half.  There is concern at present among all the countries of earth to halt or reverse the present warming trend, it being supposed that there is nothing to be done to preserve the open land mass from inundation by the planet's oceans if it continues.  This, if I may say so, is an unnecessarily pessimistic view of the matter.

For what if, as the water in the polar caps melts and the oceans rise, it were diverted off the planet, by immense pumps and siphons, into vast artificial satellite reservoirs, in orbit around the earth and presumably globular in form, where it might be kept safely, and perhaps used in hydroponics systems to supplement the world's food supply--until the inevitable recurrence of another ice age, and the reconstitution of the polar ice caps, will require returning it to earth?

The point being that it is the nature of the earth as we know it, over long aeons, to alternate ages of relative warmth with ages of frigidity; and rather than try to fix one narrow temperature range and try to make the earth adhere to it (which would be futile, on the evidence of several billion years of geological history), it seems to me more sensible to try to find ways to adapt to these long periods of climate fluctuation, and, with the help of modern science and technology, to attempt to moderate them.