That’s Not How Any of This Works

At least, it’s not supposed to. 

How can Russian intelligence use social media to interfere with American elections?

Because, apparently, a significant percentage of people lose sight of reality when they get online. They get ugly, nasty and scary.

It’s like there’s lead in our water supply.

Like the guy who threatened to use his Second Amendment right on me because I said I thought gun owners should have to carry liability insurance.

Hey, in case you are wondering why many of us are frightened of gun owners, there’s your Exhibit A.

Or the little old lady mentioned in this Washington Post article. At first, I felt bad for her. A smarty-pants blogger is making his living fooling simpletons on Facebook. The blogger, Christopher Blair, a liberal, makes up the most ridiculous “news items” he can and sees if he can fool (and humiliate) right-wing conservatives.

And he can: millions of them.

Like Shirley Chapian, a lonely 76-year-old living in a trailer in Pahrump, Nevada.

But look at what Shirley, looking like someone’s grandma, likes on Facebook:

“A Muslim woman with her burqa on fire: like. A policeman using a baton to beat a masked antifa protester: like. Hillary Clinton looking gaunt and pale: like. A military helicopter armed with machine guns and headed toward the caravan of immigrants: like.”

What the hell?

According to this superb and frightening 2017 Rolling Stone article, rather ordinary people are used by everyone from Russian intelligence to Trump campaign officials to Alex Jones to teenagers in Macedonia looking to make a buck, to spread bizarre and hate-filled conspiracy theories.

And this has already had, predictably, real and awful consequences.  After all, the New Zealand massacre, which killed 50 people, was planned by its perpetrator specifically to go viral.

What is wrong with us?

Life is Good

You know how it sometimes seems like the person who can tell you exactly what you need to hear at that moment in your life suddenly shows up?

Yeah, that recently happened to me.

Robert Flatt is a wonderful photographer and an amazing person.

And I wrote about him for The Buzz Magazines.

Foods That Aren’t Really Food

See? People trying to make
pomegranates edible.

There are some things we all say are food that really aren’t. 

Take, for example, pomegranates. By the time you get through cutting it open, careful not to get any on yourself, it stains, and digging out the seeds, just so that you can get that tiny bit of edibleness around them … No, not food.

Grapefruit: absolutely not a food, more of a torture.

Lots of diet food – rice cakes, melba toast – fall less into the “food” category and more into the “cardboard” category.

Popcorn, in my opinion, is similar to rice cakes and melba toast, except you can drench it in butter.

In fact, there are a lot of foods that are inedible except as vehicles, excuses, really, for eating melted butter: steamed clams (breading and frying those also works), escargot, lobster.

Fondant, that weird clay-like icing bakers use when they are building something that looks cool out of cake ingredients, is not food.

Neither are marshmallows and cotton candy.

Legally, restaurants are not supposed to put anything on your plate that is not edible, in case you are too dumb to tell that that flower blossom isn’t really meant to be eaten. But it isn’t. Ditto: those sprigs of parsley and cilantro and those dried red peppers in your General Tso’s chicken. Not food.

Likewise, spicy ingredients – hot chiles, horse radish, wasabi – while fine as an accent to the actual food on your plate, are not, in my opinion, food themselves. Just picture yourself trying to eat a bowl of any of them.

Anise, the flavoring for black licorice. My grandmother was so proud of her anisette cookies. Blech. When she gave me, ordinarily a cookie fiend, one, I would sneak it back onto the plate when she wasn’t looking.

Did I miss any?

What I Say Versus What I Do

I might like you to think that my reading material of choice is The Economist and Nature, but really, it’s The National Enquirer.

I’m not alone in this. When we used to subscribe to The Enquirer (that bears repeating: we used to subscribe to The National Enquirer), of all the people we knew, only one did not immediately grab it from our coffee table and tear through it, oblivious to what was going on around them. And she’s the most uptight person I’ve ever met.

I’d like you to think I always read literary fiction and poetry but, in reality, I am a huge sucker for self-help books.

I might allow you to think that salads and steamed vegetables are my foods of choice. No. I might grit my teeth and go with them, but it’s the potato chips that I really want. Candy, too. In fact, a friend just freaked me out when she mentioned she still had some Christmas candy left over. Are you kidding me? Honestly, when people say, “I don’t like sweets,” I assume they are lying.

I might tell you, “Oh, I don’t watch TV,” and that would be true, but only because I can’t figure out how to work all our remotes. When I can get a kid to turn on the television for me, however, I am happy to watch marathons of “Cops,” “Hoarders” and “My 600-Pound Life.”

When I have my phone out in public, I’d like you to think that I am a busy, connected person, doing a lot of important stuff. No. I am most likely looking at slide shows of stupid tattoos or plastic surgery gone wrong or videos of what happens when squirrels steal Go Pro cameras.

That’s how I really roll.

There: I said it.