A sunny day for fascism

 I woke up around noon. After taking all that stuff apart and all the things I did, I called it day/night and went to bed. 

I'm continually amazed at what a soft spot for fascism the media, even National Public Radio, has. Everything Donnie Dumpo says, they put on the air. Oh, he's selling sneakers? Let's be sure to let our audience know, and what they look like (glittery!) and what they cost. 

At least as I write here, "On The Media" is doing a piece critical of John Stewart, a guy who was on the TV and then was off the TV and now is on the TV again, who's reportedly witty and entertaining, but is a "good people on both sides" type who's obviously there to try to provide a few chuckles on our downslope to Nazism 2.0. Tom was raving about him because Tom, as a dutiful white guy, is kind of required to side with the fascists. Also he's an idiot. 

A sunny day for fascism but a cloudy one for me.  It was between rain storms, though, it seemed. I got some stuff to donate together and a bag of trash and had about $7.60 I'll allow myself to spend. Today was "Nirvana Day" where Rinban Sakamoto wanted to get everyone possible to show up, but with this rain I realized that was not going to happen, hence my sleeping in. But I could donate the stuff, get rid of a bag of trash, and buy a couple Coke Zeros. 

So that's what I did. I got wetter than I did last night coming back, but at least it's not very cold at all. I did some parking lot cleanup - bums had taken the metal and wire I put out last night, but not the big box the stuff was in - and now I'm in and the rain can drip and drop all it likes. 

Japantown was pretty subdued, with very few people around due to the rain. They even re-schedule this weekend's lion dance at 99 Ranch, to next weekend when it will hopefully not be rained out. 

I'm really beginning to wonder about the utility of having this blog, though. I was inspired by blogs like that of Marvin Naylor, who'd give a blow-by-blow description of each busking session, talking about all the characters who were regulars - England has a lot of quirky people and actual street life. 

San Jose, by comparison, is a very boring place not least so because it actively tries to be as bland as possible. I blame it on tech. Like banking, you don't want operating a computer or phone or table to be exciting. You don't want quirks or "personality". In fact, even if you're Apple, you want your things to look and feel as much like Microsoft's as much as possible so if someone wants to switch to your stuff, it's easy for them. This drive for blandness and uniformity bleeds over into everything else. So no interesting street-character or "fun, quirky location" stories were going to come out of my blogging from here. 

Marvin Naylor, these days, is on YouTube which is about 1000X better. Of course he's in England so he's got good internet access and from what I understand, they only pay about $30 a month there, for access speed that would cost $300 here. My own internet access is slow as well as expensive. It's good enough to upload photos to Ebay and that's it - that's all it's intended to be. If I did YouTube stuff I'd have to think like a composer of commercials, who have 15 or 30-second bits of time to work within. Maybe this is why YouTube has those weird "Shorts" things now, because most people don't have the connect speed to submit things of any length. 

 

And I'm not sure if there's a point to blogging from Hawaii. There are already a million people doing that.