Being a President requires balls. The proverbial kind, I mean.

So, as I often do, I went looking around for examples of other peoples’ writings. I do not know quite how I came across this article on Sad Bastard Bar, but I am glad I did. In it, The Bastard, as they call themselves, talks a lot about the buzz that has been going around about the “debate” that U.S. President Barack Obama supposedly lost. Let us leave aside for a moment the fact that a victory obtained by lying so hard that your opponent will have months’ worth of material to hit you over the head with is what the expression Pyrrhic Victory was invented for.

Why I have not commented about the Eastwood debacle until now.

I will give it to you straight. Even though I am very interested in American politics as it affects the autistic and enforcement of their basic Human rights, unfortunately that same interest also makes me reluctant to read news about the Republican party and their doings. Maybe at some point, I will write my own commentary about how the Republican party that exists now, and existed during my lifetime so far, is a very different beast to the Republican party that Baby Boomers and such grew up with. But for now, I thought I would add my observations concerning Clint Eastwood and the debacle he made for his fellow Republicans a matter of weeks ago now.

Healthcare. Why is it such a problem?

I live in a country that purports to have “universal” healthcare. Like many countries that have such a system, there are problems. Availability of care, or rather difficulty in properly accessing care, is a major issue, as I believe I have already written about.

Still more about language

You might have missed yesterday’s entry in which I spoke at length about how everything that comes out of the collective mouth of curebies and “person first” tossers is, to quote the pertinent British English term, bollocks. I also explained in indirect terms how curebies prefer “person first” bullshit for reasons that in and of themselves make this mode of speech invalid.

Videogames that I have played in the past and what they say about me.

I make no secret of this. I play videogames. I have played videogames since sometime after my sixth birthday. One day whilst I was on my way home from school with my still very young mother, she told me cryptically that my male parent had something at home that I would like to see. That something turned out to be a Commodore VIC-20, the first of what is now many, many computers that have passed through the households I collective have and continue to reside in. Being that this was 1984, the price of a VIC-20 was likely quite cheap, and the machine turned out to be a source of entertainment enjoyed by the whole family as a collective. But whilst I was at the time mildly interested in the programming and creative aspects of the device, I got the games in a big way.

I did not know this at the time, but in the previous year, the Commodore 64 had been “unveiled”. Although it suffered reliability problems at first, by 1984 its greater flexibility and capability, along with its greater visual and aural capabilities (do not laugh) meant that the VIC-20 was quickly headed for retirement. I do not recall exactly what year my family traded in the VIC-20 for what came to be referred to in shorthand as the C64, but it probably did not take long. Now, by greater visual and aural capabilities, well, obviously by today’s standards that is a pretty sick joke. But the Commodore 64 could give brief real-time voices, constant music that, although low in quality, put the player right into the mood of the game, and crude representations of visual elements that in 1982 matched or even exceeded those of arcade machines. If you can imagine a bass voice saying “Another visitor. Stay awhile… stay forever!” in exaggerated tones, then you can sort of get the idea of my first impression of the Commodore 64.