Random Rants from a Guy in Tinseltown

So this disgusting man was the king of Hollywood for decades despite his regular behavior as a sexual predator and harasser. I am glad he finally fell thanks to the New Yorker , the New York Times , and an unbelievable number of women who finally broke the silence—but how come did it take so long to happen? It is a reminder that this is what women have to go through in this industry, and in many other fields. See what I wrote about this here and a journalist wrote here .

After Microsoft Messenger, there goes down AIM, one of the oldest modern messaging clients. I suppose it was too difficult to bear the word "AOL" and yet stand for modernity. What a strange world we live in, where things rise, thrive and wither away within a few years, until they eventually pass away in total oblivion, not unlike what the Japanese call kodokushi—those elderly who die alone and remain undiscovered for the longest time. PanAm, Kodak, Blockbuster Video, Radio Shack, now AIM… someone said to me it's the way of the world, those companies didn't adapt and can only blame themselves for their disappearances… I must be particularly unrealistic, but I find such vision of things awfully cold-hearted. I can't help but picture the individual tragedies of the employees who had to vacate their workplace after an entire life dedicated to a company; the devastating feeling of failure the employers must suffer as they powerlessly witnessed what they inherited ...

So somehow they convinced a big part of this country that you need to own a gun, go to church, fly the American flag, be militaristic, and believe America is the greatest country that ever existed in the Universe in order to be a good American. If you don't own a gun and think we'd be safer without them, you're an accomplice of a scheming government that tries to destroy America; if you don't go to church because you believe in Shiva, Mickey Mouse or Nietzsche, or just want to pray at home, then you lack the core values of a Good American; if you don't fly the flag because it doesn't represent for you the same thing it does for other people, it means you don't like your country; if you don't want to sing the national anthem because you find it militaristic or it reminds you of anything negative, then you should be fired; if you're antimilitaristic because you think for the most part the military only wastes human lives to serve political agendas, yo...

Okay, so many of you won't shut up with your Second amendment. You got me pissed off. I won't write on your Facebook walls or my friends' walls because it's useless. But I need to rant on my own blog. Even if it only makes me and just me better. Don't read it if it's gonna make you pissed. Go target practice in your backyard. You think guns and mass shootings are not related. If you love guns so much that this bloodbath in Vegas is a regrettable collateral damage to you, so you can keep shooting your dear M-16 at beer bottles in the forest with your drunken friends, then answer this: You guys really think walking around with a holster, constantly ready to shoot, is what's gonna make us safer? You really think a guy with a knife can kill 60 people and injure 500+ in 10 minutes? Or with a hammer or a baseball bat? How come there's so few mass shootings in Japan or Australia or England and more than one everyday in the US? Because the US is so exce...

The daily life of Parisians nearly 100 years ago in a city that looks almost exactly the same as today. All of these people you see died a long time ago, yet they're here, so alive, so close to us, sipping a cold drink through a straw, taking a cab with a date, talking politics or gossiping with a friend at a café, smiling at the camera, relaxing on a Sunday in a park. No cell phones here, but they're carrying mostly the same thoughts we have today, some looking shy, or happy, or unhappy, or in love, or introverted or preoccupied. How different were these people's lives? Or more interestingly, how similar were they? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blw8zJt-Sc0

Heterosexual men need to read this, again and again . As men, we tend to be so oblivious about all of what many women go through almost daily. A big shock to me was that video of a woman walking for 10 hours in NYC and being catcalled dozens of times. As men, we vaguely know that women can be occasionally harassed, but it is easy to forget about it, and in any case, most of us don't have any idea how bad it gets. I go through everyday in my life walking around, almost never being afraid of a stranger following me (unless it's a scary, empty neighborhood at night), or looking at me insistingly; never cautious or uncomfortable about someone talking to me in a supermarket or approaching me on the street; never feeling objectified, never having to worry whether I may have dressed "inappropriately" and "provocatively"; I don't ever worry about who's sitting next to me on the subway; I don't have to worry about people touching me in crowded trains, lo...