Zelda, Spotify, and Refugees

"The Legend of Zelda Encyclopedia" was the only thing I wanted for my birthday, and it came in the mail yesterday. On opening the package, I was somewhat annoyed to find that two of the four packing bubbles were already deflated, and that despite being plastic wrapped this "new" book that I intended to keep in flawless condition forever already had a little dent/tear in the cover. Thanks, Amazon. No complaints about the actual content, though. I've spent hours reading it yesterday and today and I'm less than a third of the way in. It's just so chock-full of pictures and text and diagrams. Two thumbs way up. If you haven't already, go out and get this book.

I alternate between that obsession and the Spotify playlist I'm building. Since most of my tens of thousands of songs became inaccessible, I've been searching YouTube or choosing artists on Spotify for six months, but now I'm putting every song I like or love that I can find on Spotify on this list so it can be my go-to spot for virtually everything for the foreseeable future. Lots of the stuff I owned is obscure and/or independent and not on Spotify, but Spotify also has lots of stuff that I never owned due to time and money constraints, so it's a tradeoff. This playlist takes me back to the days when I was first introduced to the concept of a playlist, and didn't get it. Why would I want to choose only some of my music as opposed to shuffling literally all of it? I've always liked shuffling. Probably because I grew up with a CD changer that could hold five CDs and shuffle all of them together. If I end up with a polka and a rap and a symphonic metal back-to-back, so much the better.

I try to resist my natural inclination toward inflammatory rhetoric, but there is a time and place for it and in this case I'm not going to hold back or sugar-coat it except insofar as to leave out the swear words going through my head. I join with millions of others in unequivocally condemning the Supreme Court's misguided decision to uphold Drumpf's refugee ban. I know my condemnation of it doesn't affect jack but I'm putting it out there anyway so I can stand before God with a clear conscience. As the anniversary of the United States' Declaration of Independence fast approaches, we can all celebrate the ideals that our nation is founded on and now actively tramples underfoot. I am officially no longer proud to be an American. I refused to sing any of the patriotic hymns in church today. We can't just go around pretending that this is de facto a great nation because we said so while it's doing crap like this. We may as well be honest and change the plaque on the Statue of Liberty to read "Screw You."

Last year I detailed at length why the ban is a moral abomination and why Drumpf's excuses for it are an enormous crock of orange feces. Reiterating all that would be a waste of time, so here I'll just remind Americans yet again that when this blight on humanity was running for the Republican nomination, he called for a ban on all Muslim immigration. In any civilized country, that remark, along with any of at least three hundred other indefensible remarks he's made, would have immediately disqualified him from being taken seriously as a candidate for anything - but in this country, basic decency isn't a thing anymore, so the Republican Party, to their everlasting disgrace, nominated him as much because of that remark as in spite of it. And today, millions of imbeciles have chosen to forget he ever said that and have the gall to claim with straight faces that this ban has nothing to do with religion. What is it about, then? Not any legitimate national security reasons, that's for sure. ​Maybe refugees are better off going to countries that will treat them like human beings anyway. But those countries are small and the refugees' numbers are not.