Happy TGIF. The weather is as it has been for the last while. No snow but only glimpses of sun. I do feel for the people out east. They are getting what we had last year about this time. The snow systems seem to come every other day and the amounts simply pile up. I forget which city the news readers cited this morning but they have better than 80 inches when their normal yearly total is around 24 inches. Nothing like getting 4 times the usual.

I knew that the Republicans had little sympathy for ordinary Americans but I don't often see it expressed so baldly. Take a look at this story dealing with the effort by the Senate to extend unemployment benefits. A damned basketball game is more important.

And then there is this bit of information from the EU. We already have a big problem of bacterial contamination in ground beef because the packages we buy in the supermarket can be derived from hundreds of animals from widely separated geographical areas. The process enhances the chances that surface bacteria can contaminate a large amount of product. We don't need another composite product especially if we would not be able to see the difference between the composite and a regular piece of meat. Once upon a time the scraps they are putting into ground beef (and I suspect those the manufacturers want to use for composites) would have been processed for pet food. I don't think I want to ask what were are feeding pets now.