Hi, Everyone.  Here we are starting the last full week of April.  Where does the time go?  I don't have much gardening planned.  I am watering some of the seedlings inside.  But the temperature is only in the low 40s and we may get rain so I doubt I will get anything accomplished outside.  We definitely need the moisture because we are short on precipitation by about 2.5 inches for April.  We went to one of the large greenhouse/gardening markets just to look around.  If I had the space I saw several beautiful and unusual lowering plants.  I did find a pot of marjoram that I bought to provide in case my seeds don't produce.  I am getting a nice collection of herbs.

I am constantly amazed at what the news media considers news.  I just sat through about 3 minutes of a non-story about New Jersey Governor Christie photographed apparently sleeping during a Bruce Springsteen concert.  Who the hell cares?

We were just commenting on what is the most pathetic aspect of the Secret Service sex scandal.  Not only could these guys not keep their pants zipped but one of them, stupidly, agreed to an outrageous sum for a prostitute that he tried to renege on the next morning.  Somehow he expected that the working girl would settle for less than 10% of what he agreed to pay and keep quiet about being cheated.  Now that boy had a serious 'entitlement' problem.

This tomdispatch post should be filed under the 'what's old is new again.'

I just looked at the new AARP (from an e-mail alert) poll on Social Security and Medicare.  You can find it here and look at it yourself.  I didn't fill it out because I think it is a meaningless piece of crap.  Although you can register, to a certain extent, whether you think the systems should be tweaked or overhauled or left alone, it doesn't ask what options the respondent might think should be enacted.  It doesn't commit AARP to any specific program.  Does this really give us a say in what happens???  I don't think so.

And here is another case of what the right hand does the left know nothing of.  They keep bleating about the 'epidemic' of obesity and the subsidize the ingredients of junk food.

Media Matters posted this little piece on three stories that have received so little press they are invisible. How many of the oil spills have you heard of post--Deepwater Horizon?  I have seen only a couple of stories on other-than-mainstream venue on the Pacific garbage patch and the Gulf dead zone.  I saw on segment about the eyeless shrimp and ulcerated fish in the Gulf on a mainstream outlet and that report did his best to denigrate (as unconfirmed) and minimize the story that I wondered why he bothered--unless the purpose of the story was to preemptively neuter it.

Annie's Granny posted an example of a bit of commercial idiocy.  Sometimes all I can do is shake my head at the lack of common sense.