Saturday and more snow is coming. Indonesian volcanoes. Winter on the Great Lakes. Comcast/Time Warner possible merger.

I haven't seen anything--yet--to get me into a contrary mood.  But I found this Atlantic piece which has some really mind-blowing  pictures ranging from the stunningly beautiful to gruesomely beautiful.  They are scenes from Indonesia which has had two volcanoes erupting over the last two months.

Here are some fantastic pictures of the winter we are experiencing around the Great Lakes.  Though the snow and cold are major pains in the butt the winter can be beautiful--if we let ourselves slow down and see it.  One of our TV news channels showed the ice caves on Lake Superior a couple of weeks ago and said this is the first winter in five that people could actually actually cross the ice and see the caves.

The news over the last couple of days has featured the proposed merger of Comcast and Time-Warner.  I won't link to any of the stories because you can easily find those stories yourselves.  But one small comment one of the pundits debating the pros and cons of the deal caught my attention.  He said the major threat to cable TV providers is from services like Hulu and Netflix and he thought that the merger might shift the power in contest between such subscription services, which use the cable infrastructure, and the cable companies, who own the infrastructure.  That may allow the cable companies to charge more for using their lines which Netflix and others would have to pass on to customers.  But I had a slightly contrary thought on that notion.  I wondered if the real threat to the cable companies' profits aren't people like me and Mom.  We have been discussion getting rid of cable with increasing seriousness for the last four+ years.  And we are talking about not replacing it with anything--no Hulu, no Netflix, no anything.  More often than not, we find there is nothing new we want to see and the rest we have either seen (and don't want to see again), or couldn't sit through the first time.  Each time (so far) we find channels that provide us a reason to keep the service but are finding fewer and fewer such reasons.