Good December 28th to you all.  Hope you had a nice holiday.  Ours was quiet and totally at home since my brother's family, with whom we were supposed to spend a bit of time Christmas Eve, were all down with the flu.

It has been quiet on the posting front also largely because I haven't really felt like commenting on much I have seen on-line.  The news hasn't really been new--the names may change a bit but the basic stories are the same.  And has anyone else noticed how little of it merits the time the programers devote to it?

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To continue the thoughts from yesterday (it is now December 29)--I remarked a while ago that we reduced our cable subscription to simple basic though the representative tried very hard to induce us to go to a bigger package.  The change was the culmination of several years of increasing dissatisfaction with cable TV generally.  The provider wasn't the problem--the content was.  More often than not we simply couldn't find anything we wanted to watch.  After almost a decade of debating the situation as the we found our choices more and more restricted (not everyone loves the "reality" shows or Duck Dynasty) we cut back on cable.  If we had found an indoor antenna that would have functioned with our constraints, we would have cut it entirely.  The final straw came when we realized that even the news programming had shifted to more infotainment and less of what we considered real news.  We don't care what is going on with the Kardashians or which former child star is misbehaving or what new idiocy Justin Bieber is up to.

Ah, for a bit of relief from my grousing and grumbling an absolutely cute bit from the Archdruidess.

Yesterday Mom suddenly remarked that she just read an article which listed 75 TV shows that have been cancelled--and we haven't seen a single one of them.  Didn't want to see the ones we saw promoted.  We both chuckled a bit over that but it does go a long way toward explaining why we cut back so severely on cable.

OMG--gas prices here were down to $1.84/gal this morning.  Haven't seen prices that low for the last 8+ years.  We'll enjoy it while it lasts.

Does anyone else get the feeling that a lot of bloggers and others on the 'net are very glad to see the end of 2014 but don't feel any great enthusiasm for 2015?  I do feel that way to an extent.  The political deadlock was frustrating and annoying coupled with the unending campaigns.  Some of that was fueled by the (s)news media which simply has to hype the controversies and speculations.  And more of it was fueled by the gigantic egos and small brains of the politicians.  I would be more welcoming of the new year if I felt that anything would change on that front for the better--but I feel in my bones it won't.  The weather has been just as strange as ever and that is something else I don't see reverting to what had seemed normal for most of my life.  The economy is as absurdly surreal as it has been since well before the 2007 meltdown.  That is something else I don't expect to change for the better in the coming year.  Wall Street and the politicians do well and try to convince the rest of us that things are improving.  2015 just doesn't appear to offer anything to be enthusiastic about.  Hope I'm wrong; afraid I'm right.

Happy and blessed Solstice to all.  The sun will be making its return journey north toward spring.  Another seed catalog came in yesterday.  I only skimmed through it.  I will settle down with all of them, weed out the old versions and start making my list of seeds/plants I might like to try out this coming year.  I will make my final list early January.  Gardening never really stops--it just shifts gears from planning to planting to harvest to clean up.

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I have been reading about the effects of deforestation for the last 30 years.  Here is one I find interesting because I have also been reading about the drought in Brazil, the drought followed by flooding in Thailand and other such weather anomalies over the last decade or so.

Every time I think I have seen the absolute limit of selfish insanity some idiot ups the ante.  Watching the TV news this morning and saw a report of asshole drivers who decided to evade the section of Lake Shore Drive (Chicago, for those who don't know) closed because of a fatal crash by crossing over to a parallel bike path.  One mental giant (sarcasm, big time) was running without his headlights and came close to hitting joggers already on the path.  Here is another interesting article on changing weather patterns.  In the Bible Christ asks (Mark 8:36) "what profiteth a man if he gains the whole world but loseth his should?"  I would amend it a bit to "what profits business if it extracts all possible resources but creates a world in which humans can't live."

One of my favorite series of novels calls the winter "the dark months."  This year, so far, that has been an accurate description:  dismal, gray and with half the number of sunny days as normal.  We don't even have any snow to provide a bit of white to brighten up the landscape.  That pattern isn't going away any time soon.

The Atlantic has a nice article just in time form cold and flu season.  We recently (as of a few years ago) switched from name brands to generic over the counter drugs.  A couple of things drove the move.  First, the massive recall of Excedrin two years ago left us scrambling to replace it and we certainly weren't going to get on Ebay and pay $300 or so for a bottle as some desperate people did.  We checked out the ingredients and found a generic that had all the same ingredients in the same proportions and switched.  We didn't switch back after new stocks arrived some months later.  Second, we started looking more closely at all our over the counter meds when warnings started coming faster and more insistently about the dangers of overdose with those drugs.  When we started looking at the ingredients we suddenly saw how easily it would be to take more (often much more) than the recommended doses.  Think about it for a moment.  You have a headache so you take your usual headache drug.  But you also are running a bit of a temp so you take a dose of Tylenol.  Well, you headache med might just have Tylenol's active ingredient in it also.  Oh, I forgot--you also have a cough so you take some cough medicine also.  Guess what?  You may just have taken another dose of Tylenol because you cough medicine may also contain it under its generic name.  The article is a good read.

Well, the final push of Christmas shopping and the frantic exhortations to spend heroically has started.  The first news report this morning concerned one retailer who is going to be open for 100 straight hours beginning at 6am this morning through 6pm Christmas Eve.  As usual, we abstain from the annual ritual honoring the commercial gods.

The State Department has, evidently, decided not to release its volume of foreign relations history that covers the 1953 CIA lead coup in Iran for fear that it will upset delicate nuclear negotiations.  Since the Iranians are quite aware of our meddling in their affairs I wonder if there aren't some little known or unknown bombshells lingering in the dusty archives.  I don't think they have to worry about reactions over here.  Most Americans are terribly ignorant of their history and, given how little reaction the Senate report on CIA torture elicited, couldn't care less.

Glad to see this.  Our first thought: about damned time.  This crap has been going on for way too long.  Mom's second thought: who is tired of sneaking his Havana cigars into the country?  I can already hear the knee-jerk conservatives and Cuban-American community howling.  (Update: I won't link to the stories but evidently the news media is picking up on the dismay of both groups.)

Like the author at Crooks & Liars, I hope Wal-mart simply pays up but I don't think they are that smart.  Chiseling their workers has been a major tactic for padding their bottom line for years.  They simply don't get slapped often enough or consistently enough to stop.

I never had any intention of going to see The Interview.  Not possible now that Sony has pulled the movie it isn't an option.  The style of comedy is not one I appreciate.  Can It Happen Here? has a few cogent comments concerning Sony's stupidity in making the film in the first place and I concur.  I though the comments the stars made in their own interview on ABC which indicated surprise at the attack on the film exhibited a cultural blindness of colossal proportions.  They thought it all good fun.  They simply don't understand one of the major characteristics of the 'cult of personality' which holds sway in North Korea.  It is a religion and the personality at the pinnacle of the cult can't tolerate being the butt of a joke and especially one which postulates a plot to kill him.  Why did they think the Koreans would react with any better grace than some Muslims did to the Dutch cartoons featuring unflattering depictions of the Prophet?

We spend most of this wet, foggy morning out.  Only got back a little bit ago and have just started to slog through my e-mails and other items on the computer.

On this one I can only say--DAMN!!  We do not need another Bush in the White House.  I wish Mitt Romney would simply fade away also.  However, I have seen nothing, Democrat or Republican, I am willing to vote for in the next election cycle.  I may just leave that one blank since I don't have the choice of "None of the above."

I am also a little ticked off.  I went through a Google alert for new blog postings for "crochet patterns" and found three that looked interesting until I clicked on them.  They were all hard core porn.  I checked what I had clicked on but nothing at all in the description or title would have tipped me off about what was really on the site.  I don't mind that there are porn sites on the net.  I don't want to visit them and I certainly don't want to be suckered into visiting such sites.  Another DAMN!!  Anyone else come across that kind of thing?

Oh, how strange the weather has been.  Yesterday and today the temperatures are more like early March.  Three weeks ago--like early January.  We saw a bit of sun that disappeared way too soon.  Not expecting much more today.

Had a nice e-mail that announced the new Jung seed catalog will soon be coming.  I already have the new Baker Creek, Totally Tomatoes, Seeds & Such, Pinetree and Vermont Bean catalogs.  Several more are yet to come.  I have so much fun looking through them and planning what will go in the gardens.  Also how the some of the containers will be arranged.  The largest ones will stay in their places but the five-gallon buckets and lager pots change each year.

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Didn't see much I wanted to comment on yesterday.  Let's see what I find today.

Well, so much for promises any government agency makes.  And for any expectation of fairness.  Banks steal millions with full knowledge of what they are doing and get off keeping their ill-gotten gains but little people are dunned forever for "debts" they never knew about incurred by parents decades ago.  Rule of law??  Only important when our leaders want a club with which to beat perceived enemy governments.

I really wish our government would stop interfering in other countries.  We have done no good and a lot of harm from what I have seen.

Several bloggers noted that this is the anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791.  HMMM--no celebration.  I wonder why.  Perhaps because most of it has been shredded in the last couple of decades.