The IOS update that killed my original iPhone SE was the last straw. I was done with Apple. They’d already skated far out onto the thin ice when they killed the excellent Dark Sky weather application and replaced it with their more-is-less Weather application, which took what was once quick, convenient, easy, and comprehensive — Dark Sky — and replaced it with a jumble of information, often not the information being sought, on a too-busy screen. It would have been forgivable if they had provided a setting that restored the look, feel, and functionality of Dark Sky. They didn’t. They never do. Apple knows best.
Something I’ve long hoped would become a family tradition may have finally begun to sprout. It goes back nearly 20 years. That was when one cold and lonely winter night I happened on a broadcast, on one of the cartoon channels, of “Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol.” Much to my surprise, I remembered all the words from all the songs. It had premiered in 1962 and was broadcast each year afterwards until it wasn’t anymore. It was wonderful and, as I realized as I sat there in my Connecticut home with tears in my eyes, still is.
Was it the pandemic? Or has society’s decline increased in velocity? Or is it just me? Christmas is close, but it doesn’t feel like it. Some of that has to do with the pandemic, I suppose, at least around here. The vague sense of being under siege remains, and the Christmas music doesn’t seem to have returned to stores, broadcasts, and elsewhere.
If you’re less than 50 years old, your entire life has taken place in the time since a human being walked on the moon. This to me is a scandal. It is our nature to explore and from new places explore further, not to touch a new place then scurry home. It isn’t entirely unprecedented — probably the most famous example is when the Vikings sailed to Newfoundland, discovered that their watches were off by half an hour, and retreated. It should be noted that there aren’t any Vikings now, though it is believed that their origin, Norway, still exists.
Have you ever encountered law enforcement — local police, state trooper, whatever — at night? If you have, and you’ve been in a locale where both red and blue flashing lights are involved in police activities, you might have noticed that blue light seems brighter and is not friendly to your eyes.
Whoo-ee did it blow! The weather has been abnormally, almost alarmingly warm around here the last week or two. There were a few days earlier when it got down to the teens at night, but it hasn’t hit freezing here since before Thanksgiving.
Tuesday was the day that got designated for me to bring in the car, which was damaged September 7 by a deer that wanted to cosplay a hood ornament. It took 10 weeks because it seems as though many people have settled upon leisurely lives following the pandemic, and because our system is currently arranged so that we have a surfeit of experts in vague areas ending in “-studies” and a shortage of people who can actually do things.
If you’re at all like me, every so often you’ve watched coverage at the time or a documentary later about some great disaster, one that has taken many lives in horrific circumstances. You might have wondered — I have, anyway — about how or whether families and friends ever found out what happened to some of the victims. If you think of Hiroshima, or the tsunami of March 11, 2011, or even the events of September 11, 2001, you suspect — no, know — that there are people who died whose fates will be forever unknown to anyone this side of the Pearly Gates.
The one important takeaway from yesterday’s election is that it’s unlikely that the current investigations into Donald Trump’s misdeeds will result in his indictment. Why would Democrat-controlled attorneys general go after their party’s most potent weapon?
You’ll occasionally run into someone who believes that it couldn’t be clearer: everything we’re experiencing was foreseen in the Book of Revelation. I’m not here to argue that, nor am I anyone’s idea of a Biblical scholar, but I think what we’re experiencing today is better illustrated not by the last book in the Bible but by the first.