I know that it is customary to do so on the first of January but why get stuck with tradition? Besides which, yesterday was rather chaotic at home with my daughter and son-in-law’s flight back to California being cancelled and the replacement one being repeatedly delayed, all due to the bad weather in this part of the country. In addition, we had a plumbing emergency that required a lot of messing around so I decided to give blogging a miss.

So after a frazzled start to the new year, now things are back to (almost) normal, so Baxter the Wonder Dog and I wish all of this blog’s readers all the best for 2014.

What do I wish for in 2014? I hope to see the end of drone murders by the Obama administration, the addition of many people who have access to affordable health insurance, worldwide outrage at the global spying network by the US and UK that lead to real reforms, Edward Snowden finding a permanent home safe from the vindictive and lawless US government, more whistleblowers being inspired by him to reveal government wrongdoing, more principled judges reining in government excesses, a hike in the minimum wage to at least $15 per hour, a rise in the maximum tax rate to somewhere around 75%, elimination of the cap on income taxed for Social Security, defeats of religious extremists and their associated racists, sexist, and homophobic agendas, and a rise in secular thinking all over the globe.

I realize that this is a far more modest list than peace on Earth but I thought that I would try to be at least faintly realistic. There are many more things I wish for but these are enough for the moment.

Me reading the comics while Baxter the Wonder Dog takes a nap by my side.

Blogging will be more sporadic over the holidays as I will be together with my children and their significant others. Now that they are older and living independent lives elsewhere, these times together are few and far between and to be savored. I thought that I would pass on a couple of personal recommendations. Others should feel free to add their own in the comments. [Read more…]

In the recent post on how best to discourage monomaniacs, without banning them, from derailing discussions by posting about their pet peeves that have barely any connection with the original topic, it was suggested that one improvement might be to eliminate nested comments that group sidebar conversations together, so that when one scrolls down, comments do not appear in chronological order. Up to now, this blog has had five levels of nesting.. [Read more…]

A scan of 600,000 customer service calls was studied to see in which states people swore at the operators the most and also those states where people are most polite and use phrases like “please” and “thank you”. [Read more…]

There are some news headlines that are irresistible and that one simply has to follow up on. I do not as a rule track the activities of the parasitic British royal family but when I saw the BBC news headline Police ‘told to leave Queen’s nuts alone’, I had to read more. [Read more…]

This year’s Super Bowl is coming up and for the first time it is going to be held in an open-air stadium in a region of the country (New Jersey) where the winter weather can get pretty bad. But what interested me was this news report describing the restrictions on how people can actually get to the stadium. [Read more…]

I start each day with a cup of coffee. I have done so since I became a teenager because children drinking coffee was not as uncommon in Sri Lanka as it is in the US. While I like coffee, I don’t drink a lot, with at most one other cup during the day, usually in the afternoon, with an after dinner cup of tea. But despite my fondness for the beverage, I am definitely not a coffee connoisseur. I drink instant coffee and add milk and sugar to it, a practice that is scorned by the purists. [Read more…]

Readers may recall the story of Chelsea Welch, the server at an Applebees restaurant, who was fired after she posted a receipt on the internet on which a local pastor she had served had written “I give God 10% why do you get 18”. Welch explains what happened and her bafflement at her firing here. [Read more…]

One of my biggest peeves is the media creating ghastly and unnecessary new words that are mash-ups of two perfectly good words. We have had abominations such as ‘snowcalypse’ and ‘snowmageddon’ for what could be more simply described as a severe snow storms, and ‘staycation’ to denote a vacation spent at home. I am sure there have been many others in the past that I have deliberately driven out of my memory because I despise them. [Read more…]