Tuesday night, like most Tuesday nights, I settled in to watch election returns. To my horror, there were no election returns. Not, mind you, that I really expected the whole nine yards, with pundits pontificating, or boffins with their sleeves rolled up yelling about what the early returns from Door County told us about the Catholic vote, but I did at least expect that, even in this all-coronavirus all-the-time news cycle, there would at least be the reassuring little box up in the corner showing the percentages, Nope. Not even anything in the little cavalcade of minutiae which crawls along the bottom of the screen. Well, this morning after much too much prowling around news sites, I discovered that all of this was, at least nominally, because there weren’t going to be any returns for a week or so. Clearly, it’s already become tres gauche to care about who is the president of the United States, though perhaps we have another month or so before giving a damn will become an actual crime.
Read MoreAnother year over, and what have we done? Yes, 2018 is at an end. We can look back at the past, and forward to the future, and celebrate an arbitrary date chosen to begin a new year – January 1. People will make (and break) resolutions, promise things will be better in the new year, and proceed to do the same things the way they always do them, because the new year isn’t magic. There is no reason to expect things will change, because New Year’s Day is an imaginary day…oh, the day actually exists, but there is no reason to believe things start over that day. It’s really just another day to which we have chosen to add significance.
Read MoreI’ve been feeling a bit peeved lately. It seems the pundits and political analysts are not reading my column! And they keep repeating the exact same things over and over, the things they’ve been saying for two years now. If they would read my blog, and understand it, they might not be getting things so wrong.
Read More