For the last year or so I have to admit that I’ve been watching the TEOTWAWKI crowd with at least a passing level of interest. As long as they’re of the relatively harmless variety, crazy people can be good fun. The thing that I can’t understand about the current crop of doomsayers is that they’re convinced that the end of the world is foretold by the fact that 
the Mayan calendar “suddenly” ends on December 21st.
I’m not sure the end of days crowd has really thought their argument through all that well. From my cursory understanding of Mesoamerican culture, the Mayan civilization more or less collapsed around 900 AD. I’m not an expert, but I suspect the fall of your civilization tends to mean you have more problems than updating a calendar that’s still good for another 1112 years. Finding water and feeding yourself spring to mind.
Convincing yourself that the world is ending because the Mayan calendar is about to roll over is pretty much like me sitting here convincing myself that the world is ending on December 31st because I haven’t bothered to buy a new wall calendar. It’s just one of these things I haven’t gotten around to yet, but if the historical record is any indication, I wouldn’t bet against the sun coming up on the December 22nd or January 1st. Still, I fully expect the nut jobs to put on a good show in the next few days.
for me until it doesn’t work. If I can be frank, the since Thanksgiving, I’ve had an appalling track record of sitting down and making any more than a cursory effort.
with something all week and then dropping it in someone else’s lap at the last minute hoping they’re going to drop everything and fix it over the weekend does not constitute a plan. At best it constitutes hope… and hope, as we all know, is not generally considered a sound planning methodology.
The concept of a Non-Denominational Winter Holiday Office Party is a lesson in contradictions. First, fill the room full of people that you really only know passingly well. Add a DJ who can’t play any good music for fear of offending someone. Add a healthy dose of forced conviviality and Christmas joy. And finally open the bar in the middle of the afternoon. It amazes me year after year that office Christmas parties don’t result in drunken shouting matches between people who generally don’t want to be in the same room with one another when it can be avoided. It’s one of the biggest reasons I know mankind can do anything that we collectively set our minds to.
get to them. For the most those few disks are fairly oddball titles that you’d really only want to watch once or twice in a lifetime anyway. Still, I have them, and it would be nice to go from finished to really finished eventually.
When we started the TPLO process three months ago, I’m sure the vet was trying to be reassuring when she told me that a decade ago this was the kind of injury that would have been grounds for putting a dog down. The thought would have never occurred to me. Because for the last 50 years Americans have had more money than brains, it seems that just about any kind of surgery you and I can get, our four legged friends can get too. The marvels of medical science have definitely not left our pets out of their unending march of progress. In fact one of the forms I signed this morning was basically an advanced directive for Winston – laying out how heroic I expect their life saving efforts to be if his heart should happen to stop while he was getting his x-rays done. For the record, I was ok with them performing basic CPR and administering electronic defibrillation. That seemed like a reasonable compromise between “do nothing” and “crack open his ribcage and perform emergency open heart surgery.”
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