Anti-life-biotics

Last night a friend sent a video of a German singer named Kaas. I wrote back thinking Kaas must be cold ... If I were wearing pants that fit in the manner hers fit, I'd be cold, too. Maybe I was envious of her figure or her youth. I wear pants that low and my middle-aged shape has them shooting off like a rubber band off an aiming finger. And just moments before, I had expressed cavalierly gratuitous comments about Glenn Campbell's Classical Gas performance? Was it my intellectual flatulence ... poor Glenn is off somewhere now in dementia and I was being critical of his guitar fingerings ... How unkind. How unlike the kind Soul I seek to be. ... When I was young, I'd say each morning as I opened my eyes: Modeh Ani l'Phanecha ... I offer thanks before Thee ... Melech Chai v'Kayam ... Living and secure King ... she'hechezarta bi nishmasi .... that you returned into me my soul ... b'Chemlah raba emunasecha ... with Your reliable mercy. I woke up this morning not knowing if the flu or the antibiotics were killing me, but when I found myself mouthing those childhood words in a foreign tongue, I wasn't expressing thanx to Big Pharma. My advice: beware of allopaths bearing cutting edge antibiotics ... IF THEY'VE COME TO KILL YOUR BUGS, YOU MAY BE NEXT! Having the flu or other bronchial madnesses in the Fourth Quarter is not Playing ... nor is it Playful. With apologies to both singers and all cowboys, I remain ... Flu-bitten, Bronchial and/or Addled Howard

Changes

Sitting with friends on New Year's Eve and watching the year being reviewed, I was struck by my own sense of surprise at my reticense to expect change that, perhaps, hit me stronger this year than in previous years. I 'apologized' (I can think of no other word to describe my thinking .... an apology, indeed) for being so behind in my thinking. I suspect that I maintained a fantasy all these years that all the major growths and alterations of culture and civilization had already occurred. I suppose it was like the American shock over the bursting bubbles ... in housing ... in technology, etc., that grabbed the Americans and Spaniards and Greeks and Northern Europeans (y'get my drift) by the back of their chairs and yanked them off those chairs (think I really messed up that metaphor). How could it be that printed journalism and published books weren't the cat's meow, forever? How could it be that the Post Office would downsize or tyat there wouldn't be enough jobs for everyone who wanted to work in the most civilized nations in the world? And even on the positive side, telephones in every room seems like paradise and, yet, now one hardly is ever feet away from a phone or from the ability to communicate -- more in less in real time -- with anyone on this Good Earth. Wow! Google gives me 2,000,000 sites in which to explore the price of toilet paper on busses in Mainland China which is no longer called Mainland China. When I was listening to some old guy, Kirk Douglas, talking on the Academy Awards, I think it was, I Wikipedia'ed him and it already listed that he was talking on the Awards. How's that possible ... and would it tell me what he was likely to do, tomorrow? May-be! I could go on ... but, chances are, what I'd write might well have already been written and published on Wiki this or Wiki that! Ain't nothin' new under the Sun ... only, there is! I think I could be a Luddite ... but not a happy one.