New Shoes in the Rain

Last Monday of January.  Already.  Where does the time go?  If you know, please speak up! Today's post isn't really ONE post, but numerous small ones.  Here goes. Are you excited about the Super Bowl matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers?  I read that the Niners are slight favorites, but the Chiefs have been in four of the last five SB games with this one.  Hard to beat that. But I'm almost to the point I was with the Patriots, as in, "Them?  Again?" $83.3 million.  Ahem. Meanwhile, various entities are trying very hard to pull the U.S. into active war in the Middle East.  Our next move is likely to be calculated as a proportional response to the death of three service members.  Let's hope that more won't follow. Charles Osgood, former CBS reporter, anchor and host of "CBS Sunday Morning," passed away recently, and his former show devoted its entire 90 minutes to Osgood, who was a witty, comfortable presence ...

Greetings, one and all.  I hope that January is going well for you so far.  I have to confess that returning to our usual routine has been a little bit of a letdown, after having our entire family together for full week over the holidays! But I digress, as I stopped by this morning to address something that has been nagging at me for some time. After many years of using Twitter, now called “X,” I decided to stop doing so and deleted my account. Why?  Well, for one thing, the current owner of that platform decided to end Twitter’s longstanding practice of making it possible to use what is called a “client” to view content from that platform.  In that model, it is possible to completely tailor one’s account to see only what the user wants, only those accounts the user follows, and no ads. One of the earliest actions that rankled me was the elimination of these clients.  That meant using the native Twitter app, which meant that my feed was polluted by a growing amo...