CONTENT The news ain’t what it used to be. I’m retired. I have wifi. I have Reuters and Google News and Flipboard and The New York Times and more sources for ‘content’ on my phone than I could ever need. Not so long ago, scanning through those sources was enjoyable, might even have evoked a chuckle or two. Remember the Chris Christie meme? How many ways could an obese governor lounging in a beach chair be photoshopped into wildly inappropriate current events stories? As it turned out, lots of ways, lots of very funny ways. Where are the memes featuring the politicians of today that evoke laughter and not disgust? COVID. Trump. Boris. Putin. Ukraine. China. Climate. Supply chain. The price of energy. The price of food. The world is too much with us... ON THE OTHER HAND UPI reports that a chicken walked up to a security area in the Pentagon, unaccompanied and unarmed. Yes. A chicken. Not a Bird Colonel. An actual chicken. With feathers. When I was in college, we stole
FRESH FLOWERS Joni always gets it right. You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. For something like 30 years and a bit more, we bought, packaged for resale, and distributed thousands of cut flowers every week. Roses, carnations, mums, and more slipped through our hands, primarily viewed as a commodity. It was how we made our living. Oh, every once in a while, a particularly fine specimen would catch our eye and wind up in a bud vase on the kitchen table. But in general, I just became accustomed to having fresh flowers in the house without really noticing them. In retirement, Cathey has taken to container gardening on the terrace. No veggies. Just stuff that looks pretty, smells good, or might spice up a stew. So we have sprigs and blossoms of several different sorts on the table as summer begins on through the middle of autumn. But the winters, as far from eastern Pennsylvania as we are, still can be pretty sparse. And, because I am a man, I hadn’t noticed that the vases had