Just Wait

Happy Saturday morning, and since I just opened a new bag of beans, this morning’s coffee is wonderfully fresh and tasty.

Last Saturday after posting I made my lunch using some great leftover Blue Oven Bakery salted-wheat -Sourdough bread – “Pain Perdu”. Now, a week later I can still taste it in my mind, almost better than when it was fresh.

Now that it’s formally autumn/fall I thought it wise to explore the correct term for the season. Hence, I went to my quick fount of wisdom – the Readers Digest (large text format). Turns out it’s all correct. Way back it was ‘Harvest Time’ in Britain. By 1300-something a new term, ‘autumn’, came into use. Eventually in the Americas it became the ‘fall-of-the-leaves’ season which quickly was shortened to ‘fall’. Whew, don’t you just feel much wiser now?

This paragraph I Posted a Year Ago (Oct. 6, 2023)

Fat Bear Week – As a precursor to next month’s elections, your vote is important for this event. Katmai National Park, Alaska’s Fat Bear Week is a celebration where anyone can vote. Vote? Yup, vote for the fattest brown Bear – the one who’ll emerge from its winter slumber as the ‘king of the hill” (or woods). Have fun! fatbearweek.org!”

Now a piece of shocking news from Katmai National Park in Alaska. It appears that two of this year’s competing ‘fat’ bears got into a bit of a kerfuffle. Well, it was more than a “kerfuffle”, it was a beat-down (i.e. biting and thrashing), and as CBS News reported; “a clash between a male bear, referred to as 469 and “Patches,” and an older female bear, referred to as 402, by the Brooks River in Katma. The fight led to one of the bears (#402) dying.”

Bottom line, all this had the 2024 Fat Bear Week brackets being delayed. So, via The Washington Post, the Fat Bear Week bracket has voting for Fat Bear Week 2024 running through Oct. 8. Click here to vote.

Zzzzzzz Tedious ‘Fire’ cliché in a burning room – is what this past week’s ‘debate?’ devolved into. You just know that desperation set in when a panicky contestant for the VP slot calls himself a “knucklehead”.

First, none of these ‘debates’ have anything in common with a debate other than the name. Rather than a formal discussion we’re ‘treated’ to a series of statements and stump refined bits. These then monitored and where desired cut short due to some unspecified need to move on. Boring!

From history  (National Park Services) comes the real thing; “Lincoln (Republican) and Douglas (Democrat) agreed to debate in seven of the nine Illinois Congressional Districts; the seven where Douglas had not already spoken. In each debate either Douglas or Lincoln would open with an hour address. The other would then speak for an hour and a half. The first then had 30 minutes of rebuttal. In the seven debates, Douglas, as the incumbent, was allowed to go first four times.”

In this week’s ‘debate’ there was a clear winner (hint; it wasn’t the self-declared ‘knucklehead”). What was interesting were some people whose career had been in interrogation and their insights.

Quotation – “I’m not upset at Trudeau. It’s the Canadian people who have trusted government, for some unknown reason, for far too long. Started with the carrot of universal (substandard for all) healthcare, and got worse from there ”, David McP on X (@uudavidx); answering an asked question; name a famous Canadian who openly came out against Trudeau.

In our own country, this week we saw how a dysfunctional government functions when a major disaster crops up. In fact, this week Secretary Mayorkas publicly stated that FEMA was out of money even as citizens with helicopters were shooed away under threat of arrest. What?

Considering all of this, take a close look at the picture inserted below as we see how our dependency on government has crept in over the years:

What, me worry? – So here we are, and not at all like the famous Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman character we can’t help but be impacted; bombarded, literally in the Middle East, but all over. Storms where we watch how a non-functional government behaves under pressure. Soaring prices on about everything. And we all could go on an on. Now we’re being told about billions trillion living things miles under the earth’s crust.

I guess we have two choices. One is to lose sleep over it all. The other is to look at it all with wonder, fascination, and awe. I choose the latter.

Now the long wait has begun. Last evening I renewed my passport online. Easy enough and it’ll ONLY take 4 to 6 weeks to process. Paid via credit card.

Instead of a plain, Thank You, I am now in some wait queue. Here is what I mean, I received a subsequent email; “we will send you a confirmation email when your payment has been successfully processed.” Wait a minute, all this processing is automated. Amazon advises me instantly whether things are good or whether there is a problem.

Update, there is no ‘subsequent’ email as of this writing. As I said, the wait has begun. Should I advise that at my age queue line waits do become a slight bit of a concern?

Life is AMAZING!

May Peace prevail! Shalom.

Dirk

BONUS POINTS:

This week’s B.P. is for the ladies (and some men). Often, the Romance Novel genre of softcover books displayed a suggestive cover and for years the male model for these covers was an Italian model who went by the name of ‘Fabio’. Which one of these corporations (by advertising tag lines i.e. “Just Do It” is Nike) did he represent?

1) “Just Do It”
2) “It’s finger-lickin’ good”
3) “Think Different”
4) “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!”
5) “The Best a Man Can Get”
6) “Betcha can’t eat just one”
7) “I’m Lovin’ It”
8) “Think Outside the Bun”
9) “What’s in your wallet?”
10) “The Quicker Picker Upper”
11) “All for Freedom. Freedom for All”