The Burrow

Six years before the start of Pandemica, I began to experiment with meditation.   I was surprised by the power it had, for the longer-than-just-sitting-there effect it had, for the fact that I could calm not only my mental but my physical being. And then I stopped.  The teacher moved closer but at a less convenient time.  Life got in the way.  I gave it up. And now I'm faced with adding one more medication to my pillbox; I see the doctor as you drink your coffee, or think about lunch..   With that in mind, I asked Dr. Google for help and she sent me to Deepak Chopra and Oprah's 21 Day Meditation course.... which, unfortunately for me, has ended. Plunging further into the interwebs, I discovered that there are many ways to access the verbiage.  I don't know if the original course had video, but my eyes were closed so it wouldn't have mattered at all.  I clicked on the first one and settled back into my chair. It was familiar and strange.  It was im...

There are two, or maybe four, hurricanes bearing down on the United States right now.  There have been so many hurricanes this year that I can't keep up, and I'm not the only one.  They are running out of names... and there are still two more months to go before the season ends. The west coast is on fire, and the smoke is causing beautiful sunsets in Washington, D.C. Big Cuter can't open his windows or go outside.  Without air conditioning (remember Mark Twain's coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco ?), with the temperatures unusually high, he's sleeping with ice packs and fans.   Our President is holding indoor, un-masked, un-distanced rallies, even as Bob Woodward's tapes show that he knows Covid is both airborne and a lot more dangerous than the usual flu. And then, as the facts on the ground were explained to him, once again, in one and two syllable words, the President of the United States smirked the way a spoiled brat 14 year old might...

So many many things to talk about today..... Let's get the whole small people thing out of the way, first.  My position on the assassination of the Gulf of Mexico has already been made clear - some of the prettiest and most productive shoreline in the world is being altered irreparably and expensively because nobody wondered what might go wrong if safety were sacrificed to profit.  BP's executives should have to explain themselves, to as many Congressional Committees as want to flay them.  Yes, it's an extraordinarily absurd exercise and a vanity showcase for our elected officials to demonstrate their outrage but humiliation is all we've got going for us right now.  The oil keeps gushing into the Gulf, and we're reduced to collecting snippets of hair and shoving them into nylons.  Does anyone even wear nylons anymore? But, I digress.  BP's chairman, Carl-Henric Svanberg, was interviewed in the driveway of the White House this week.  He had just...