Happy New Year

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne! 

Christma Eve

After church concert of carols early this evening we're all gathereing in the den to watch the 1951 movie version of A Christmas Carol. I've seen it just shy of 50 times probably, but always enjoy it.
MERRY CHRISTMAS to all (Yankees too)

Christmas week

My wife and I are spending the week at my son's home up in NE Louisiana--Log Cabin. Louisiana. He lives far from the big city (or any city) in a wooded area of 18 acres, I walked my Granddog, Joe, through the wooded area where my son's house is located, and through the adjoining woods. Brisk, about 50 degrees, nothing but the sound of leaves as I walked. No sirens, no horns, etc. Saw one deer. Joe bolted after him but the deer was too quick, I guess, as Joe retuned a few minutes later, returning to his sniffing and tree-search.
We'll have seven at the dinner(noon) table Christmas morning.
It will be cold enough for the fireplace tonight so on to gather some "free" firewood.

Trying to get back

Trying to get back into the blogging scheme. Been working on getting my advanced reader copies out. Several people have generously agreed to read and comment. But getting it all done is a bit of a chore for a newby.

Christmas Short Stories

I got a copy a couple of years ago of A Very Southern Christmas. I pull it out now at Christmas. Though reviews at Amazon only give it three and a half stars, stories (like beauty) are in the eye, or ear of the be-reader. maybe it's just because I love short stories, but in any event it beginning to look a lot like you-know-what.

Revisions

Got some final revisions to work on over the weekend, so I'll try to get any replies off when I can catch up. That's the thing about this blogging. You're(at least I am) afraid somebody'll think I'm ignoring them.

Lenghty AND brief

The following is not a brief post; however , in a concise, relatively few words it covers volumes.

The author is Troy Cauley, born in Comanche, Texas and a contributor to Who Owns America, sequel to I’ll take My Stand both written in the 1930s. This partial essay of Cauley’s appeared in So Good a Cause in 1993.

"...Technological progress in the past half century has been outstanding in the field of transportation. Let’s illustrate it. When I was a small boy in central Texas we lived about nine miles from the county seat, a town of three or four thousand people. In the fall we took a bale of cotton to town in a wagon. With a load of this sort, the team of horses walked about four miles an hour along the dirt road, thus taking over two hours for the trip.

A short time ago I flew from Texas to California in a 747 jet in about the same length of time. That looks like incredible progress. Let’s examine it more closely.

On the flight to California I saw virtually nothing of the country. From an elevation of 36,000 feet, all we saw were some weather-beaten clouds. Our seats were narrow and jammed together, but I visited with no one. Nobody showed any interest in me. I was in a crowd but it was a very lonely crowd.

On the trip to town with the bale of cotton we visited with fellow travelers along the way. We exchanged hearty greetings with neighbors as they sat on their porches. My brother and I had the whole back-end of the wagon in which to roll, tumble, and wrestle. We saw field-larks in the pastures and heard their cheerful calls. Bob-white quail thundered out of the bushes along the fencerows. Jackrabbits raced off for the cover of the post-oaks. The trip was a big success even before we got to town.

In a sense, of course, all of this is trivial. But in a broader sense, it is highly illustrative of a basic human fact: human nature is better adapted to a simple technology than to a highly complex one. People cannot live in a society of bread and circuses, especially when the bread has little or no nutritional value and the circuses consist mainly of endless hours of television depicting violence, vulgarity, and unclassified stupidity..."