To make my reading time more complicated (making things more complicated is my strong point)
I try to keep up with these 8 magazine subscriptions. Good thing some of them are quarterly publications or I would surely fail miserably.

Book report

Coltrane required listing = Better World

So True!

7th British County/Town/ Pub names

7 down and only 76 left! Keep thinking I should expand this to include more info but I am lucky to have gotten this far with these basic elements!. Probably shouldn't press it any farther!

Groucho!

The way time seems to speed by these days I am reminded of a theory I heard many years ago. As you get older time seems to speed up. This appears to happen because each year added to your life becomes less of a percentage of a total life experience. One year is one half of a two year old child's life. By the time they reach 20 one year is reduced to 1/20th of the experience making it appear to go faster.
This has always made sense to me!

As it was recently Friday the 13th I thought about my dad. He loved that day. He was always telling me that 13 was his lucky number. This is probably because he was born in 1913. Although he did not seem to have much luck in the last few years of his life ( he died 27 years ago) Hopefully there was lots of it in previous years, none the less. If you are lucky enough to have parents among the living give them a hug.
Because you fight and think you can't get along, then they are gone and you miss them!

explains a lot!

Without ethics, politics has no limits. America broke the rules of living systems, and lost its balance. All the oxygen flowed to a smaller and smaller section of the body politic. The history is brief and unquestionable: close to toppling, the society momentarily pulled itself upright, and then became even less ethical, less balanced, more endangered than ever as a lawless financial system came back from death, and like a foolish patient after a heart bypass operation, continued in its old ways. With no ethical component to national politics, President Obama could deliver his 2011 State of the Union speech without ever mentioning the word “poverty,” although one in every five American children lived in poverty. Without a commitment to Hutcheson’s idea of the greatest good, which is at the core of the original American philosophy in Jefferson’s drafting of the Declaration of Independence, this may no longer be the brilliant experiment. If happiness is for the few and it produces unemployment approaching that of the Great Depression, then the shadow of evening is here.

- Earl Shorris

Excerpted from “American Vespers: The Ebbing of the Body Politic”, by Earl Shorris, as appeared in Harper’s Magazine, December 2011

Walkies anyone?