It's a very bad bug this year. Hospital beds and emergency rooms are overflowing, Tamiflu is scarce, and this year's highly promoted flu shot is about ten percent effective. Evidently we don't have everything figured out quite yet.2. Weather:
The "bomb cyclone" seems to have replaced the "polar vortex" as the meteorological catastrophe of the millennium. When I was a kid, we called it "a blizzard."
3. Sports:
Now that no one in San Diego cares about the Chargers anymore, they are having a decent season. Unfortunately, no one in Los Angeles seems to care, either.
4. Movies:
For the first time since I was thirteen years old, I'm going to skip the Academy Awards telecast. At the moment, I just can't take these people seriously.
5. Television:
I'm hooked on Netflix's "The Crown;" "The Walking Dead" is getting far too silly; and after all this time I still love "Blue Bloods" and "NCIS."
6. Books:
I"m reading about half a dozen of them right now. That's what happens when you own a Kindle, receive Book Bub email notices, and still long to hold hard copy books.
7. Stock Market:
It's way up. That fact makes me happy and nervous simultaneously.
8. Travel:
I remember when flying was considered a glamorous, enviable activity, a leisurely stretch of time to be pampered and waited upon. Today flying feels as special as being loaded into a standing cattle box car and feels about as comfortable.
9. Politics:
Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I don't know when about half of America stopped understanding that fact of life, but the past year has established that the losers don't get it.
10. Life:
In the words of the great poet Robert Frost, "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."
