I watch very little television and when I do it's generally old movies. However, at my retail job during my lunch break a television is generally on with a football game or some ridiculous talk show. On occasion there has been a sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, which I was surprised by. They made a joke involving Schrödinger's cat. This is a subject that I suspect only a small portion of the television viewing public would be at all familiar with. The joke worked too. The punch line was "the cat's alive". The writers adhered to the Copenhagen interpretation.

Working retail during the Christmas season, I'm barraged by Christmas music. I find one especially puzzling and annoying. There is this line about a shivering infant and the response is "let us bring it silver and gold". Now just what does an infant want with silver and/or gold or frankincense and myrrh for that matter. That kid wants a blanket and probably a tit.

Sometimes I just want to make a quick lunch, so I heat up a can of chili. I do try to be conscientious about such things as GMOs and the big multinational monsters. For a long time I would buy Dennison. I since discovered that Dennisons is a ConAgra product so I had to switch. Lately I've been purchasing Staggs chili. I decided to look them up on Google and discovered they are a Hormel product, the same as Spam. That's not so bad but Hormel was one of the major contributors to the effort that defeated Proposition 37 on the recent California ballot.

Mark Twain visited the Versailles in 1867 and marveled at it's extent and craftsmanship in construction and maintenance. One point that struck me is the relationship between the workers and the high borne that had it built:

As American society creeps closer and closer to feudalism, we've just had a very narrow escape, I continue to retreat into the works of Mark Twain for solace. I'm currently converting my recordings from reading The Innocents Abroad into mp3s to be compiled into audiobooks. A recurrent theme throughout The Innocents Abroad is Twain's criticism of "The Old Masters". The works of these fellows are a significant part of what we today recognize from feudal societies. They portray the "1%ers" from those times. What we rarely see are the lives of the rest of the populations.

In case anyone might have noticed, I've updated or upgraded my site. I don't know which to call it. I'm still using Drupal 7 but I've switched to using panels for styling, along with delta. I'd been meaning to do this for some time and actually had a working version on a development site. Something went wrong with this live site so I backed it out. Well, I couldn't sleep this morning so I go up and tried it again. There had been some updates to some modules so perhaps that made a difference. Anyway, I think it looks better.