Weather: "Warmed up" to about 5 degrees Fahrenheit -- snowing styrofoam, and there's a visitor from Helena, Montana on the way! Normally, it takes 3 1/2 hours to get here from there -- good luck, Rick! (He arrived OK, after 4 1/2 hours.)

Wildlife: The hole in the ice didn't close in the sub-zero cold! Damn near, but not quite. I think I'll get a bag of sunflower seeds this afternoon. Lots of Flickers and Doves lately.

Charity Alert: The Rainforest Site: Help Save Our Rainforests!

Media Watch: I don't think I have mentioned this before now, but I'm a regular listener to National Public Radio. Their news programs accompany me back and forth to work, plus their music and specialty programs keep me informed and entertained in the intellectual wilderness of 21st Century Amerika.
On television, I watched the NASA panel speak about their "Spirit" Mars lander on CSPAN, and skipped over "Duh Guvernator's" lying, self-serving rant from California. Nice pictures from space -- I hope that the science they undertake is as good as their imagery -- go slow, guys. Science means investigation, after all.


Personal: The old debate about the "place of space" in our society goes on, including manned vs. unmanned exploration.
I know that I've directly benefitted from many spinoffs of space exploration during my working life, but I can't dispute that we continue to outpace our ethics with technologies that allow us to act before we think.
H.G. Wells pointed that out almost a hundred years ago.
If we wait for Ethics to "catch up" with Science, we'll have no Science at all.

Lately I regret that our society's public ethics and political structures are reverting into disfunctional, discredited modes of corrupt "Gilded Age" behavior, predating Wells' era, and worse.
The goal of the administration-in-power seems to be a country resembling a Christian Fundamentalist version of Saudi Arabia, governed according to a narrow lip-service-only ideology (maybe even a Merchantilist Soviet Union). Like the Soviets and the Saudis, they are thieves, and spokespersons for thieves.
Western Wahabbi's, like Pat Robertson, seem to be on a mission to make science illegal -- they certainly battle teaching it in the schools -- and barely tolerate it's existance at all, except for convenient technology, of course.