Sometime last week, for the first time in a while in these parts, the sun rose before 7 A.M. Always a good sign. Also, as the weekend went around the corner, we had a cluster of holidays–Lincoln's Birthday, Friday the 13th, Valentine's Day and Presidents' Day. A good time for saving money on cars, appliances, and clearances on candy.

Also, Welcome to Lent, all you who survived Fat (or Shrove) Tuesday, particularly if you spent it in one of the Mardi Gras hotspots like New Orleans or Rio de Janeiro. Presuming you're still there, you should not be particularly disturbed this Ash Wednesday by anything noisier than street sweepers scuttling along cluttered streets or the sound of ashes being rubbed onto foreheads in the shape of a cross by the priest's thumb.

And of course Olympics,

specifically, Olympic tongue steppers.

I can't imagine the tasks the commentators have taken on, providing sound over two weeks of events, and talking all that time.

For some reason, NBC, in the confines of the executive suite, have decided that viewers cannot handle silence. There has to be sounds, noise, words flowing in a constant stream, especially between events when there is nothing going on. That's sort of OK, but it would be nice if they could shut up so we could be closer to the action, to watch the athletes and hear the crowd reaction.

I have sympathy, though, for the people who have to provide the wall of sound. You start blathering, just to make sound, irrespective of it making sense to hearers. Much like the athletes in the distance events, the talkers tire and say 'theengs,' like:
'He's trying to get to the finish line as quickly as possible,' and
'That's an upset if I've ever seen one,' and
'That medal count will change at the conclusion of [the next event],' and
'I do think this race will be longer for him,' and
'His team has its focus on the gold medal,'and
'No one in the world can do that' (after we've just seen someone do that), and
'it's a personal journey and his story,'
and, of course, 'It's not over 'til it's over.'

Good news, mostly.

The 2025 Global Peace Index of most peaceful countries has been released, and the top 5 includes:

Iceland
Ireland
New Zealand
Austria
Switzerland

I'm sure there are many ways to connect the dots, but the ones I notice are isolation (islands and Alpine countries), balance of rural and urban, an educated populace, and a homogeneous culture.

Cluck, cluck.

Idle speculation about chickens.

I wonder what chickens were like before they were domesticated. Were they flock animals, like geese and ducks, or were they mostly solitary, like wild turkeys? And, I wonder why there are so few if any wild chickens about these days. I've seen wild turkeys, ducks and geese. And not really about chickens, but why is the plural of goose geese, mouse mice, and moose moose?

Like I said, idle.

All you need to know about: Druids.

Druids did not build Stonehenge. They used it, but did not build it.
Druids did not paint their faces blue when leading religious ceremonies. Blue was reserved fir warriors, which the Druids weren't.
Becoming a top-dog Druid could take up to twenty years and was conducted in secret.
In Ireland, women could be Druids.
Druid side hustles included doctoring, lawyering, stopping battles and possibly sorcery.
Druids did not write important things down. For everyday things, they used first Greek and later Latin.
Forests, especially oak forests, figured prominently in Druidic activities like training and trials, but they didn't exactly worship trees.
Druids died out in the late 1st to mid 2nd Century.
Merlin was not a Druid.
Druids bear no relation to the strange creatures who appear at Renaissance festivals, at the summer and winter solstices, and cosplay/photographic events.

How high is that bar?

The WSJ reveals that The data are in. We are more faithful than meerkats.

That's probably not the gold standard. That title belongs to (among others) Canadian geese, which mate for life.

Hats off to The WSJ for remembering that 'data' is the plural of 'datum,' which is used so little most commoners have likely forgotten it exists.

Words that can go away.

at least in their currently common usages.

journey. any 'trip' that does not involve actual, physical movement, as in 'my journey to health began...'
shares, as in 'Philip shares ten children with his wife.' Whatever happened to 'father of ten children'?
curate. I thought this old horse had been pastured (which construction itself should be on the list) a while ago, but is sneaking back into odd places, like restaurant menus. Next time, it's off to the glue factory.
not exactly a word, but the whole class of verbifications, the taking of perfectly good nouns that are then subjected to twistifications, contortions, and other tortures and mutilations. Shakespeare was wrong—we shouldn't kill all the lawyers first, we should go after advertising copywriters, the source of so much pain.
We can go after the lawyers second.

Sounds like a lot of three- and four-year-olds.

The Wall Street Journal says AI gadgets are bad, but still promising.

To be fair, most three- and four-year-olds can be good, even sweet, most of the time, but when they're bad, they're very, very bad. Ditto AS.

Fine granularity.

I admit it—I'm an introvert. That's been pretty consistent for my entire life. No shame there.

But now, I find out that being an 'introvert' is no longer enough. I have to be one of four types of introvert. Am I Social? Anxious? Thinking? Restrained? I can be social in small groups, like to put time into making decisions, and definitely a thinker. If I have to pick one, that's the one I would go with.

But for whom am I agonizing? Certainly not for other introverts. Not me. Extroverts, when I run into them, don't care. They just want to be the life of the party.

And speaking of extroverts, turns out they fall into four camps, too, at least according to Glam magazine. Why am I not surprised that Very Well Mind gives us the 411 on introverts, while Glam covers the party animals?

Revisiting meaning and greatness.

The Poetry Foundation, after a week or so of cutting edge poetry (translation: does anybody beyond the author have any idea what the point of this is?) made amends by running John Milton's Sonnet 19, with its magnificent final line:

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Random observations.

It's a lot easier to get to 'inbox-0' after Christmas, when all the ads have stopped, than before.

The best way to combat boredom is not to fill your life with external stimuli, but to live in boredom until you can't stand being bored any more.