
(Stonehenge in Snow. Picture courtesy Paul Robinson via BBC).
This is the fourth attempt at a story this morning. The first one was a polemic about something really important I won’t bore you with; the second another polemic about something else that bothers me intensely about the PC thugs; the third a fun romp through something I don’t want to put in the public domain, but which is completely legal. Really.
So that, unfortunately, leaves me down a quart on options. I have a nice story from Point Loma, but I am keeping that in reserve for some morning when I have to be someplace early; I could recycle a liberty story from some other decade when the world made more sense; or I could run something that would just irritate people. Wrong season for that, not that it seems to be stopping anyone else.
The problem with having so many things we are supposed to not notice is growing. And the number of wildly improbable things we are supposed to accept just because someone says so is frankly bewildering.
For example, I always irritate Old Jim when I note the arrival of the Winter Solstice tomorrow, shortly after five PM. Jim doesn’t have a problem with orbital mechanics or any of that, he just is precise in his grammar. When I start out with noting it is the “shortest day of the year” he fulminates that it is not the shortest day of anything.
“The Winter Solstice is the day when there is less daylight and more darkness!” he says with authority, and of course he is completely correct, though even the encyclopedia makes the same mistake. Jim is a stickler for precision, and I don’t blame him.

See, the axial tilt of the globe and the gyroscopic effect of the earth’s rotation keep the axis of rotation pointed at the same point in the heavens. As the Earth follows the orbit around the Solar giant the same hemisphere that faced away from the Sun, experiencing winter, will, in only half a year, face towards the Sun and experience summer.
So after cocktail hour tomorrow night we start that long march back into the sunlight and warmth, which coincidentally is the reason for the season. It is, of course, also about the birth of the Christ Child, even if there is some controversy over whether the Savior was actually born on the 25th of December.
(Emperor Constantine on a good day. Photo courtesy digitalapoptosis.com).
That day was not selected for the observance until 336 AD (I am not going to dignify that “CE” nonsense) in the time of Constantine, the first Christian Roman Emperor. It happened to coincide with the pagan mid-winter festivities the human animal requires to steel itself against the cold and dark, and the “Saturnalia” and “Dies Natalis Solis Invicti” (Literally, “the birthday of the unconquered sun”) and I will let you draw your own conclusions.
I am not one of those to bash the Christian Faith when there are so many others that need a good reformation, so I will leave it at that. Merry Christmas.
But this time of year is still the bottom of the well, daylight-wise, and with the encroaching darkness, I have been watching a little more television than I normally do. As you may have gathered, my television nemesis isn’t the programming these days, but the means by which it is delivered.
Comcast Cable is my sworn enemy. Lousy customer service, unexplained outages, monolithic inefficiency sort of start the litany of grievance, and I was burned too many times to ever trust them again. When the Verizon people wired Big Pink for fiber-optic cable, I was among the first to leap at the chance to shit-can the cable giant and go FiOS.
I have been generally happy with the service, and the reliability has been excellent. I am not too crazy about the channel line-up- you know, 500 channels and nothing on- and as part of the frustration with Comcast, I bought a flat-screen television that was internet aware.

I imagine we are getting close to SkyNet coming self-aware and wiping us out like in the Terminator movies, but I will accept the inevitability of the extinction of our species if it lets me avoid network programming by streaming stuff direct from the internet.
Anyway, I had a Roku box that was kind of neat to get Netflix and Hulu Prime, which constitutes the bulk of the non-sports stuff I watch. Others have cracked into that market segment- and the latest of them showed up at my door yesterday. It had been advertised on Amazon as part of their campaign to rule the world (before SkyNet does) and I took a chance and pre-ordered one. It arrived in the morning and I am knocked out. I un-boxed the components, plugged two things in, and was up and running in about five minutes.

“The Fire Stick connects to your TV’s HDMI port! It’s an easy way to enjoy Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, Hulu Plus, YouTube.com, music, and much more!”
And actually, it does. The other promotional material claims it has four time the storage and twice the memory of the device from Google, the Chromcast. What attracted me was the massive selection of content. Amazon claims they have over 200,000 movies and television shows, millions of songs and hundreds of games on which to fritter away what remains of the rest of my life.
They tell me I can download an app for my phone that allows me to use it as the remote control, and use voice commands to navigate and search, something that really made me cranky on the stupid million-button remotes.
In fact- I think I am going to leave it at that for now and go to the app store and do battle with that. It is a good way to while away and almost winter day, you know? Can’t start the holiday cheers for hours yet, anyway.
Oh, and with Amazon Prime free two-day delivery, you can still get them as stocking stuffers.
You know, it occurs to me that maybe Amazon actually is Skynet.
Merry Christmas!
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303