Forget the Snakes – Watch The Horses 

   Every nature show one sees about Australia spends some time discussing and showing video of all the venomous snakes crawling around that country. They have the Eastern Brown snake, the western brown snake, the Mainland Tiger snake, and the Inland Taipan, and the Coastal Taipan, just to name a few. (A person could get the idea that these Australian snakes don’t get around much – I mean the easterns don’t mix with the westerns, the inlands don’t mix with the coastals, etc.)
   These nature shows leave a person with the idea that once they’ve left their homes and get outdoors, it’s only with the best of luck that Australians make it back indoors without getting bitten by one of these deadly snakes. And once bitten, they have only a matter of minutes to make their peace with whatever entity they want to spend their afterlife with. 
    A recent study tells us that horses kill more people in Australia than do snakes. The nature programs will never be the same. 
    This study showed that in a thirteen-year period horses killed 74 people, whereas bees and other stinging insects killed 27 people and snakes killed another 27 people. 
    So, if you visit Australia, don’t sweat the snakes, but look out for those murderous horses.

Drink It Or Pour It On Your Head - They Don’t Care As Long As You Buy It 

   I’m not a beer drinker, so that fact might cloud my take on this product a Swedish brewery is making, and that is a beer designed to “optimize” the experience of drinking in the shower. 
    My question: is drinking in the shower a big thing, or is this brewery just hoping it might become a big thing? 
    I mean, a shower is going to last what? Maybe at most, five to eight minutes. It seems to me that if a person can’t wait for a beer until they get out of the shower, they have a problem. And this Swedish brewery is betting on the assumption that there are enough people, who can’t wait that long before slurping down another beer, to make this new product of theirs viable? Sort of scary. 
    According to the brewery this beer can also be used as a conditioner. There you go, use it internally or externally. How many liquids or foods can make that claim?

If You Don’t Have Anything To Say, Try Not To Say It 

    We seem to have a malady that has reached a new level of intensity among a certain group of public figures, semi-public figures, or public figure wannabes. The malady? These people can’t keep their mouths shut. They feel that if they’re not texting, tweeting, or in some other way alerting everyone to their every thought and action they are somehow letting humanity down. We’ll not add blogging to this list for obvious reasons, even though I’m not sure it should be exempt.    Today so much of what people are saying seems to be more like a frantic effort to be noticed or not to be forgotten. It’s like people feel they’ll either disappear or become a none-entity if they’re not saying something. 
    Today’s politicians are not exempt from this malady. If a day goes by where our President-Elect, Donald Trump doesn’t tweet, people take note and wonder what’s wrong. Of course, if he does tweet, the media is in a froth, disagreeing or reading something sinister into the tweeted comments. And many of his tweets are not really adding to the national intelligence or making him look presidential. 
    So, Mr. President Elect, it seems to me that you’re missing a lot of good opportunities to just be silent. It’s a simple concept. Paraphrasing fictional character Jesse Stone: “If you don’t have anything of substance to say, try not to say it.” People can’t take issue with what’s not said. Your quietness and reluctance to discuss the inane might even seem presidential.
    I'm picking on Trump here, but you can't spit without hitting a politician who is doing exactly the same thing.
     Of course, each one of these mostly inane tweets gives countless people something to do, and that is tweet a response, text their friends about the tweet, or encourage their friends to text/tweet about their own text, or about the tweet in question. Without this to occupy their intellects they’d have to just depend on themselves for entertainment, or companionship. Yikes! 
    Today the media is leading the pack in pitching the inane as something important. Examples: since when is the size of a Kardashian butt, or how a British Royal holds her purse, news? 
    One thing we seem to forget is that the primary objective of the media is not to inform, raise the level of intelligence, or to provide a public service. Its primary objective is to make an acceptable bottom line (I’m talking about profits for those of you still stuck on the Kardashian anomaly), like any other big business, and if it takes a Kardashian’s butt to pull in the readers, increase the viewing audience, and in turn sell more advertised products, then that’s what they’re going to do. And sad to say, that seems to be exactly what’s happening.
    The fact that many of our public leaders feel that they have to be constantly saying something whether it’s pertinent to anything or not, is a sad state of affairs, and reflects poorly on us, the voters.

The Revolution Is Here 

    It’s finally started. And it started in Florida. A woman was trying to dress her pit bull in a sweater. Now if a person needed to dress a dog, why pick on a pit bull? A Chihuahua named Fluffy maybe, or some other small breed with low self-esteem. But a pit bull named Scarface? 
   The pit bull took exception to this humiliation and attacked her. The lady’s husband came to her rescue and in turn was attacked by the dog. The son of this couple, evidently feeling he needed more scars, tried stabbing the dog in the head and neck, trying to change its focus away from attacking his Dad. 
    The dog didn’t appreciate the interference so turned and attacked the son. Soon all three humans were chased out of the house and ended up in the hospital, leaving two small children back in the house. 
    Police had to call in the animal control people who shot the dog with tranquilizers. That didn’t work so they had to use a bean bag gun to stun Scarface before they could catch him. 
    So, dog owners beware. This may be the sweater heard around the world. The first salvo in the animal revolution against being dressed in human-looking clothes. Their slogan could be, “Hey Punk, ya don’t like my fur? You must be feeling lucky!” 
    Viva la Scarface!

Business as Usual 

    Well, AOL has done it again. Their latest headline stated: “Donald Trump tweets outrage at CNN for using an unflattering picture of him on book cover.” 
    Notice the word “outrage”. So, to explore this “outrage” I followed the link. Now the headline on the link had downgraded “outrage” to “dissatisfaction”. 
    The outrage/dissatisfaction was over the picture of Trump that CNN put on the cover of a book they’re publishing called, “Unprecedented: The Election That Changed Everything." 
    Trumps actual tweet said, “@CNN just released a book called 'Unprecedented' which explores the 2016 race & victory. Hope it does well but used worst cover photo of me!"
    If any other industry pulled this kind of garbage it would be called fraud, bait-n-switch, flimflam, con job, hustle, or rip-off. But from the media it's business as usual.

It’s a Bird. It’s a Plane. No, It’s - - Oh Well, Let’s Call It a Camel 

   A report filed by Daniel Uria, for AOL news I guess, started out with this first sentence. 
   “A group of visiting llama experts helped police in Georgia (that's U.S.) capture an escaped llama that baffled residents.” 
   WOW! - That sentence has some interesting points. I’ll try to address some of them.
   Llama experts in Georgia? A group no less? Why not, they’ve got to be someplace, I guess. 
   Georgia residents baffled by llama? Turns out they thought it was a camel. Hopefully this doesn’t reflect the general acuity of Georgians. 
   The llama experts had to help the police capture the llama. Notice the singular. There was only one llama. 
   Later the Chief Deputy Sheriff explained, “Our deputies are not trained in South American camelid identification.” I have a hard time imagining “American camelid identification” being something that would naturally roll off the tongue of a Georgia deputy sheriff. But what do I know? 
   Also, we find that these llama experts were traveling right on the road where the camel/llama was located. Talk about coincidence. 
   When asked why the llama had gotten lose the deputy sheriff offered up the suggestion that maybe the llama had seen the weather report for the coming weekend and was attempting to buy bread and milk. I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that the deputy sheriff’s suggestion was tongue-in-cheek.

Work Ethic Takes Another Hit 
    For the past fifty years, there has been a growing concern for the seeming lack of interest workers have in doing a good job. The only good news on this subject is the fact that this malady has only affected a small percentage of the work force. However, there are probably statistics showing that this percentage is increasing.  
   This malady does not seem to be confined to any particular industry, or type of employee, within any given corporate organization. 
    Today I ran into a case in point. In Webster, Mass., a lady robbed a credit union. She showed such a lack of interest in the success of her venture that the only thing she did to increase her chances of success was to draw a mustache on her upper lip. 
   No Halloween mask, no dark classes, nothing. Just that drawn-on mustache. 
    It was a great example of a slap-dash approach to doing a job. 
    Now, I hate to bring this up, but they have yet to find this lady robber, so maybe she knew what she was doing and her approach to her job of robbing the credit union was not as slap-dash as I first thought. 
    Or her still being at large might just speak to the efficiency of the Webster, Mass., police.

This Is What I’d Do – Actually, This Is What I’ve Done 

    Recently we’ve heard a lot about how Trump is treating Russia’s Putin. Most people including President Obama, are really pissed at Putin right now. Russia’s supposed messing with the recent U.S. elections has triggered a great deal of negative feelings for Putin and Russia in general. A number of U.S. law enforcement entities have told us that they are certain that the Russians were indeed trying to tweak our election. How they were doing this has not been made clear to us lowly citizens, as far as I know, except to inform us that it was done via computer hacking. I suppose we would not understand anything more technical than that. Who exactly was responsible for doing this tweaking has also not been made clear to us lowly citizens, as far as I know. I guess we are not to be trusted with such delicate information. We are just told that ‘they’ were doing ‘this’ and we are supposed to trust what we are told. Well, good luck with that. 
    Anyway, Trump seems to be taking a somewhat wait-n-see approach to the situation. This has the administration and the purveyors of our news in a froth, wondering why he is so soft on Russia and Putin. The media, who know everything, but are not responsible for anything, are leaping to all sorts of sinister conclusions. 
    I compared what his actions seem to be to my own experience in dealing with possibly problem people and situations. During my career, I was hired to manage several companies that were struggling. I was brought in as either the President, CEO, General Manager, or whatever the top slot in the company was called. 
    Before arriving at the assignment I was usually given a verbal analysis of the people who would be reporting directly to me. These analyses could come from the hiring entity or from the direct reports themselves.
    Considering that these companies were already in deep trouble, (that’s why I was there), and because a company’s trouble usually started with management, these analyses nearly always pointed out at least several of my future direct reports to be anywhere from simply incompetent to actually being guilty of maleficence. This information was always hearsay. 
    This is how I used the offered information. 
    I never reacted in any way until I was actually in charge of the company, and had been for at least a little while. I just tucked the information away in the back of my mind. To react to it before I could personally get acquainted with the people and the situation, would in my opinion have been irresponsible. 
    After getting acquainted with the people and assessing the situation I took appropriate action. Very seldom was the information even 50% accurate. 
    Until I had assessed the situation for myself, I treated everyone as if I had not heard anything negative. 
    How to deal with Putin if I was assuming the presidency of this country? I’d want him to think I was his buddy until I could assess the situation from inside the White House, then if he deserved it I’d lower the boom on him.

Is It, Or Isn’t It, Cold Outside 
    We have a quandary. During this time of year, where it can get extremely cold, well, below zero and such, we like to keep track of the temperature. It sounds simple. We have a thermometer out on the patio which we have no reason to believe is inaccurate. But there are times when it is hard to see, so we fall back on the reporting of the outside temperature on Lorraine’s phone, her laptop, my laptop, or my desktop. You’d think that these weather reporting websites could agree, because they surely must be getting their information from the same place. But not so. For instance, on my laptop browser home page there is a small weather screen that shows the current temperature. If I click on that screen I get a more complete view of the weather. But low and behold, these two screens can’t even agree on the outside temperature. 
    Why? I have no idea. They don’t disagree by much, but three or four degrees? Give me a break. I mean, in any locale there is usually at least one place that keeps track of the temperature, like an airport, or some other reasonably responsible entity. 
    So, who is feeding my websites the weather information? Is some huddlehunce in each location stepping outside every once in a while, tapping his twenty-year-old Walmart thermometer, and putting the results on the web? 
    Obviously, this whole situation needs more research.