Random thoughts from a fatigued place.

Random Monday thoughts, some used already at other portals.

With much work to do yesterday, I listened a bit to the Super Bowl, watched a handful of the ads, and viewed both the halftime show and highlights of the Who on DVD.

Conclusions: Any coach who begins the second half with an onside kick deserves to win even if I was indifferent to the ultimate outcome. The commercials were uniformly crass and insulting to persons of average intelligence, which is to say that I imagine the bulk of America wailed in delight. And, strangely, while I fully expected to find nothing of value in the nostalgic halftime medley, the old clips of the Who failed to inspire me, too. All of it, from hype through game and the NFL's calculated timidity in entertainment options, strikes me as past-date, old hat and too predictable even for Pavlov's dog to salivate.

With crusty bile, tea parties and Alaskan non-entities making the headlines, I just find it noteworthy when one's definition of injustice extends no further than a calculation of his tax bill.

Beyond the spite perpetually dispensed by Dan Coffey, Steve Price and their disaffected coterie of failed flat-earther birthers, can anyone deny that the food, dining and entertainment district currently emerging downtown is worthy of pride, patronage and positive thinking?

Or, that in its infancy, it is garnering an unprecedented level of media attention in Louisville, as well as achieving the previously unthinkable by convincing native New Albanians that we can be a “possibility city,” too? Given our recent past, it's cataclysmic.

What ever happened to that racist antique dealer? Has the rudderless local Democratic party elevated him to chairman yet?

I might be able to abide abject cluelessness if it were not so often deployed as fertilizer for intolerance and cruelty. As a species, we humans have short lives in the overall context of Earth's span. It should make us humble, but instead, it moves us to wave flags, hate, embrace stupidity and dispense religious hokum as an excuse. Your Bible tells you that it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve? Fine. Read your Bible, and leave me out of it. It's your God, not mine.

Thinking -- what a concept. That's why it isn't fashionable.

Quite unexpectedly, I've warmed to the book that we're reading in our reading circle, samizdat. It's called "Annals of the Former World," written by John McPhee," and might be described as an explanation of geology in layman's terms. I'm profoundly non-scientific, but the discussions of deep time, plate tectonics and other vivid refutations of creationism have been fascinating.

Apologies for having so little time to write here of late. To be honest, the bits I consider best go toward my columns, and after the usual daily NABC propaganda, there are not always prime cuts left over for posting here. Couple that with Bluegill's commitments, and you can see how much we need IAm Hoosier to step up to the plate ...