It is 12/13/14 if you do dates the American way. That won’t happen again until 01/02/03 in the next century, 89 years from now. I can’t even imagine what the world will be like 89 years from now. Certainly I won’t be here to see it but children born today will probably be around. Life expectancy is on the rise in most countries and in the 22nd Century, 90 may be the new sixty. Who knows?
I went to a screening of the first episode of Downton Abbey last week in New York. It was set in 1924. The Earl and Countess of Grantham are celebrating their 34th wedding anniversary. One of the characters remarked that if she got married right then, she would be celebrating her 34th wedding anniversary in 1958.
It was a jarring thought because the world of 1958 was radically different from the world of 1924. In between there had been the Great Depression and World War II, forever changing the world. The atom bomb had been dropped; half of Europe was shut up behind the Iron Curtain. Germany had been pared down and cut apart into East and West. The Soviets had pierced space with Sputnik. We were off on the race to the moon.
What a difference a few decades can make.
Lunching today at the Red Dot in Hudson, I was asked by someone if I knew where the Mimosa had come from? So I did what we all do today when faced with a question for which we don’t have an immediate answer – I googled it. The Mimosa apparently was the invention of the bartender Frank Meier at the Ritz Hotel in Paris in 1925. Thank you, Google. Thank you, Wikipedia.
As I was finishing my omelet, I decided that I would serve asparagus soup tomorrow for dinner. Not knowing what was needed, I googled asparagus soup, found a recipe that I liked and then made a list of ingredients on the notes section of my iPhone and went off to the Price Chopper for the ingredients.
Amazing. Having been the first boy on my block to have a car phone and one of the first to have a cell phone and one of the first to upgrade to a smart phone, I am dazzled by how far we have come since that big black box was installed in the trunk of my car.
I don’t take it completely for granted but I am sure anyone under twenty can’t imagine a world before these devices. If they really thought about it, I am sure I would seem quaint, an antique from another world. Could someone actually have lived at a time when you couldn’t put the world in your pocket?
There’s far more computing power in my little iPhone than there was on the first space shuttle. It’s boggling for me to think about.
And that’s only in thirty years, it having been early 1984 when I got both my first Mac and my car phone. It’ll be interesting to see what the next thirty years will bring, not to mention the next 89 when, if we’re still using the American style of dating, it will be 01/02/03.


Letter From New York 12 14 14 A grey and gloomy day on the road to Christmas
December 14, 2014The light is beginning to fade here in the Hudson Valley; it has been a painfully grey day. Not once has been there a burst of sunlight to shatter the exterior bleakness. Christmas carols are playing and they sound dirge-like against this shadowy day. It has been a day to cuddle inside and to read, reflect and do interior things.
I am having friends for dinner so started the day making fresh asparagus soup and prepping things for dinner. When I finish writing this, I will move on to the kitchen and start the meal.
Today, I also started doing Christmas cards, a few, adding personal notes to folks I have not seen for a long time and for who Christmas is seemingly our sole touch point.
A Climate Treaty has been signed in Lima though it seems that while all agree few are enthused. Scientists, I read, feel it falls far short of the actions needed to curtail climate change while some nations feel it costs them too much.
Cheney, to no one’s great surprise, is highly critical of the Senate “Torture” Report. Jeb Bush is giving some indications he is considering a 2016 run for the Presidency. Certainly Rick Perry is prepping for the race. He’s getting some coaching and has declared that the run for the Presidency is NOT an IQ test.
The good news/bad news story of oil continues. It slipped beneath $60.00 a barrel, which caused prices up here to drop to under $3.00 a gallon but which also shaved 350 points off the Dow on Friday, making for a scary Wall Street ride.
Some folks are saying it could go down to $40.00 a barrel, which would be very bad for the shale oil industry in North Dakota. It only makes money at about $60.00 a barrel. There are those who speculate that the Saudis are letting the price of a barrel of oil fall so as to get rid of the pesky shale oil producers here in America. After years of declining crude production in the US, the shale oil boom has made us something like the third largest oil producer in the world.
It’s certainly causing some hurt for Mr. Putin; Russia depends on its oil sales. The ruble has been crashing. Must seem like a grey day to him as well. Put Venezuela in that camp as well, hurting badly with the fall in prices. Same with Nigeria. Same with a few other countries, too.
Regardless of what is happening in the oil realm, all over the world we are moving toward Christmas.
It seems some Americans are eschewing an expensive Christmas and moving back toward simpler times with less extravagant celebrations of the Holiday. It will be interesting to see how this holiday shopping season works out in the end. Up? Down? We’ll know the figures right after Christmas.
On this grey day, Newtown is marking the second anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings with a private ceremony and quiet reflection. It is a town where the wounds have yet to heal and may never heal.
In another gruesome story, hundreds attended the funeral of Jessica Chambers, a Mississippi teenager who was doused with an accelerant and burned alive on the side of a road.
The mind boggles at the act while the heart revolts at the cruelty.
A reward fund has risen to $11,000 for information leading to her killer.
It is stories like that which darken my day and make me feel as grey and gloomy as the weather.
Tags: Cheney, Christmas, Climate Treaty, Jeb Bush, Jessica Chambers, Lima, Mathew Tombers, Newtown, Oil prices, Sandy Hook
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