keeping my toga clean in the current bad days

One day into winter so far.  Not so bad eh?  The days will be getting longer.  Sun is rising here at 7:15 which is pretty late.  Surely it's rising even later in Cheboygan two or three hundred miles north of here, and when I looked it up on the Yahoo machine (5 degrees warmer than Chicago, what is this shit?), sure enough the sun wasn't rising until 8:16.  That seemed later than I though it would and then I remembered that Michigan is in another time zone.  But wait a minute, correcting for that would give Cheboygan the same time as Chicago.  But wait a minute, Cheyboygan is not only north of Chicago, but east as well so that probably equalizes the time of the sunrises.

When I lived in Texa, I was a little disappointed that here I was in the sunny south and yet in the summer sunsets were earlier than in Chicago.  I guess it makes sense, the closer you are to the equator the less variance between summer and winter.  Still doesn't seem quite right with the tilt of the axis, and here I am tempted to get a turnip out of the fridge (should turnips be kept in the fridge?) and draw a circle around its equator and lead it in a circle around my desk lamp.  Oh and then I can take that ping pong ball and have it circle around the turnip and then I can do lunar and solar eclipses. I can make a whole day of it.

But I won't.  I will take time out to remind my colleagues that there will be a total eclipse of the sun on August 16th.  Lucky for me my friend Ruby Doo lives in St Joseph Mo, right on the line of the eclipse, so I'll see the first such event in my life.


I assume Old Dog is referring to the current New Yorker where there is a section where people talk about their idols or something like that, and one of them mentions a stoic philosopher, back in the days when it was a pretty cool thing to be.  I'm sure it's more complicated than that but my take on the stoics is that they realize they can't control all the bad shit going on in the world, so what they do is control themselves.  They set up their standards and they rigidly hold to them come hell or high water.  They face with equanimity the fleeting fortunes and misfortunes of life, not seduced by fleshy pleasures nor dismayed by pain and privation, keeping their eyes ever on their own unsullied adherence to their principles.

They sound a lot like Christians, if you substitute the Laws of God for personal standards, and indeed many of them became Christians and many Christians became stoics.  That's Ken's Klassic Komics version of it.  More dedicated scholars may want to consult the wiki.

Myself I have never been to crazy about the stoics.  It seems like here they are walking through the bloody mess of the world and all they are interested in is keeping the hems of their damn togas clean.  I think they should be more involved.  I should've been more involved.  I should've manned phones for the big girl on election day, a least slipped her a Jackson or two.  Ah you know, I knew the dems had their faults, but I saw them overall as a force for good, and now we are totally defeated while the forces of evil soar across the bloody sky.  Maybe I should reread that New Yorker article.