Friday's Fractal Fourteen

1. There, got me a nifty shortcut icon too.
2. I call this fractal because it’s alliterative and I like the word (and the pictures), not so much because everything listed is infinitely complex, though they could be if we let them. No plans to do it again.
3. Now that the facts are out, anyone who still thinks US Airways ejecting those imams is part of some sort of war on Islam is an idiot.
4. I am so freaking annoyed by historical documentaries on History and Discovery and so on using the present tense that my kids almost can’t watch them with me anymore. It happened a LONG TIME AGO, people! McClellan does not HESITATE before Richmond, he hesitate-ED!
5. I need to lighten up about Christmas and remember the Reason for the Season is not shopping or planning parties or stressing out or stringing lights or some life-affirming mythology made up around 70AD that was a creative combination of Mithraist and Jewish beliefs but is instead a couple days off, lots of food and a bottle of Scotch. Oh, and family.
6. I never clean out the fireplace at the end of the season for having fires. I procrastinate and forget and end up cleaning it out at the beginning of the season for having fires.
7. My aunt has a shitload of almond firewood up for grabs and I don’t have time to go get any.
8. All those co-called Christians who think it was unconscionable of Mary Cheney to get pregnant piss me off. On abortion, they say it’s a child, not a choice. Well, that’s true, and guess what. It’s a child, not a symbol in your fevered paranoia of the breakdown of the so-called American family, the loving mommy-daddy part of which I’ve determined, after researching four hundred years of genealogy, is way overstated anyway.
9. Today is the grand opening of the light rail extension that goes to the Amtrak station. Woo hoo! ‘Bout time! I wanna go!
10. It was warm this morning: No ice as such on the windshield.
11. What the hell is it with parents who put four kids into Boy Scouts but are too busy with their precious real estate business to spend even two hours on a weekend helping out?
12. There is a Shi’a Muslim Cultural Center behind my house that periodically sends over the trees the most wonderful sound on Earth, that of children laughing.
13. The Kim family tragedy has hit me too. When I had small children, my biggest fear was getting stranded with them in the wilderness in winter, or trapped in a flood. Now, of course, they’re stronger swimmers and hikers than me, so no worries. But James Kim found himself in the nightmare the rest of us only feared, and did a pretty good job dealing with it. Like everyone I have my detail-oriented whys and what-ifs, but they really don’t matter now.
14. Finally, I wish for … world peace! (No, really.)