Does Absence Make the Blog Grow Fonder ... Of?

Took the red eye out of SFO at 12:30 a.m. on Christmas Eve so that I could spend Christmas Day with my lady wife in Winter Haven, Florida, where she was tending her 95-1/2 year old mom so that the sister who regularly tends Jackie (Moms) Landrith could spend Xmas in Texas with *her* family.

When you have an aged P for whom you have some responsibility, life can become a game of musical walkers. I dumped my aged P with my younger sister and have never looked back. Well, that's a little melodramatic. Mother insisted that it was life in the trailer home in Georgia or no life at all, and finally my older sister and I got out of her way and let her move down to Tobacco Road.

But let's talk about Florida: The middle of winter, and it was still too hot to sleep. Scanned the AM dial and got nothing but preachers and right-wing talk show hosts, one of whom was ranting about Lenin and international communism. That game is over, baby. Send in today for your Osama Bin Laden kit.

Oh, there was one exception to the right-wing litany. I did hit some sort of morning talk show from (I think) Orlando that consisted of two first-name-only guys filling the air with talk about beauty contestants in some local bar making out, apparently sans underwear. Great, lunatics and vulgarians and nothing in between. The only NPR station played nothing but classical music, which in that particular context struck me as a cultural anesthetic.