The last half moon mostly involved travel and visiting with friends and family. I won't go into family details here, but will note this felt like one of the best years of Fall/Winter holiday interaction in recent memory. Good spirits and overall health for almost everyone. One branch of the family tree had some sort of bug going around, but they were bouncing back well and no one else seems to have caught it.
The gap in recent posts prompts me to write a little about a meta concept concerning this blog. The idea of writing something once a week made me hesitant because of consideration of the thing people are calling the "News cycle".
Growing up, I remember my grandparents faithfully reading daily newpapers and watching the evening news every night around supper. None of the content ever resembled information I could process outside of the comics and the sports. But there was a sense of importance about the whole thing that I suspect others might get from being in a more socially religious family and going to church. The vessel becomes the thing of import, the message it is supposed to convey goes unrealized. (Eventually my apathy toward the church 'container' would give way to a deep fascination with the spiritual 'contents', but that is a subject for another entry.)
As the concept of a greater society around me grew clear enough to make sense of the content of news articles and programs, one of the first things I noticed was that it didn't really make any sense. All they ever talked about were problems happening at differing distances from my actual life, and it was clear there was effectively nothing I could do about any of it. This brought an epiphany about "news".
Start with a supposition that 'News' is information outside your immediate awareness that is of vital importance. What happens when someone pumps out 'news' periodicals on a set schedule? In humanity's recent past, Newspaper publishing created a social environment where readers on a daily basis had their minds filled with information of 'important' events outside of personal experience, elevated to the sphere if 'vitalness' by definition of it being published. But this information was being produced by journalists who received pay based primarily on their ability to string together enough words legibly to fill up the periodical. It was the size and frequency of a newspaper that dictated 'newsworthy' content, the actual subject matter became more of a side product as time moved on.
The same applied to a radio announcer filling a news slot, or the TV news anchor. This gave rise to McLuhan formulating the phrase "the medium is the message". Something is "News" because it is presented by media, not necessarily because it has any convincing importance or merit. Anyone attempting to keep close tabs of the news cycle as it turns over is slowly robbed of the ability to determine the relevance of any information they are exposed to.
So, I see this as a disastrous element of modern society and it was one concern I had when deciding to post 'news' of activity here. I plan to make more focused entries over the next few months but staying on a schedule does not seem like a strong pull right now. Perhaps once the weather makes it more favourable to be outside at night, the pull of the moon's schedule will bring more of a flow to regular publication...
