Today is Sunday, November 12 and there are only 43 days until Christmas.  Get your lists to me soon or you will be out of luck (you probably will be anyway, but you can still take your shot).  Today we remember the birthdays of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sun Yat-sen and Nadia Comaneci.  On this day in 324 BC it was the origin of the Era of Alexander, in 1910 the first movie stunt: a man jumped into the Hudson River from a burning balloon, was performed and in 1954 Ellis Island the immigration station in NY Harbor closed.  In Austria it is Republic Day, in Bermuda it is Remembrance Day and in the US it is National Pizza with the Works Except Anchovies Day and National Chicken Soup for the Soul Day.

I don’t have a lot to discuss this week.  It has been slow and I have not been out a lot.  When I was out I saw stuff, but it is the same foolishness I have seen a number of times and I don’t want to continue to harp on the same things all the time.  You know the stuff – bad drivers, rude people in stores, people doing dumb things, people who need help dressing themselves, stupid commercials, etc.  I feel like giving all that a break.  If you really need that kind of thing, you can review previous postings.

There are a couple things I would like to briefly touch on, so let’s do that now.  When I am doing any kind of work around the house I like to have music on.  I am hooked into one of those music services on my IPad and I like the music I can get through them.  What bothers me is that every so often I notice that the music is not playing.  My immediate reaction is that there is something wrong with my pad.  I go to see if it needs a charge or something and see that the music has stopped playing and there is a message on the screen that asks if I am still listening.  Now I have to wake the pad up and then touch the prompt that says I am still listening.

My question is what difference does it make to them if I am actually listening or not?  They can continue to play the music and run the goofy commercials whether I am actively hearing them or not.  Why is it necessary for me to stop what I am doing to get them to continue offering the service they are giving anyway?  Sometimes I am in the middle of cooking and now have to stop, wash my hands and let them know I am still listening.  I wish there was a way I could signal them and ask if they are still playing music.

While watching TV the other day I heard a commercial for a store that was having a sale on outer wear.  I began to wonder why they don’t refer to clothing worn under that outer wear as inner wear.  Why do we have outer wear and underwear but not inner or over wear?  For that matter why don’t they just sell coats and jackets?  What makes outer wear different from a coat?  I sometimes wonder if I am the only one who thinks about these things.  Obviously the people writing the commercials don’t.  I know, I said I wasn’t going to get into stupid commercials, but it is kind of hard to avoid them.  Anyway, that was just something I wondered about.

One other thing that concerns me is our inability to correctly pronounce words.  I have talked about this in the past, but it came up again recently with all the talk about Vetrins Day.  The word is Veterans.  Three syllables:  vet – er – ans.  How hard is that?  I have a hard time understanding how someone can look at a word like veteran and pronounce it vetrin.  Of course I have a hard time understanding a lot of things that I see and hear.  This just happens to be my current peeve.

Yes, peeve is a word.  It means a cause of annoyance.  It is not a pet peeve because I have a number of peeves and don’t want to single one out as a pet.  That would just be showing favoritism and make the other peeves jealous.  So, as I said, in an effort to avoid repetition, I decided not to rehash many of my peeves this week.  I am sure you understand.

This week our fact tells us that 45% of people use mouthwash everyday.  I am sure we can easily identify the ones who do not.  I cannot help but wonder if this is an either/or thing – either they do or they don’t.  The fact specifies that they use it everyday.  Of the remaining 55%, are there some who don’t use it at all and some who use it every other day or every couple days or only when they have a date or special meeting with the boss?  I wish they would provide more detail with this kind of thing.