It’s trou­bling, but not unrea­son­able to fear that 2025 may turn out to be as vex­ing­ly grim as the year we’ve just slogged through. My plan for off­set­ting  the depres­sion that for­bodes, is to harken the beau­ty I saw and pho­tographed in 2024, and find rays of humour in things that nor­mal­ly dri­ve me to out­bursts of pro­fane protest.

An easy tar­get is the ongo­ing inani­ty of Don­ald Trump think­ing he can annex or buy neigh­bours that fit his fantasies
.Green­land, for example.

Why on earth would peo­ple who hap­pi­ly live with ice­bergs big­ger than their house float­ing by the back door, be inter­est­ed in hav­ing him for a leader?
Cer­tain­ly they wel­come some inno­va­tions. (The Inter­net has been embraced, for example).
But in remote coastal vil­lages, the Inu­it who pre­dom­i­nate in Green­land also cling to tra­di­tion­al ways, to the point where sled dogs out­num­ber peo­ple by as much as ten to one and more.

And that’s not count­ing the one sculpt­ed by Nature in the form of a slow­ly melt­ing ice floe.Much as I like cold and snow, I’m going to take the easy way to opt out of the tech-dom­i­nat­ed soci­ety I live in — ignore and laugh at what’s not as use­ful as it pur­ports to be.Top of my list is stock mar­ket pre­dic­tions. The gnomes of finance want us to believe their self-award­ed crys­tal balls. How­ev­er, a com­par­i­son of year­ly Wall Street pre­dic­tions and actu­al mar­ket results over the last 24 years con­clud­ed that “the vari­ance between actu­al annu­al per­for­mance and the pre­dic­tion was huge — an aver­age gap of 14.2 per­cent­age points.”

My odds of pre­dict­ing when and where a loon might pop up in front of my kayak last sum­mer weren’t even on a par with that.
But try­ing to was reward­ing far beyond any­thing that can be mea­sured in dol­lar signs, so I’ll take that to the mem­o­ry bank, and look for­ward to invest­ing in doing it again next summer. 

                            AND TURN OFF THE INSUFFERABLE          

         The fret­ting over how to cov­er Trump in the White House again has already begun to pre­oc­cu­py polit­i­cal jour­nal­ism and (under­stand­ably) its prac­ti­tion­ers who need to wor­ry about being in his vin­dic­tive cross-hairs.
I don’t have an answer to or an informed opin­ion on that.
But I do have a plan for how not to be sub­sumed by it, or any oth­er news that wastes my time by ignor­ing basics, such as allow­ing grade school lev­el errors into print.
A sen­tence in the Wash­ing­ton Post is a prime exam­ple: “Just after 5 a.m. on a Fri­day morn­ing…”|On the basis that you can’t trust any­one who doesn’t under­stand redun­dan­cy on that lev­el to cogent­ly report com­plex sto­ries, I’m going to stop read­ing any sto­ry at the point such non­sense rears its head.
TV news broad­casts whose cor­re­spon­dents think they’re more impor­tant than pic­tures to tell the sto­ry, wave their hands like they’re audi­tion­ing for a hand-jive com­pe­ti­tion and do not speak gram­mat­i­cal­ly-cor­rect Eng­lish, will get the click of the remote button.

It’ll be my ver­sion of how a great blue heron deals with per­ceived intru­sions on its self-des­ig­nat­ed per­son­al space.And if my resolve fails me and I suc­cumb to the obsess-about-the-mess mind­set of 2024, I’ll fall back on the “5x5 Rule: “It’s not gonna mat­ter in five years, so don’t spend mor than five min­utes being upset about it.”
THANK YOU for read­ing pizzeysperch. from which I wish you

               HAPPY NEW YEAR

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