I was at the Hutchinson Center branch of the University of Maine last week and I urgently wanted to keep up with the news in the Mideast. I had on my person my cell phone and my iPod touch which is normally full of breaking news items from a wealth of sources, including pictures and live video. But the wifi went down for a while at the facility (and it's normally unavailable in some parts of the building) so I was dark except for the news I heard to and from lunch on the car radio.

I would have been better off packing one of my little AM-FM radios.

Sometimes the lowest tech is the best.

Chocolate

The best day of the year to buy chocolate is the day after Valentine's Day. Every establishment that sold fine holiday boxed chocolates will have fresh stock at half price or less.

Chocolate does go on sale on other occasions, however, it is usually not fresh at that point. The peak freshness of chocolate doesn't last long. Day after Valentine chocolate is almost always fresh.

Morning Joe on MSNBC is the smartest weekday show on TV. Worthy of the crack of dawn time slot. The View used to be the smartest weekday show on TV, but not any more. With each of the hosts having obviously more compelling professional interests, they've gone totally daytime.

The Situation Room on CNN is a contender, but whenever Wolf Blitzer takes a day off they put a cupcake (intended as a gender neutral disparagement) in the anchor seat. Blitzer is one of the best cable TV journos, and does news, news, without a lot of biased blather. Occasionally his attitude betrays his personal leanings, but in these days of yappity dog broadcast journalism, that puts him high on the Russert scale.

On weekends, it's still Meet The Press. I like Fareed Zakaria GPS for a smart TV show but Fareed is entirely too smug. He's condescending, who needs that? Christine Amanpour is a great journalist but doesn't do This Week very well, it's just not a good fit. She shined, however, with her coverage of the Egyptian revolution, but the Mideast is her beat. For the normal news week she's just not incisive enough.

Update: I apologize for that cupcake remark. After a couple of days, Candy Crowley filled in and she's no cupcake.

I also admire the Andrea Mitchell show on MSNBC, but it comes at an awkward time of the day so I don't often catch it.

I wrote the previous post on Egypt's populist uprising before violence broke out, but that violence, by pro-Mubarak thugs trying to provoke a fiasco, failed. The protests remained peaceful through even Mubarak announcing yesterday that he wouldn't resign. But by today, he finally got it; he was done, stick a fork in it.

Sweet: Swiss banks are freezing any assets they can ascribe to him. While his country struggled, he looted the treasury and collected billions in corruption. But no matter how his government deprived his people, some managed to get educated, to get on the internet and to organize a successful revolution on Facebook. The second millennium has shown it's colors.

I was so happy to be home and watching TV when it happened. I feel so fortunate to have watched Tahrir Square in Cairo erupt in celebration and triumph. We heard they were dancing in the streets of Alexandria. I cried and cried to see such a vehement victory of peace and persistence over a 30 year old autocrat and his corrupt regime.

By now everyone has seen it. Though, curiously, and what a surprise, Xinhua, the state run media of China, does not mention the 18 day protest when it reports the resignation of Mubarak. They have nothing to worry about. Cairo is not Beijing. But the mentality of the Chinese leadership has not caught up with the world they're emerging into.

However, in the rest of the Mideast, tyrants must be nervous tonight. And for good reason.

It's phenomenal what the Egyptian people have done peacefully and without the electronic connectivity that their tottering government has deprived them of. Even though the repercussions of the Egyptian uprising are unsettling, particularly in the case of Israel's security, it's a phenomenon that is hard not to admire and support. You go, Egypt! Claim your destiny!

I am reminded of being a little girl in school and learning about the Hungarian student uprising, which was brutally obliterated by the Soviet Union. The teaching point, as was to be expected in the cold war era, was how fearsome the Soviet Union was and how vigilant we must be not to fall under their domineering power. But that wasn't my nightmare, somehow. All I could think of was: "Those kids! What about those kids? What happened to them?" It was a defining moment in my sense of my world and it informed how my politics and sensibilities developed.

I believe and hope that all despots are soberly reconsidering their citizenry tonight, reconsidering them with deep apprehension.

I understand why President Obama and Secretary Clinton have to tread carefully and I don't castigate their efforts to maintain as realistic a diplomatic position as possible. This is not "our" fight, but it will affect us significantly, however it turns out. It is mortifying to read the "Made in USA" label on the tear gas canisters, a picture frequently broadcast. We made our deal with the devil, no doubt about it and at the time it was worth what we got -- a relationship with a strong Mideast ally that had a peace treaty with Israel. But on the upside, today Google made available Talk to Tweet technology that it developed over the weekend (!) to provide workaround connectivity to the Egyptian people as they stand united for a different leader and a better future.

You go, Egypt! Way to shake things up. If I have to pay a lot more for gas and heating fuel because of it, so be it. You're worth it.

Wash and save the lightweight plastic bags with holes in them that grapes (and other small fruits like cherries) come in. They are ideal for keeping mushrooms in the refrigerator.

Mushrooms should immediately removed from the plastic sealed containers they come in. They'll get slimy in there pretty quick. Re-use the perforated grape bags and they'll stay fresh at least twice as long.

Keith Olberman, one of the yappy dogs of MSNBC, has left the network for unspecified reasons. It was the talk of the industry today. He was the highest rated newspinionator on MSNBC, and one that may have set the windbaggy, highly partisan tone there. MSNBC, with Olberman, became a left wing counterpart to the predominantly mega-right wing Fox "news" organization that has been eating the ratings lunch for quite a while. It was probably a competitive, rather than a qualitative attitudinal morph and it did enliven the popularity, somewhat, of the sagging part-time cable "news" station.

Well, well, well. And I mean that. There was no denying Olberman's intelligence and perspicacity, but lo, he'd become just another wingnut. A wingnut is a wingnut regardless of political leanings, though it's tough to ignore that the right is so much more successful at it.

And why might that be? Is it perhaps because leftier thinking people (theoretically) place more value on a balance, fairness and inclusiveness? The trend, nay, the faddish mania of hyperbolating news and political posturing is something I've been fulminating about for a while. And I wonder if we're seeing a crack in the facade right now with Olberman representing the first fissure.

In the aftermath of shock and agony following the tragic shootings in Tucson, Arizona, pundittoheads wondered if the rampant incivility of political discourse set the stage for the attempted assassination of a Congressperson resulting in many deaths, including a 9 year old. Was it -- reaching for the low hanging fruit -- Sarah Palin's firearm metaphors for political action? Should it open another discussion of gun control? Attention K-Mart shoppers: Is there another scapegoat available?

It became quickly apparent that none of the above were relevant to that random and horriffic act by a mentally ill person in need of medication and treatment but it did open discussions anyway. As if. There is measurable response, at least for the time being, in politics. Not for any moral reason, mind you, but because it was one of their own that was shot and they all felt vulnerable. There is nothing, as any good sci-fi B movie will prove, like shared vulnerability to pull opposing factions together.

While I pillory MSNBC for their yappity dog approach to newspinion, they also do have the very best news discussion show on the air anywhere, Morning Joe. And it was Joe Scarborough of Morning Joe, the best newspolitic and culture program on TV, who said out loud that so many earned so much money by creating hysteria out of news and politics that it probably wouldn't recede easily. I'll wax admiringly about Morning Joe and Scarborough himself another time, but he certainly made that embarrassing call more clearly than anyone else in broadcasting would dare to.

I'm as glad Olberman is off the air, albeit voluntarily, as I am that Rick Sanchez, an apoplectic clown occupying an ethnic slot on CNN, got kicked off. (Joe Scarboro told us last week that the only reason Morning Joe was on the air was because Imus --suddenly-- got kicked off MSNBC for racist and sexist bombast and they needed to fill the time slot.)

And this bit we're hearing about Republicans and Democrats sitting together at the SOTU tomorrow night is a nice touch. I'm not naive enough to think that the gasbaggers have all realized that fulmination is not the best discourse to exercise. The best I can hope for is that, like any oversaturated media convention, it's going out of style.

Predictions are that grocery prices are going up, which seams credible. Costs have gone up for farmers, distributors and packagers and commodity prices on the spot markets have risen.

Your grocery bills could go down if you eat out of your cupboard for one week out of the 4.3 (avg) weeks in a month.

Buy only proteins and produce and then, for the rest of the week, supplement that with the contents of your cupboard.

Eat the canned and packaged foods, the pastas, the frozen items, the rice, the soup, you get the idea.

And, if you can deal with it, work from the back of the shelves to the front to make space for fresher stuff. You'll discover food you forgot about which you must like, or you wouldn't have bought it in the first palce. Not everything has an indefinite shelf life.

That'll trim the market total nicely, and neaten your cabinetry as a side benefit.

The local public radio station, MPBN was playing classical music by artists that died in 2010 this morning. I so enjoy creative programming ideas and take a break from playing tracks for those rare stations/programs that feature such a true love for recorded music. Amongst them is Highway 61, all Dylan hour on WERU (streams live Fridays) and KCSM jazz station from the Bay Area and of course WOZ, New Orleans.

It got me to thinking that in the dawn of time of humankind's journey of expression, paintings and sculpture and writings were so precious because they could survive the originator and allow subsequent generations to reach back in time and experience the perceptions of their progenitors. How the nature of inspiration must have changed. But it was not until the last century, of which I inhabited more than half, that audio recording could provide the same benefit for music. And so, even in that mere speck of preserved history, we have such an amazing body of music to experience. I wonder if that is why I, for as long as I can remember, have cherished my radio, recordings, and the extraordinary humans who have given this gift to us.

Happy New Year! I say a heartfelt so long to 2010 and don't let the door hit you on the ass as you go out. And to you who've endured it, don't forget to cherish what we have in such enduring abundance.

Don't pay good money for flavored coffee. It's just second-rate coffee disguised with flavorings. If you like your good coffee flavored, add some cinnamon or cocoa or vanilla (or all of the above) yourself.

Washed all the snow away! Phooey! But it's so warm, I can wear my leggings by themselves.

The birds are (bottom) chickadee (common, the state bird of Maine) and the one above is, I think, a kind of finch known as a siskin, an olive morph, which is not very common.

There has never been a better time to buy a laptop than now. Prices are plummeting as the laptop/netbook market exhibits apprehension that the tablets, novelty of the year, are going to eat their lunch. This is a very active season for all consumer tech. Maybe you're giving or getting one or more new tech toys yourself. I hope so. What a fantastic array of gadgets there is to choose from!

As we approach the giftiness and big consumer technology discounts of late December a word of (very) hard won caution: Do not, if you can help it, acquire more than one new piece of technology at a time. Stabilize one before adding another. There is a reasonable expectation of downtime installing/activating/configuring any new piece of technology. If you put more than one piece of hardware or software into your constellation of personal technology at a time, and something goes glitchooie, it's a much harder job to figure out who the culprit is without uninstalling everything and starting all over. Not a fun proposition when your patience needle hits the red zone. (I love Laura Nyro's line "I've got a lot of patience, baby; that's a lot of patience to lose")

Hardware comes with software and software occasionally comes with hardware conflicts. You can usually work it all out with enough fiddling. But if you need more than one tech support call every other day, it's just too much.

I've known a lot of tech support people in my time. Treat them well, it's hard on them too.

Free Therapy:

If you walk with a spring in your step, it works every muscle in your body, gives your heart beats a boost and gives your mind a lift after a while too. And you look instantly younger.

Jauntily go.

My late mom made this Menorah. If you look carefully, you can see her name, Faye. She is my candle in the dark.

Now isn't this a revolting development? Documents released by Wikileaks uncover some rather awkward communiques between diplomats and their government contacts. You've heard the same news that I have, so I won't reiterate, but if this was really done in the name of war protest, all it does is huck gumballs into the the best avenue for averting war, namely diplomacy.

This speaks most unwelcome volumes about the security of such documents. Some puke just downloaded them and walked off a military installation with the goods in his pocket.

I believe officials who claim this could put people serving on our behalf overseas in danger. I fond nothing heroic or commendable about it at all. If the Army Private alleged to have been the source of this avalanche of documents is convicted, I hope they throw the book at him. Actually, I hope they hang him by his balls.

I'm not smart enough to be a pessimist. What's wrong with all this theorizing and speculating is that there are no "ordinary Americans."

For: jazz, pizza, tech, mousetraps, my kid, my grandkid, my daughter-in law, dance, romance, Louis Armstrong, jiaodzi, saffron, wireless, Belfast, Bolinas, New York, L.A., Roma, Beijing, Amsterdam, Elkins, Big Sur, Boston, passion, inspiration, nuthatches, cinema, photographs, string theory, seashells, prime rib, lobster, tidepools at low tide, hardbacks, e-books, seasons, seafood, black sticky rice, the typewriters I've used, gold chains, garnets, sunsets, Scotch rocks, Stevie Winwood, Stevie Wonder, Little Stevie, lingering longings, karma, Milky Way Midnight, meteor showers, kisses, wildflowers, kartuffle, kerfuffle, boots on the ground, fresh roadted coffee, firesides and you.