It’s the first weekend of the New Year, but, looking around, things don’t seem or look a whole lot different to me than they did a week ago. Me? I’ll be stripping the house – inside and outside – of all the Christmas remnants and getting some more house-cleaning in. January is a great month for that kind of thing.

Lots of folks like to use a new year for predicting future events. Now I’m no Jeremiah, but it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if, by this time next year, the Middle East will look a whole lot different politically than it does right now. Between a Palestinian / Israeli peace accord (which I believe the Trump administration is working hard on behind the scenes) and the inevitable collapse of the mullah’s regime in Iran, we could be on the verge of something historically ground-breaking. It wouldn’t, of course, mean an end to all the violence and turmoil over there, but the major players could look quite different than they do now.

…the sad thing is that Barack Obama had a golden chance to make all this happen eight years ago and chose to back (as he always did) Islam’s worst players and most extreme factions. Just another example of someone who I believe truly could have been one of the great presidents of all time, but he was just another arrogant leftist who surrounded himself with only like-minded people and actually believed all the glorified bullshit the mainstream media would regurgitate throughout his presidency.

…I am, however, going to go out on a limb and predict that Tiger Woods is going to get hurt again in 2019 to the point where we never see him again. Of course, that’s really a no-brainer – he had spent the better part of the past ten years hurt in one way or the other. Are you going to tell me that a complicated (albeit successful) spinal fusion operation turned his entire body into Superman? Of course not. You know what they say about tide and time – they wait for no man. Not even Tiger Woods.

R.I.P. Daryl Dragon, the “Captain” of The Captain and Tennille fame, who passed away Wednesday just a couple hours up the road in Prescott. Before he and his wife struck gold as a pop duo, Dragon played both an influential and instrumental (no pun intended) role in The Beach Boys between the years 1970 and 1972. His keyboard playing is all over the Sunflower, Surf’s Up, and Carl and the Passions – So Tough albums, and he never got credit for the many arrangements on tracks like “Don’t Go Near The Water” (he designed the song’s haunting a capella tag), “Forever” and “Cuddle Up” (Tennille can be heard singing high harmony during the middle section). It’s my favorite era in the group’s history, and Dragon had a, if not significant role, an important one in the group’s sound during that era.

This doesn’t surprise me at all. The college football season should be over and done with by now. January football belongs to the NFL. The fact the that college football can’t get finished on New Year’s Day is nothing more than corporate greed run amok – pretty much like everything else these days.

A very important article by Trevor Thomas over at The American Thinker about the virus of gender identification running amok through our culture. It’s a complicated issue for a genuine minority (I’m guessing), but in the vast majority of cases I’m guessing this is outright mental illness caused by brainwashing (culturally or parentally) and the victims exploited by the radical LGBTQ community as a wedge issue designed to make them feel good about their own neuroses and sexual hang-ups and deviancies. The fact that you have men identifying themselves as women allowed to compete in women’s sports is a sad and pathetic joke on the state of our culture, but you have powerful forces at the local, state, and federal level encouraging and seeking to legislate this kind of evil (which is what it is) and madness.

And speaking of our culture, it’s true, we have become a nation of slobs. One of the things I’ve come to hate about flying is seeing how people are dressed for air travel. I see folks dressed better at the gym! The next time you fly, take a good look at how people are dressed: lots of sandals without socks, sweats, and folks who obviously don’t care about how they are viewed by others. Which is one reason why, I believe, air travel has become such a hassle: people dress poorly and act poorly. I would sure hate to be a flight attendant these days. People that dress better act accordingly. But that genie was allowed to escape from the bottle years ago.