The Super Bowl is upon us, and this year the NFL will be using the Arabic number 50 in place of the traditional Roman numeral. But why use Arabic numerals? Is this another example of political correctness? Aren’t we having enough problems with those people? For one thing they are not Arabic numbers. The numbers we use every day, including zero, were invented by the Hindoos of Northern India a thousand years before Rome stole the idea of using letters of the alphabet for numbers from the Greeks. The Hindoo numbers and notation system we use today was brought back to Baghdad by Muslim invaders and which over time infiltrated Europe, and ultimately led to my being told by my third grade teacher, quite erroneously, that they were Arabic numbers. I feel strongly that the Super Bowl should retain its Roman numeral marking, and refuse to refer to it as Super Bowl 50, for to me it is and will always be, Super Bowl L. Nonetheless, I will watch the game, along with Cs of Ms of other people.

A Roman number sure goes well
With Super Bowls, that’s why an L
Should go with Xs and those Vs
A simple L is read with ease
But then upon the other hand
It’s strung out letters I can’t stand
What’s with a scheme that you can write
A number many ways despite
The fact that there is only one
True number when all’s said and done
XVII is 17
But you will see just what I mean
Three Vs two Is, I mean what gives?
And still today great Rome still lives
So long her numbers raise on high
When V and X and L and I
Can be lined up in numbers whole
And used to mark the Super Bowl

The actuary can tell you, statistically, when you will be called upon to release your hold on life. But then, the precise date is known only to the mirrors lining the hallways of our lives.

They say a man has measured time
Upon this blue-green Earth
A measured time that will begin
At squalling time of birth
But on reflection there is much
That each of us recalls
We see ourselves through shrouded eyes
In mirrors on the walls
That line the corridors of Time
Through which we wend our way
While knowing that the Time will come
But know not on which day
The mirrors in the corridors
Reflect what others see
Reflections that when once revealed
Remain the truth of thee
Until the measurement has run
Full course and at the last
We yield the scepter we once held
And present becomes past

Bill Clinton, campaigning in New Hampshire for his wife Hillary, drew a crowd of six people at a political event. Six. How many years ago was it that Bill Clinton was a Superstar who shone so brightly that the law did not apply to him? And yet, a dissolute life, the steady drip of stories of women, the stories of parties on an island with underage girls, and the sheer sleaziness of the Clintons’ money grabbing behavior has led to his descent into a shadow of the man whom Time once touched.

So gently does the touch of Time
Grace the Immortal Man
Mount Rushmore is a heady climb
Not many of us can
But immortality is such
That Time may see its end
And turn that very gentle touch
Into a steep descend
Into the annals of the lost
Great names and greater men
Who learn to their great bitter cost
That fame is now and then

The epic snow is over and the woods behind my house is back to normal. Beyond my kitchen window lies a narrow belt of old shade trees, much diminished in extent now, but for hundreds of years, before the tract houses went up, a natural pathway for deer and a natural habitat for smaller forest animals and birds. We still see the occasional doe and her two fawns in the Spring, and even now, as Winter closes in, we occasionally see the now grown fawns passing by, nibbling at the bark on the homes of the grey squirrels in their hollows and the year round homes of the finches who stay over rather than assay the long journey to warmer climes. In consequence, the wood is much quieter now that the ground is covered in snow than it is in Summer, but it is not entirely quiet. No, the squirrels come out to play every day, the finches talk to one another from earliest dawn to latest dusk, and at night we often hear an owl muttering something to himself, and an occasional scream as something small and reckless has ventured outside. The wood, like Nature, is never still.

The Summer denizens are mostly gone
The insect thrum has quieted and ceased
The sky still dark before the coming dawn
Awakes to birdcall, be it much decreased
The Winter sun shines dimly through the trees
Whose shadows fall haphazard on the snow
And silence reigns as temps drop to the freeze
And yet there’s life, all snug and warm below
The woods protects its fragile little ones
Who burrow ‘neath the all-embracing roots
Who last the storms and wait the Winter suns
And lay awake in fear of owlish hoots
Bird feeders line my neighbors’ backyard decks
Where squirrels fight off the birds for toothsome seeds
And through the Winter snows till Springtime becks
The tiny woods provides for all their needs
Until the Spring brings warmth and tender leaves
And insect thrum again is background sound
Where fawns still follow Mama as she weaves
Between the new-leaved trees on hallowed ground

The blizzard of the century is over, and again, dear friends, we have around the clock newscasts giving us the very latest poop on the very latest epic snow, and especially when that epic snow affects the comfort, lifestyle and work hours of the media purveyors of the fantasy of the epic snow. There is epic snow in the Donner Pass every year, but because none of the media is there to see it those yearly epic snows never happened. I looked out my kitchen window at the height of the storm and the squirrels were strangely unaffected.

As the news anchors were shrieking
Tiny heads of squirrels were peeking
Out into the whitened landscape ‘neath their trees
With the television blaring
The Northeastern states were staring
Into snowy hell where everyone will freeze
Birds were following the leaders
To the full of seed bird feeders
And a cat began meowing to come in
A small dog pushed through the drifted
Snow until the pup was lifted
By a little girl to whom the pup was kin
Yes the storm raged on the telly
As I sat and filled my belly
With hot coffee and some cookies wifey baked
Epic storms just seem to father
Epic media caused pother
By my window though you’d think the thing was faked

Bernie Sanders, at the moment, is leading Hillary in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Who’da thunk it? Bernie Sanders proudly proclaims himself a true Socialist, and though no one has ever asked him if he is a Socialist in the likes of Hitler or Stalin, I am sure he is not, though he did, however, honeymoon in the Soviet Union, so there is that. How could anyone who looks like a kindly grandfather be a Castro or Saddam Hussein Socialist? The Socialist political philosophy as espoused by such as the Korea Kims, Pol Pot, Mao (whose picture lately hung from the White House Christmas tree), Castro, Hitler, Stalin and many others, has been responsible for the murders of over one hundred million people unfortunate enough to have been born under Socialist rule. But then, Bernie would never be that kind of Socialist, would he?

A Socialist like Sanders
Has a mind that just meanders
From the Left to farthest Left as time goes on
Nothing daunted, more’s the mystery
By the sordid, murd’rous history
Of all Far Left governments since ‘fore the dawn
The Left is full of killers
Using bodies as pit fillers
Guys like Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein
With meat hooks, piano wire
It was best not to inquire
Into things the tyrant meant not to explain
Not that Bernie would use force to
Make the country change its course to
The Utopia that’s always ‘round the bend
Always gleaming in the distance
Which is why to raise resistance
Leads to tears and to a rather nasty end
Socialists don’t always murder
Just so long as he’s the herder
Of the sheep who clap and cheer his every word
But when things turn rather dicey
He’ll turn off the nicey-nicey
And the distant cries from meat hooks will be heard

Hillary Clinton, it has now been revealed by the Inspector General for Intelligence, had such highly classified documents on her home computer that were those documents to be in the hands of foreign adversaries the United States would be in danger. And of course those documents ARE now in the hands of our enemies, most notably the Chinese, which is why they were placed on her home computer and server in the first place. Ask yourself, why would the Chinese government give many millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation if they did not expect something in return? There was absolutely no reason for Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, to bypass the security protocols of her own State Department if not to make it easier for her to sell stuff to whoever was prepared to buy? The Clintons have always been for sale, and they never cared what it was they sold. One can only hope that when the FBI completes its investigation that jail time awaits this scumbag and all around her.

A scumbag is a scumbag
Even in a pink pantsuit
She always was a loathsome skag
And criminal to boot
She used a server as a ruse
To hide her Chinese graft
All thinking she would leave no clues
So clever at her craft
But now the cat’s out of the bag
Indictment now for sure
There’s nothing that, for this old hag
Some slammer time won’t cure

Unless indicted, Hillary Clinton will be the nominee for president of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton is a lying, corrupt, elderly slug of a woman. The entirety of her political life has been filled with corruption and betrayal. She is no more fit to be president of the United States than Barack Obama is fit to be president of a homeowners association. Hillary Clinton has a criminally tainted paper trail, and we remember.

We remember Whitewater
A law firm named Rose
A fortune on futures
Made just at the close
The ChiCom Red Army
Donations to Bill
And poor Mr. Foster
Face down on a hill
She danced through the nineties
A mad social whirl
A media darling
Now yesterday’s girl
A seat in the Senate
Some restaurant dead
A run for the White House
Obama instead
Department of State and
Guys yelling Hey Rube!
She blamed the attack on
A vid on YouTube
She set up her emails
For others to hack
The Chinese and Russians
She knew had her back
She now is campaigning
For hubby’s old job
Deflecting each charge with
A weave and a bob
She longs to return to
That mad White House whirl
Corrupt and a liar
Still yesterday’s girl

I spoke to my brother-in-law recently and he wondered why it was that he was beginning to feel irrelevant. I thought for a minute and said, “It’s because you’re eighty-five freakin’ years old!”

Irrelevance comes stealing like a cat
Tiptoeing oh so lightly without sound
The years slide by with silent steps so that
We realize too late that all around
Has changed and we are far behind the curve
The traffic up ahead just flashing by
We think we still have all the vim and verve
We had when young but now it makes you cry
to think that this fair world that once we ruled
A leader to our family and friends
Has turned from heated pace to limping cooled
And horrified we see how it all ends
We matter not in anything at all
We have no say in how the world is run
We sit at home and wish someone would call
And watching daytime TV is no fun
Irrelevance has come to claim its due
We sigh but really have no hard regrets
Old memories still stick to us like glue
And an irrelevant never forgets

The world seems to be in a fragile state these days, but fragility is in the eye of the beholder. Napoleon thought Mother Russia fragile, but underneath she was solid, unyielding ice. Hitler thought Britain was fragile, and she was, with Beaverbrook and others clamoring for a rapprochement with Hitler, but underneath lay the strength and steel of Churchill. And so it goes. The United States of Obama looks, to outsiders, to be fragile, but just below the surface sleeps a giant fist with a giant hammer. Let the pissants of the Jihadi world boast of destroying America. Let them brandish their fists and flap their bearded lips. Let them try it and they will not live to regret their mistake.

How fragile is this tiny stone
That circles round her sun
Far from the center, all alone
Led by Barack the One
Who boasts of his accomplishments
Such as the Arab Spring
Where all he did made just no sense
Unless he meant to bring
About the ruin of the West
And most of all of us
In furtherance now of his quest
He’s loading up the bus
And driving to a better day
When Babylon’s blue skies
Had magic carpets to survey
The world through Islam’s eyes
Yet in his dreams of faith restored
Obama surely sees
America that he abhorred
Is mightier than these