See you at January breakfast

On Sunday, Dec. 16, the Amenia Fire Company held their monthly pancake breakfast. We were pleased to have a nice crowd of 169 people in attendance to enjoy a hearty meal. 

We rely on the breakfasts to raise much-needed money for general operations and we always appreciate the support of the community. We thank everyone who attends our meals throughout the year and we hope to see you again for the next one on Sunday, Jan. 20. 

Battery power needs to be much more capable in order to change how everything works: your cell phone, a car, airplanes, drones and a host of uses just waiting for electric power to be more compact and transportable. Of course, only a fool would think that DARPA and the folks at advanced technology labs around the world have not already cracked this. But their inventions are mostly under wraps, useful only for those devices where a return on investment (ROI) is never measured.

An extremely hostile gesture toward Hispanic people on both sides of the border, President Trump’s proposed border wall is also an ineffective way of reducing unwanted migrants and goods from entering our country and a colossal waste of money. Even though the scope of the project has been scaled back, cost estimates keep increasing and Trump’s own estimates have grown from less than $10 billion dollars to a current budget demand of $25 billion; and this would only be an initial down payment.

Reading the press accolades for the late President George H.W. Bush, it was difficult to reconcile today’s “revered statesman” with the “wimp” label the media pinned on him in office.

As vice president and then president in the 1980s and early 1990s, Bush was portrayed by the press as an out-of-touch bumbler, a national joke on late-night TV and in newsrooms. White House correspondents delighted in catching Bush in gaffes and in pointing out what, in their liberal view, were his wrong-headed policy positions, which was just about all of them.

I remember when I was a very young child, every summer my family vacationed at the beach and visited a friend of my father’s who lived there. He was a fisherman delivering seafood for the local restaurants. And as soon as he saw me, he would ask the same question he had asked every summer: “Hey kid, tell me, what did you learn in the school this year?”

December is halfway over and the holidays fast approaching — never is the spirit of giving more evident than at this time of year.