All about me

So long, iTunes, hello Amazon:

Why did it suddenly become "pick on cats" season? According to a Mother Jones article, cats are helping destroy the Earth.

Yes, please, and amen:

Tom Brady, Peyton Manning and Drew Brees say "it is time" for NFL owners and players to wrap up negotiations on a deal to end the league's lockout.

We make it a point to print guest columns by people who disagree with us. That's a standard newspaper practice, but sometimes I think we go too far, especially after we run one of Ball State University professor emeritus B.J. Pascal's columns. Last night, he was wondering if voters would be "snookered again" to vote "against their self-interest" in 2012. Like they were when they bought into Barack Obama's empty rhetoric in 2008?

Ayieeee! If I say it's as hot as a Texas summer, take heed. I know whereof I speak.

Anyway, glad to be back and blah, blah, blah.

Often on vacation, I try to completely ignore the news, as a palliative for my workday immersion in it. But this time, I decided to pay modest attention to the reported events of the day, the way most people do. That way, I could catch the highlights without having to obsess over the small stuff. So, the news that broke through my short attention span in Texas:

"Balls of dough are heated and shot out of a 'puffing gun' at hundreds of miles and hour." Yum, right? Well, yeah, of course:

The answer, of course, is Cheerios.

The iconic cereal, known by its distinctive yellow box, is 70 years old this year and still a force on the breakfast cereal market. One out of every eight boxes of cereal to leave the shelf in America carries the Cheerios name.

Maybe I shouldn't tempt fate by mentioning it, but there actually seem to be fewer violations in my neighborhood this year:

Fort Wayne police have received more than 100 complaints recently about people setting off fireworks. That's in violation of a city ordinance that prohibits from ireworks being set off more than five days before the fourth of July.

Sigh:

The nation's largest newspaper publisher is laying off another 700 employees to cope with an unrelenting advertising slump.

Gannett, the owner of USA Today and more than 80 other daily U.S. newspapers, hoped to complete the cuts Tuesday. The layoffs are occurring at most Gannett newspapers but not at USA Today.

Will the last person to leave the profession please turn out the lights?

I feel their pain:

Barack Obama's approval rating among self-identified liberal Democrats consistently hovers in the 90-percent range, but those numbers conceal reservations that bode poorly for his 2012 reelection campaign's ability to raise small-dollar donations and marshal the type of grassroots army that helped carry him to victory in 2008.

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