My thoughts for December 28, 2014

Where did it all go so fast; 2014 that is?  It was just January, now it’s the end of the year.  Many events have taken place.  We have lost a lot of good people, and football has been as exciting as ever.  Just today my beloved Seattle Seahawks beat the Saint Louis Rams in an exciting game.  Did my ole heart a lot of good. 

Some memorable events for the year were the loss of Malaysia Flight 370, enroute from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, disappearing while flying over the Gulf of Thailand.  To date, not a trace of that ill-fated flight has been found.  Just today we learned of another Asian carrier, flight QZ8501, and it has disappeared in the same area.  Kind’ve spooky, isn’t it?

Also in March, Russia annexed Crimea and occupied the eastern part of the Ukraine.  They also succeeded in shooting down a Malaysian airplane that was enroute to Southeast Asia.   As the year draws to a close, the Russians are still in Eastern Ukraine and appear to not be intent on leaving.  Personally, I wish the U.S. would stay out of it.  During the Cold War that was the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence and nobody messed with it.  I feel we live in a more dangerous time than was the Cold War because today we keep meddling everywhere.

On a positive note, the Rosetta spacecraft’s Philae landed on a distant comet.  The landing itself was reminiscent of our landing a man on the moon back in the Sixties.  Only this time the target was much smaller and far more distant, about 306,900,000 miles from earth. Yikes, it takes an electronic signal traveling at the speed of light about twenty-seven minutes to reach the spacecraft.  Whoa, Baby!

We lost some great people in 2014, notables such as Robin William and outstanding actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Both were men of distinction in their field, both of whom I enjoyed.

And speaking of the film industry, I credit Sony Pictures with the greatest illusion of the film industry’s history; the so-called hacking of Sony’s computers because of a lousy movie entitled, The Interview.  I’m not sure what exactly happened, none of us probably will ever  know, but I don’t believe for one second that it wasn’t a bunch of distorted claims to build interest in a movie that would have otherwise flopped.  What amazed me more was our President got caught up in the superlatives of a threat to our freedom of speech.  Give me a break, Sony did all this hype to sell a movie to the public that isn’t worth the cost of the film it used.  Where the hell is integrity and character these days? 

Good-bye 2014, may we all do better in 2015, see you all next year.