![\"\"](\"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/crouton_ditalini_2.jpg\" "\\"crouton_ditalini_2\\"")
Valentine’s Day, our 45th. Should be old hat by now, right?\u00a0 Not to mention that V-Day’s one of those “Hallmark holidays,” concocted and forced upon us by corporate overlords hoping to encourage a small off-season spike in flower and chocolate sales.\u00a0 So you’d think I could be forgiven for forgetting . . . but I am a wiser man than that.<\/p>\n
I woke up thinking I’d make dinner tonight . . . scallopini al limone<\/a> with fettuccini alfredo<\/a> and saut\u00e9ed broccolini<\/a> . . . but then remembered it’s Monday.\u00a0 We head downtown every Monday evening for a walk with friends.\u00a0 By the time we’re done it’s too late to cook, so we pick up takeout on the way home.\u00a0 Dinner tomorrow, I guess.<\/p>\n We rode our bicycles Saturday morning, slogged through a long hash trail<\/a> Saturday afternoon, then drove down to Green Valley for yet another hash trail<\/a> Sunday morning.\u00a0 We may not walk vigorously tonight, but we will force ourselves to shuffle along.\u00a0 I suppose we could even hold hands, this being V-Day and all.<\/p>\n But enough with the mushy stuff.\u00a0 What else is going on?<\/p>\n The other night Rachel Maddow<\/a> compared the departure of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which I thought hyperbolic.\u00a0 The Berlin Wall was a pivot point of the Cold War, a fundamental East\/West issue affecting the nations of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and though it fell two years before the Soviet Union finally gave up the ghost, it truly signaled the end of an era.\u00a0 What does it signal when one autocratic leader of a Middle Eastern nation turns things over to a new set of autocratic leaders?<\/p>\n We don’t know yet, and neither do the Egyptian people.\u00a0 Though if I were one of them, my thoughts would be running in this direction: “He’s gone!\u00a0 Yay!\u00a0 The army’s in charge!\u00a0 Yay!\u00a0 Yay!\u00a0 The army.\u00a0 Heh, heh . . . the army . . . heh . . . oh shit.”\u00a0 Interesting times.<\/p>\n Interesting times at Twitter, too, now featuring “sponsored Tweets<\/a>.”\u00a0 For those of you who do not Tweet, here’s a typical Twitter post, from the film critic Roger Ebert:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/ebert-tweet_1.jpg\" "\\"ebert-tweet_1\\"")
And here’s a sponsored Tweet, also from Roger Ebert:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/ebert-tweet_2.jpg\" "\\"ebert-tweet_2\\"")
Jesus Christ, Ebert, how could you possibly think your followers would go along with shit like this?\u00a0 Did you need the money?\u00a0 Really?<\/p>\n