Gingko Gender

 Sunday's weather is a repeat of yesterday's weather, and it will carry on for the rest of the week and maybe into the following week.  I'm reading that the current weather patterns are the result of El Nino, that could be.  With climate change, El Nino may become more of a presence, rather than showing up every few years to bring warm weather to the east coast.

Retail was slow yesterday.  When sales are down on a weekend management wants to blame sports.  Yesterday Penn State played, so everybody stayed home, however the pattern of lower sales doesn't only happen during football season.  During the summer they blamed it on Phillies baseball.  The truth is that they're trying to look for a rational explanation.  The fact that some retailers might have priced themselves out of competition in their desperate search for that 5% growth is never going to occur to them, mostly because upper management is conservative... and, how could conservatives ever be wrong?

I do get to work today.  I will let you know if it's slow or not.

This morning, I went out and took a pic looking up through my gingko.  The leaves are turning yellow fast.  Soon they'll fall, all at once.  Seriously.  It takes an hour or so, but they all fall at one time. It's as though it's shrugging off a summer coat that's no longer stylish.  Oh, and actually, this gingko is a female.  How do I know?  Male gingkoes have balls.

And since it's Sunday, I thought I'd muse about religion just the slightest bit.  Right now, among certain groups, Christian Nationalism is strong, but only certain groups.  Individuals like Mike Johnson, the newly elected Speaker of the House is a Christian Nationalist.  These people desperately want to force the United States into a theocracy, and I don't doubt that if they feel they need to go to war to do this, then that will be their choice.  Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with this chain of thought, the foremost in my mind is that Christians going to war to push Christianity never really win.  Don't believe me?  Lets look Christianity's biggest and baddest attempt to push the religion, the Holy Crusades.  They were going to drive the Muslims, the Moors, the infidels, the heretics, in fact they were going to drive everyone who wasn't a Christian out of the Middle East.  Well, all you have to do is look at the Middle East to see how unsuccessful that was.  Of course, the fact that they've always been losers when it comes to war is never, ever going to occur to them, because that would mean they're wrong, and their faith will not let that happen.