2022-11-21, Monday, 03:37 EST, Cincinnati, OH, USA

My furnace thermostat says that the temperature outside is 26° F, which Google equates to -3.33333° C, but  timeanddate.com says that the temperature outside is nine degrees colder than that, which would be -8.33333° C. Having just poked my head out the front door, I vote for timeanddate.com  The sky is clear.  The sampling of snow of several days ago has disappeared.  There will be more and deeper snow as autumn blows into winter.  The “news”, which these days seems to be little more than gossip of crises and terrible injustices, tells of heavy snows in Buffalo, NY.  Presumably residents of that unfortunate city on a large northern lake are dying like flies, buried under hundreds of feet of snow, probably brought down by what the “news” not long ago was calling “global warming”.  03:37 EST is 08:37 BST.  We are still four hours from dawn, but in Britain dawn has passed into day.  We in the backwoods of southern Ohio are still, for the most part, sleeping, but Europe is bustling.  

The American feast day of Thanksgiving is three days from now.  That name, “Thanksgiving”, which traditionally refers to the gratitude American Pilgrims in the early seventeenth century felt to God for giving them a good harvest in a harsh land, ought to be problematical for the aggressively secular culture of the Western world, since with the disappearance of God, there is no one left to whom to give thanks.  Watch the news for protests.  Come to think of it, there will logically also have to be movement to change the name “Christmas”, which to the sensitive secular ear must sound even more unpleasant than “Thanksgiving”.  Ah, progress.