Boy, how time flies. Christmas break is over and school is back in session. I am very much looking forward to the rest of the semester, and the new semester starting in less than a month. Again, I'll have a full load and one new class, but I'm really starting to feel comfortable with some of my classes and ready to try some new techniques and strategies with them.

My running, on the other hand, has really taken a beating. Through most of the Christmas break the wind pretty much defeated my efforts to go out running and then the day after New Year's I caught what I assume is a cold and the sore throat has prevented me from heading out running; just being outside tends to really hurt my throat. So no exercise at all except for my core workouts and those have been truncated so as not to exhaust me first thing in the morning. Right now it seems as if half the muscles in my body hurt, mostly from not getting their accustomed exercise, and my head very much wants to get out and run also.

However, the big thing on my mind the past several days has been the shootings in Tuscon, Arizona. It sounds to me very much as if the gunman was a lone, random nut with a gun doing what gun-toting crazy loners do. But the violence itself and the response to it seems to me so almost stereotypical of the American obsession with guns and violence. I realize that the news media operate under serious time constraints given our short attention spans but the bulk of the news analyses that I have read have been long on analysis and short on thought, fact and reason, mostly being geared to grinding one axe or another. It seems to me pretty clear that the constant stream of violent language in political discourse, the violent imagery used and the prevalence of guns in America make the use of weapons in a violent way to be seen increasingly as acceptable ways to settle disputes and to make statements of opinion.