Happy new year to my readers! At 2:00 I am settling down to start working on school things (as a college professor I am constantly under the gun of class preparation, and as a doctoral student doing research for my dissertation as well as taking two classes per semester, I have little time to waste) after having cleaned my home this morning. The decorations and tree are down, my husband has the football on, he cooked the black-eyed peas yesterday (but I bought turnip instead of collard greens), the weather is nice enough for me to walk my dog a bit laer, and now I am going to transcribe my fourteenth interview. Some observations on this day. In a world of hunger, hasn't the Rose Bowl parade, with its tons of organic products made into floats, outlived its usefulness? Why don't the networks get some decent stuff to show on New Year's Eve? I mean, seriously, Miley Cyrus in Times Square (ABC). And Ryan Seacrest? Dick Clark recovering from a stroke was better than t