Driving up from the Phoenix area this past Friday after Thanksgiving, I noticed, first, that the hotel addition to a reservation casino seemed to be at the same stage of construction that it was two months ago. Then I noticed the "Going Out of Business" banners on the Linens 'n' Things and Circuit City stores at one of the newer "corner" malls on I-17. Finally I noted that the amount of construction in the northern 101 corridor, which had been going great guns the past several years, was looking a little light in terms of new construction sites being cleared.

Oh, and a couple of weeks ago I did overhear a couple of contractors who work in the Phoenix area discuss the price cuts they had to make to stay working. The figures they were citing were not incremental.

All things I just noticed in passing.

Can we have a little relief from Campaign 2012 for just a little while? Please? The country really needs an election time-out.

tommydsz-

Just to carry your Michael J. Fox reference further, Marty McFly tried to pass the name "Clint Eastwood" off to the local Old West toughs in Back to the Future III as a proper he-man moniker, only to have the toughs laugh in his face. A measure of contrition by the filmmakers for the first Back To the Future flick's Chuck Berry faux pas, perhaps?

I think I'll call Judy Berman's joke about stomach kicking cruel and offensive when we can stop laughing at the endless stream of kick-to-the-guy's-groin visual jokes - VISUAL, people! - that have come our way in movies and TV the last couple of decades. In spite of how HILARIOUS everyone seems to think these are (and I'm talking as much about the GUYS who can't seem to get enough of 'em), the actual fact is such things HURT. I mean, they really HURT, and can - imagine it! - even cause serious injury.

Of course, the really silly thing is that so many people seem bound and determined to act as humor magistrates, as if anyone ever born had ever had the right, privilege or even capacity to decide what anyone else is allowed to find funny. And in reference to such humor as I cited above, if you've ever laughed at one of those gags then you really are in no position to cast a stone at anyone else's sense of humor.

Christianity has always been a tough religion to follow, what with all the myriad ways followers seem able to go off track. Paul spent a good chunk of his New Testament column inches trying to keep various congregations in line, and it's not unlikely that some of that was the very first stuff ever written that wound up canonized by inclusion that collection. And there's been endless puzzling over just what Paul was about on some topics, so his success could at best be called qualified.

Really, most Christians have enough on their plate trying to keep their own religion sorted out. No wonder so many embrace quick, pithy summations of the other religions of the world, especially if such summations readily and unequivocally elevate Christianity without compelling any kind of examination of same.

Now that "Pushing Daisies" has been cancelled, my wife and I are canceling our cable TV. This is not the sole reason we're doing so, but it is the sign that opened our eyes to the fact that our interest in television has totally bottomed out. Perhaps we should have had our eyes opened when "Cupid" was canceled, but we simply weren't ready then to believe the time had come to cut the cord. After all, shows for which one grows fond - leaving any consensus as to quality aside - get axed all the time, so after a little wistful sighing one goes on.

But life itself is a finite quantity, however difficult it is for any of us to sense, let alone know, just how much we still have at any given time. This Christmas my wife presented me with the first season of "Pushing Daisies" on DVD, and the future was clear: we don't want to buy what TV is selling, so why waste any more time in our lives on it? If TV wants us back, it'll have to be on our terms from now on.

I feel so tempted to say we need a Wall Street holiday of about six months - a period in which trading simply halts until the system comes to its senses. But is there really any sense left in the system? Sense would direct investors to stay in for the long-term, but investors haven't been given much indication that our financial institutions see sense in that. Quick cash-ins seem to have been the true order of the day, at nearly all levels of doing business, and has finally been exposed as systemic cynicism, if not utter indifference, to the future of investors, of Wall Street, of Main Street, and of America.

With the inauguration of President Obama, has the final cash-out of Wall Street now begun? Will the new administration be tasked not with restoring the current financial system, but building an entirely new one from scratch? Perhaps we are enduring a financial Deluge, with the Earth being cleansed of a degenerate generation. If so, it's impossible not to say good riddance to bad rubbish. If that renders the future uncertain, at least it promises a future.

Or so we must hope.