Yes the weather. Because only in Minnesota can I walk down the street when its forty degrees (four Celsius) out and have random passers by remark, "Lovely weather we're having." And mean it too.

Because after weeks of subzero temperatures, by comparison forty feels down right sweltering. Minnesota weather makes us tough, so when civilization inevitably collapses, Minnesotans will be ready.

"What about that ancient Mayan prediction?" I hear you say, "Those Mayans invented basketball centuries before the Canadians, surely the they knew when the end of the world was nigh." Well that's the thing. It turns out that the Mayan's didn't actually predict the end of the world.

You see, December 21, 2012 is just the end of the thirteenth B'ak'tun. Without going into the details of the Mayan calendar, the B’ak’tun is the largest unit of measurement regularly used in the Mayan calendar (it's about 395 solar years). In other words it's like we're rolling over from 1999 to 2000 (or 2000 to 20001 for you purists). Did the world end in 2000/2001? Nope.

We can also look to the previous ends of B'ak'tun to help us predict the future. The 12th B'ak'tun ended September 18, 1618, but the world kept on ticking. June 15, 1224: no end of the world. March 13, 830... I think you get my point.

So instead of all this doom and gloom, I think we should throw one heck of a party. A New B'ak'tun's Eve party, as it were.

But wait... didn't I say I also had bad news?

Oh yeah. Yellowstone is experiencing a swarm of earthquakes. The last time Yellowstone erupted it was 1,000 times more powerful that Mount Saint Helens and covered the western half of America with ash.

Happy New Year.

I love not working.

What is not to love? Sleeping in until ten, relaxing all day, actually getting to update Matthew J. Hanson.com? The slow depreciation of my savings? Okay well there is that. Which leads us to the central conflict in my life: the desire to not work verses the desire to have money. Not a lot of money, just enough to pay for food, rent, and a little left over.

So on my days off I seek a way to reconcile these conflicting goals. Alas my Matthew J. Hanson.com store is not yet selling enough merchandise to keep me in the black. Perhaps somewhere out there, there is a get rich quick scheme that isn't too good to be true.

In the mean time, I guess I just watch Japanese people sing about Barak Obama.

As many faithful readers already know, I have been recently spending a fair amount of time in the company of small children. And in doing so one trend I have observed an over sanitizing of children's upbringing. The original Megatron toy would never fly today, and children are forbidden from playing favorite games from my childhood like "Commie-Spy Killer" (which admittedly has lost some of its relevance, and no, I didn't grasp what a "Commie" was at the time, but all my hero on TV fought against them and that was good enough for me).

That's all well and good. Those I can handle. But let's all sing this one together: "I know and old woman who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed that fly..." If you grew up in my generation, you completed those lyrics with "...perhaps she’ll die," and you know that after swallowing a horse "she died of course." But that's not what today's children are learning.

I think expunging any mention of death from our children's life does them a disservice. Not only does it gloss over the serious danger involved in swallowing horses (though to be fair, I'm not sure how she made it past cat) it also ignores a very real truth:

People die.

No matter how we try to protect him or her, sooner or later somebody the child loves will die. I feel like the only ethical thing to do is to prepare children and help them understand that death is a natural part of existence.

But wait. There's more.

Some of the preschools I visit are explicitly Christian and include "Jesus Time" as part of their curriculum. At one such institution, I was paging through a book of children's prayers when I came upon an old favorite "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep..." Wait a minute... that wasn't what I remembered. What's next, will they tone down David and Goliath?

Of course that's exactly what they did. I'd like to make one thing perfectly clear incase any children are reading this: David killed Goliath. Between when Goliath "fell with a loud thud right on his face" and when the Philistines "ran away and David became a hero," David "took hold of the Philistine's sword and drew it from the scabbard. After he killed [Goliath], he cut off his head with the sword." (And on a minor note, there is a difference between a sling and a slingshot).

I haven't been at any preschool, let alone a Christian on, around Easter, but this trend makes me wonder how they'll handle that holiday. How do you teach resurrection without teaching death?