Danskcolin: Thursday October 2nd 2025 "Did YOU wake up in a cold sweat this morning? Well, join the club!!!!"

Yes, friends, did YOU wake up in a cold sweat this morning? Well, you're not the only one according to this morning's local Onion News page 94-"splash", to put it mildly!

If you missed it, see my own summary here, slightly edited for content, but I think I've got the main gist of it!

Poor Sarah [last name withheld] !!!!!

Reading the story this afternoon, however, brought an ironic chuckle to the faces of me and my light-to-moderate wife Lois, here in grassy, semi-leafy Liphook, Hampshire, where we've now lived since January, for our sins (!).

my light-to-moderate wife Lois and me - a recent picture

But "Why the chuckle, Colin, exactly?", I hear you cry!

Well, Sarah in the Onion story, who lives not a million miles away, told reporters she had woken up today "in a cold sweat", whereas, by contrast, Lois and I have gone to bed, for "nap-time", very much "in a hot sweat", after an unusually busy morning going here and there, and doing this and that, which is total madness now when you remember we've been retired for almost 20 years.

flashback to March 2006, the month we both retired

What a crazy world we live in !!!!

After a quiet start to the morning, driving to nearby Grayshott, and buying meat at the butcher's, and a pair of necklaces at a gift-shop for our 12-year-old twin granddaughters in Perth, Australia, the day quickly descends into an orgy of exhausting, overdue chores: checking tyre pressures on our little car, mowing the lawn before tomorrow's predicted rain, and switching recycling bins - emptying the gallons of water in the reserve recycling bin, which we're using as a rain butt, and swapping it over for the main recycling bin which is now falling apart - what a madness it's all been!!!!

our crazy morning: buying meat at the butcher's, and a pair of necklaces

for our 12-year-old twin granddaughters in Perth, Australia - busy busy busy!

we empty gallons of water from the reserve recycling bin, which we've

been using as a rain-butt, and swapping it over with the main recycling

bin, which is coming apart, and is no longer "fit-for-purpose":

Hence our going to bed this afternoon in a hot sweat - not surprising really is it after all that madness and running around !!!

We've calmed down now, however, and let's hope that the Sarah in this morning's Onion News has calmed down a bit now too, with her beloved pet cat Winston at her side - awwww!!!!

Taylor Swift, the world's biggest pop-star famously has 3 pet cats, and I wonder if that Sarah, and Winston, in this morning's Onion Story are part of Taylor Swift "fan-dom". They seems just the type to us, especially after we see this week's two-part documentary about Taylor.

Let me put my cards on the table at this point. [I wish you wouldn't keep doing that, Colin! - Ed]

Lois and I don't really "get" Taylor - her songs all sound pretty much the same to us, and they don't seem to have much in the way of what we call a "jolly good tune", but we're both 79, so what do we know!

We suspect the tunes are less important to her millions of young-to-youngish female fans than the lyrics themselves, which express all the secret desires and fears of her followers. But, again, what do we know!

To be frank, we know very little about what anything that goes on these days, to put it mildly! And, for example, we didn't know that during the storm over sexual harassment charges against movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, and the subsequent rise of the feminist #metoo movement, Taylor won a court case against David Mueller, a former radio DJ, who Taylor said had groped her. She only asked for a token $1 award from Mueller, just grateful that the jury believed her and also grateful for the huge support she'd received from her fans during what she called "this horrible period of my life".

At the same time she stressed that [women] still have so, so much further to go in their fight against sexual assaults.

And the outcome of Taylor's successful law suit, plus the support of her fans, apparently also led to her feeling more free to make comments on society in general etc.

The video for the track, filled with several LGBTQ+ celebs, was a call for LGBTQ critics to "just calm down", but as well as getting flack from the anti-gay rights lobby, Taylor also attracted criticism from the gay community for being too Taylor-centric: more evidence that whatever Taylor does, she just can't win.

In the 2018 mid-term elections for the Senate, in Taylor's home state of Tennessee, Republican candidate Marsha Blackburn was up in the polls, rejecting equal pay for women and also rejecting calls for gay rights. Taylor, meanwhile, was on American TV screens expressing her repugnance of Blackburn's views, and calling for voters to register as a matter of urgency - and such was Taylor's influence that after just one tweet from Taylor, 35,000 voters went out and registered.

Here she is, criticising Senate candidate Marsha Blackburn and her commercials.