1) It’s Monday, February 2, 2015. It’s Groundhog Day, which no one would care about if it wasn’t for one of the best films of the 1990s. It’s 47 days until spring and 62 days until the baseball season begins.

2) The pro-stupidity movement is highlighted in Sunday’s New York Times in another excellent column by Frank Bruni.            

The anti-vaccine crowd is just one manifestation of this phenomenon. There’s also the climate-change-is-a-hoax brigade, the where’s-Obama’s-birth-certificate contingent and the NRA’s classic “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

3)   This morning, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie surprisingly gave some credence to the pro-stupidity movement. After President Obama said all children should be vaccinated, Christie said yes —  but the government must balance public health with parental choice.

Huh?

Of course, given his track record on Ebola, the governor is likely to have any Jersey measles victims banished to some island off the coast, shouting “Unclean! Unclean!” 

4) I’m happy for my friends from New England — I had no real interest in who won or lost the game. I guess I do wonder why reasonable people — as I assume the coaches of the Seattle Seahawks are — would go for something so risky like a pass at the 1-yard-line when they had at least two chances to pound the ball in. What makes people do stuff like that?

5) I didn’t pay super-close attention to the ads in the Super Bowl. But most of the ones I saw were real tearjerkers. One ad, in particular, drawing a lot of attention this morning was Nationwide’s sad tale of a kid who didn’t experience life because he died in an accident of some kind. I can’t say I enjoyed the ad, but I guess if everyone’s talking about it, it must have been effective.