1. It’s Tuesday, May 19, 2015. The fog has not lifted in the New York area.

2. I’m sure I’m betraying my Eastern elitism, but I had no idea biker gangs were that big a deal. The weekend battle in Waco got as much attention on CNN this morning as the war against ISIS and the Amtrak crash investigation. It is a little weird to think that there are still Jets and Sharks out there in the 21st century. 

3. Do you have to join a gang if you ride a motorcycle? Just asking.

4. The Philippines is stepping up to take some of the Muslim refugees from Myanmar. A lot of these people are trying to escape persecution from the Buddhist majority in what was once called Burma. They’ve been turned away from closer nations, such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.

So, the Filipino government deserves the world’s credit, and support, in trying to minimize a humanitarian tragedy. 

5.   President Obama has a new @POTUS Twitter account. He already had one under his own name. This one he only gets to keep for the remaining 20 months and a day of his presidency.

The best thing I saw was a series of tweets between the president and former President Bill Clinton, who wondered if the account would carry over to subsequent officeholders, adding the hashtag #AskingForA Friend.

The account, unfortunately, brought out the pillbug element that emerges every so often from under its rock to spew its leavings. That, alas, is the danger of social media. Most of these cowards don’t sign their names — or maybe they have trouble spelling them

6. The song of the moment is “Tenderly” by Chet Baker.

1. It’s Monday, May 18, 2015. By the time this week is over, it will be the Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of summer. That spring thing went really fast.

2. Social media is abuzz this morning about the final episode of “Mad Men.” Some folks liked it, some were extremely disappointed by it.

Now, I have never watched the show. But that’s not because of any animus toward it. It’s because, for years, I needed to get up for work as early as 3 a.m. So, by necessity as much as interest, I stopped watching prime-time television.

Now that I’m retired, I’ve been thinking about watching the series I missed. I’ve ruled out several, including “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones.” (I’m not into violence) But “Mad Men” is something I might see myself getting into.

So my question to those of you who were regular “Mad Men” watchers is this: Knowing what you know now about the series, would you recommend it to someone whose only knowledge of it is an understanding of when it takes place and the names of the most popular characters? 

3. Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina says he is running for the Republican presidential nomination because the world is falling apart. I’m not the most optimistic person, but I’m pretty sure the world is as well off as it has ever been.

But when Sen. Graham says the world might be falling apart, one place he points to is Iraq, where the nut cases from ISIS remain a powerful force. And If he’s looking for somebody to blame for that, perhaps he should look in the mirror at one of the biggest cheerleaders for the idiotic 2003 invasion and prolonged military action that left Iraq in the chaos it’s in.

I can’t believe anyone — other than his buddy John McCain — would take a Lindsay Graham candidacy seriously. 

4. The first trailer for the Steve Jobs movie is out. It’s the one written by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Danny Boyle and based on the Walter Isaacson book that had Jobs’ cooperation.

The trailer doesn’t show much, as Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt points out. But all it needs to do is tease those of us who are prone to like anything involving the principals.

The film is coming out Oct. 9. Unless the Mets are playing a postseason game that day, I’ll be there.  

5. The song of the moment is “Summer’s Child” by David Lanz.

1. It’s Friday, May 15, 2015. It’s another nice day in the New York area. It’s been nice for awhile. Or maybe my standards were lowered by the crappy winter. Anyway, being able to walk around in the outdoors in comfort and relative warmth is a good feeling.

2. A federal court jury decided that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev should die for his part in the Boston Marathon bombing that killed three people.

In doing so, the jury ignored the request of the family of the youngest person killed – that putting Tsarnaev away for life would finally make this nightmare more past tense than the years of appeals will. If someone in my family was a victim, the appeal process would seem as though I was suffering the wrath of God for wanting to be part of a celebration. And I think executing Tsarnaev gives him the martyrdom he and his idiot brother craved with their cruelty.

But I wasn’t on the jury, and those folks had the unenviable task of trying to decide all this. I understand that they weighed this matter with the gravity it deserved and wrestled with their consciences to do the right thing. I admire their courage and their perseverance, and I thank them for doing their best.

2. Normally, the fact that the week is ending brings warm thoughts of weekend activities and celebrations. But this week’s Amtrak tragedy in Philadelphia is making this weekend seem sad.

For the families and acquaintances of the eight people killed and the 200 or so injured, the concept of the weekend is most likely lost in grief and anxiety, in tears shed and the wondering why God or the fates or whatever you believe in has dealt you this misery.

I plan to enjoy the weekend. But I also plan to keep those families in my thoughts.

1. It’s Thursday, May 14, 2015. It’s another beautiful day in the New York area, although maybe a little chilly.

2. The Mets are back to losing in their trademark horrible fashion. Last night’s loss is one of those that make you wonder what you did to deserve being a fan that lost like that. 

3. Apparently, the people of Idaho’s Second Congressional District elected one of the state’s trademark potatoes to Congress.

Mike Simpson was lying in the Republican bin with his fellow spuds when the House Appropriations Committee voted yesterday on funding for Amtrak. This was, of course, the day after a horrific crash that killed seven people in Philadelphia.

The committee’s Democrats sought increased funding for Amtrak. It might be nice to have passenger train service in this country that’s competitive with the rest of the world. Not to mention service that doesn’t kill people.

But Simpson was having none of that. Not only was he opposed to the increased funding, he blasted Democrats for using the Philadelphia tragedy as an excuse for the money.

“Don’t use this tragedy in that way. It was beneath you,” he managed to utter.

I suppose his speaking is a remarkable feat for a potato. On the other hand, it’s useless for solving real problems.

Even if it is determined that this crash was caused by human carelessness, there’s no reason not to make this system, to make ALL our transportation systems, safe. If an event focuses attention on this problem, it’s certainly worth mentioning.

The House committee, of course, voted to cut Amtrak’s funding. I’m voting not to eat any potatoes from Idaho. If you want to make a point to tuber brains such as Mike Simpson, that might be the way to do it.

4.   I’m going to miss Jon Stewart’s rants against Fox News.

Last night, he was right as always. He focused on Fox’s scoffing at comments President Obama made that the network likes to depict poor people as lazy leeches. Stewart then showed all the instances in which Fox did, indeed, depict poor people as lazy leeches.

The problem, as I’ve said before, is that the only people who are going to miss Jon Stewart more than me are the people at Fox News.

Fox News wears its bias, its blatant distortion, its propagandizing as a badge of honor. And it holds the criticism of people like Jon Stewart as a signal to the amen corner that watches. All he does when he puts facts to their fiction is make them martyrs to the faithful.

I don’t know what the solution is. The sad part is that I fear the solution has nothing to do with being reasonable.

5. Today’s song is “Enchantment” by jazz saxophonist David Sanborn. That’s a sound everyone can hear, thankfully.

TRAINS AND PLANES – What I’m Thinking About Today

1. It’s Wednesday, May 13, 2015. It’s cooler, but still a pretty day in New York.

2. As everyone else, I’m saddened by last night’s Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia and the death of six travelers.

Hopefully, investigators will find the cause quickly. Train travel should a safe way of getting from place to place.

But this incident, along with two Metro-North commuter train crashes in recent years, remind us that safety can never be taken for granted. This country needs to take a long look at what’s needed to make rail travel safer.

3. A recent proposal in The New York Times suggested what to do about busy, dilapidated La Guardia Airport, the airport closest to New York City.

The suggestion: Close it.

Yeah, right.

The proponent suggested that the area’s two other airports, John F. Kennedy and Newark Liberty, could take up the slack. But both of those airports aren’t much better than La Guardia, and there are few trips now as joyless as slogging to JFK on the bumper-to-bumper Van Wyck Expressway. 

La Guardia’s problems are daunting, but solvable. Direct rail access from Manhattan would help cut down on the vehicle traffic. Re-organizing the gates to keep short-haul flights in the same general vicinity is a good idea. So is putting up some readable signs to tell you where everything is.

There was a time when, in a radio ad, La Guardia was billed as “New York’s friendly neighborhood airport.” That can still be the case with a little vision. But scrapping it solves nothing.

4.   The song of the moment is “Animal” by Conor Maynard. Keep that in your head today.

1. It’s Tuesday, May 12, 2015. It’s another warm day here in the New York area. Lovin’ it.

2. I am proud to say that I’m signature No. 2,160 on a We The People petition urging President Obama to honor baseball great Yogi Berra with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. I normally don’t get involved with these sorts of things. But there’s a lots of reasons to honor Yogi, who turns 90 years old today. 

First, he was a great baseball player. Yes, the Yankees were a colossus in the years when he played. But he was a major reason for their success. A great hitter, a great catcher. No one has been involved in more World Series victories.

Second, he seems to be an exemplary sportsman. Among those advocating for him are pioneers of the integration of baseball, including Henry Aaron and Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie. He is popular among Latin players as well. And the petition points out that he is involved in promoting LGBT athletes’ rights and in encouraging students to participate in sports.

Third, few people have contributed as many expressions to American English as Lawrence Peter Berra. Nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded. It’s deja vu all over again. It gets late early out there. You can observe a lot by watching.

And finally, he might be one of the ten greatest Italian-Americans ever. That means a lot to those of us who constantly heard negatives about our ethnicity. Yogi exemplifies what is great in Italians and others whose forebears have come here — working hard so that the path for future generations is better (see yesterday’s post about my father-in-law).

My grandfather loved Yogi more than he loved Joe DiMaggio. He would have been thrilled to see the affection being given to Mr. Berra on this day. So would anyone with a heart and a sense of humor.

The White House says that it will consider petitions once there are 100,000 electronic signatures. This one is only at 5,447. But June 8 is the deadline, so there’s plenty of time. Here it is.

3.    My friends and acquaintances from Boston had the wind knocked out of them yesterday by the NFL’s penalties against the New England Patriots. The team lost two draft picks and star quarterback Tom Brady is suspended for the first four games of the season because the Pats were found to have used deflated footballs in the conference championship game against Indianapolis.

Among the squawks I’ve heard is that the penalty against Brady is comparable to those meted out to players involved in sexual and physical assault, which all would agree are far more serious offenses than taking a few ounces of air out of a football.

I’m not coming from this as a Patriots or Tom Brady hater or a fan of another team. I lost interest in the NFL when the Giants and Jets moved from playing in New York City to New Jersey. I was probably rooting for Seattle in the last Super Bowl, but that was because New England’s coach seems like a miserable sort. I was happy for my New England friends who celebrated their team’s triumph.

But playing by the rules is the tenet that holds a professional sport together. If the integrity of the sport can be questioned, there’s no reason to accept the outcome of a sporting event as valid. Pete Rose didn’t go to jail for gambling on the Cincinnati Reds (he went to jail for tax evasion), but has spent 25 years on baseball’s ineligible list because of it. There are now major penalties for the use of performance enhancing drugs.

Deflating the footballs may seem to be a silly thing to get pumped up about, especially since the Colts played with same footballs. But it was an attempt by the Patriots to gain a probably unnecessary advantage.

It’s the attempt, the idea of breaking the rules that’s offensive. It’s arrogant and unsportsmanlike. And it brings into question the integrity of every game the Patriots have hosted. That’s not good for the NFL as a business or as a civic institution. The Brady suspension and lost draft picks are suitable sanctions. 

1. It’s Friday, May 8, 2015. It is a glorious day in the New York metropolitan area. It is a reward for enduring the crap we endured this winter.

2. It is the 70th anniversary of Germany’s surrender to the Allies in World War II. It is a day celebrated throughout Europe (although I don’t imagine there’s a lot of festivity in Germany). Americans get a little more excited about V-J Day, the day the Japanese surrendered, which is in August.

3. I hadn’t followed it closely, but I found myself fascinated by yesterday’s British parliamentary election. Having spent a week in the U.K. last spring and watching the BBC for hours last night doesn’t make me an expert, but I did find myself thinking about the vote a lot.

4. First of all, the comparison of Camerons I made in the headline might sound a little far-fetched. But stay with me.

In baseball, a really good center fielder covers the biggest swatch of the outfield. The left and right fielders stay closer to the lines. The center fielder therefore gets most of the fly balls — even some he has to range to his left or right to get.

That seems to be what happened last night in Britain.

Labour (I’ll use the U.K. spelling because that’s what the party uses) stayed over to the left — I heard some fairly liberal folks complain that a Labour win would wipe out their income with taxes approaching 90%.

The U.K. Independence Party, a party that complains a lot about immigration, camped on the right.

And because the Liberal Democrats had formed a coalition with the Conservatives to form the last government, there was no reason they had to be on the field at all.

So David Cameron and the Conservatives had a lot of center to run free. I don’t know if Cameron did quite as well as Juan Lagares of the Mets does every night. But he did well enough to capture a majority of Parliament, shocking pollsters who thought he’d have to form a coalition with some fringe party.

5.    The Scotland situation is also fascinating. The Scottish National Party, which favors independence, won 56 of the country’s 59 Parliament seats. That’s just months after the Scots rejected the idea of independence in a referendum.

Clearly, the Scots want something other than the status quo. They might not have been ready for independence last fall, but could be getting closer to that now. Or they believe there is something they can negotiate by forming a solid bloc, although the fact that Cameron can form a government without any outside help doesn’t give the SNP much leverage.

What happens with Scotland over the next months and years bears watching, and not just in Britain.

6.    So what can Americans take away from yesterday’s vote in Britain?

I think there’s a precautionary tale for both parties. The Democrats, at this point, seem inclined to heed it. Despite the appeal of such outspoken liberals as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, they see Hillary Clinton as a winner who can hold the center ground. And you can’t govern if you don’t win.

The Republicans, on the other hand, seem determine to bring Americans to their form of Jesus. The leaders of the party see people like Jeb Bush and Chris Christie (before his latest New Jersey problems) as electable. But the rank-and-file love those Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee types who are determined to hew to a perfect social conservative line.

Cameron had the center to himself. If Hillary Clinton has that kind of a race, she’s the 45th President.

1. It’s Tuesday, May 5, 2015. The weather in New York is gorgeous. It should be like this all the time.

2. It’s Cinco de Mayo.

It is not Mexican Independence Day. That’s in September.

Cinco de Mayo is the commemoration of the Mexican victory over French invaders at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. The victory stalled, but didn’t completely stop, the French takeover of Mexico by Napoleon III.

The people who might be more inclined to celebrate are Americans, and particularly those who live north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Historians believe that had the French won at Puebla, they would have taken Mexico sooner and then turned their support to the Confederates in the U.S. Civil War.

So I suppose it’s a surprise that there are Texans who celebrate Cinco de Mayo. But beer companies promote this holiday and, to lots of people in the South, a beer is a beer.

Me, I choose to celebrate the Mexicans’ courage, the wonderful people of Mexican ancestry I’ve met and their great taste in food. Happy Cinco de Mayo!

3. Speaking of Texas, it seems as though this weekend incident in Garland was a perfect storm of stupidity and intolerance.

A bunch of idiots decide to hold a show specifically designed to mock Islam. A couple of other idiots decide to shoot up the idiots at the show.

Yes, you have the right to say what you want. But so do I — the organizers of this event are pretty goddamn worthless. So are the gunmen, who must have been so insecure in their embrace of their religion that they felt the need to prove themselves.

Everyone in this case wanted to be a martyr. Martyrdom is overrated.

The only people garnering respect in this situation are the peace officers, including the one who shot both gunmen before they could start their massacre. These officers probably would have preferred a quiet Sunday afternoon with their families or, if they had to work, patrolling some springtime festival. Mercifully, except for one treated injury, they emerged unscathed — except for the additional aggravation and unnecessary anxiety.

4. I haven’t done a lot of writing of late, being tied up with personal issues and the conclusion of my news editing class. I plan to be back on a daily basis, and to expand this blog. Let’s go for a ride with this.

1. It’s Monday, April 27, 2015.

2. I’m going out on a limb and putting the snow shovels away.

3. The Nepal tragedy is an important story that would have gone little noticed in the Western world 50 years ago. The prevalence of communications satellites makes coverage of these things far easier.

4. A Boston Globe poll shows that less than 20% of Massachusetts residents support executing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

“It seems that voters have concluded that Tsarnaev does not deserve a quick death, but rather should spend the remainder of his days in a windowless cell contemplating the heinous acts that put him there,” Frank Perullo, president of Sage Systems LLC, which conducted the poll, told the Globe. “To voters, it would seem death is too easy an escape.”

There’s a reason you think of smart when you think of Massachusetts.

1. It’s Tuesday, April 21, 2015. If this were January, it would be the third. April flies by. January drags.

2. As a Met fan, I needed yesterday off. The Mets have won eight straight, but two of their players were injured in their last win. There’s just a little too much drama for an old man to take.

3. More Americans are optimistic about the economy than aren’t. That might not sound like a big deal — in fact, it sounds the way it should be. But it’s the first time a CNN/ORC poll has found more economic half-fulls than half-empties since 2007.

And, as a result, it’s the first time in the presidency of Barack Obama that the economy is seen so brightly. It took more than six years, and got stalled too many times along the way by Republicans who refused to take ownership for the financial crisis they helped create.

I wouldn’t expect, or want, the president to do a victory lap. There are too many people who are still hurting from the slide precipitated by Wall Street greed and an unnecessary, unpaid-for war in Iraq.

But history will be a lot kinder to Mr. Obama than we have been, and this economic recovery that appears set to continue through the end of his White House tenure will be one reason why.

4. One of the nice things about the Pulitzer Prizes is that, for the most part, they are a reminder of the really good work journalists around this country do. The two awards I’m most interested in are those for Public Service and Local Reporting.

This year, the Public Service award went to the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C. It did a powerful series on how South Carolina is the worst state for domestic violence inflicted on women by men. 

The Local Reporting award went to the Torrance Daily Breeze in California for a series on corruption in the Centinela Valley School District.  

The awards are a reminder that people who go into this profession are not in it for the money (trust me on that!). They’re in it because it’s a way to change the world.

5. One other Pulitzer I noted went to Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post for National Reporting. Her award was for coverage of the Secret Service’s recent problems. I knew the name looked familiar. Nearly eight years ago, she had the co-byline on a story that featured my brother, who was being thwarted in his bid for a non-political job at the Justice Department by a Bush administration official with a political agenda. I, of course, thought the story was right-on. So I’m happy for Ms. Leonnig (although my spellcheck doesn’t seem so pleased, because it keeps changing the name to Leaning).

6. Finally on the Pulitzers – awards are also given for the arts. I like to see who wins the Music award, and have purchased the music for iTunes on occasion. Music that wins the Pulitzer is usually experimental and edgy rather than toe-tapping — I guarantee that “Uptown Funk” wasn’t nominated. This year’s winner is Julia Wolfe for a piece called “Anthracite Fields.” I can’t find a recording on iTunes and Amazon, but the Pulitzer committee put up this YouTube video. I’m not questioning whether Ms. Wolfe deserves her award. But shouldn’t there be a recording that allows people to judge without having to stream a video. Also, I assume she’s writing music to make a living, but maybe I’m wrong.