1) It’s Wednesday, February 4, 2015. It’s the middle of winter — 45 days down, 45 days to go. Alas, the halftime show is in Boston, where people will stand around in feet of snow to watch the Patriots celebrate their Super Bowl win.

2) Commuting is part of a suburbanite’s routine, and it’s usually done by rote. Get up, go to the train station or bus stop, get to town, work, go back on the train or bus, get home. 

So the idea that this routine could be fatal, as it was for seven people last night here in New York, is jarring and very sad. My heart goes out to the families who thought their loved ones were making a routine trip home for a quiet dinner and a little TV. 

3) Leaders of ISIS probably don’t care that civilized people think they’re cowards or barbarians or insane. But they are. I think the world has to come to this understanding, and to this one as well: You don’t negotiate with these pillbugs. They’re going to do what they’re going to do, and the only way to stop them is to keep fighting them.

There’s one other thing. The world should show its support of the family of the Jordanian pilot brutally murdered. He should be honored in every decent nation on the planet for his bravery. 

4)  I agree with those who won’t label ISIS, Boko Haram and other worldwide scum as radical Islamist groups.

They’re thugs, plain and simple. They kill, rape and kidnap thousands more Moslems than they hurt non-Moslems. To honor them with any even remote identification with the faith would be insulting and demoralizing to those who live that faith in peace with the world.

And while I’m here, I also find insulting this concept that “good” Moslems need to “speak out” against the bad ones.

It’s kind of the other way around. The rest of the world needs to stand by the millions of Moslems who wish to practice their faith unfettered, and find out what we can do to help them achieve that.

5) Staples is buying Office Depot, which bought Office Max a while back. That pretty much locks up the dedicated manila-folder and Sharpie store market. There might be some antitrust pushback from regulators — there was the last time these two tried to get together in the 1990s. But things are different now. There’s Amazon, of course, and there are aisles of supplies in Walmart and Target. 

1) It’s Tuesday, February 3, 2015. It’s the birthday of the love of my life, and is therefore a very special day. Pitchers and catchers report in 16 days, when it’s also Chinese New Year.

2) Vaccinations are extremely un-fun. I remember one time when my daughter was a toddler and in a good mood, giggling as the pediatrician gave her an exam. And I have never, ever seen a smile melt into painful tears as fast as when the doctor stuck her with that needle — the facial expression change seemed almost fluid.

Vaccinations are un-fun for the kids, for the parents, for the nurses, for the doctor, for everyone in the office, for people on the street who hear a kid continue to scream after the shot.

Here’s what more un-fun: Measles. Mumps. Rubella. Chickenpox. Whooping cough. Tetanus. Everything else they give these kids shots for. They’re painful, uncomfortable and occasionally lead to much more serious problems.

My kids never had most of these afflictions. (My daughter got a mild case of chickenpox before the vaccine became available) Which means they didn’t suffer from them, and we didn’t have to find out if there was something about them that made them potentially lethal. And, just as important, my kids didn’t spread these diseases to other kids, or to elderly people, or to other people with compromised immune systems.

There’s a reason these vaccinations are mandatory (or should be). It has nothing to do with a jackbooted government flexing its power, or greedy physicians and drug companies making a buck. It has to do with being responsible — for yourself, for your family, for a community, even for a state and a nation.

The parents who went to Disneyland with kids who didn’t have measles shots are idiots. And any attempt to classify them as freedom-loving idealists making some kind of choice, as the governor of New Jersey did yesterday before his people tried to walk it back, is just another example of the pro-stupidity movement. 

3) When I bought a new Mac last year, or when I finally got my iPhone6, I did not go back to the Apple or Verizon stores to buy the cables I needed to transfer files from my old computer or the case to protect the phone. I went to RadioShack.

I’m not into building electronic gear the way my friend and former boss Chris Peacock is. But whenever I’ve needed some electronic connection to tie old machines to new ones, or just for new batteries, RadioShack has been my go-to place.

For somebody my age, RadioShack is like the Post Office. They’re institutions more than businesses— where else are you supposed to go? I guess that’s a reason both are in such dire shape — they’re anachronisms at a time when things are virtual and can be shipped from a Web site in 48 hours.

If RadioShack goes down, and all signs point to that, I don’t think I’ll be sad — it isn’t that big a deal.  At least until I need to connect a mini plug to a USB port to get some old cassette recordings onto my Mac — and won’t be able to drive a couple of miles to get the remedy.

4) It’s interesting that the sequel to “To Kill a Mockingbird” was actually written by Harper Lee before the novel that made Atticus Finch a great American hero.

It’s also kind of nice to think that the hottest book of 2015 is likely to be something with some redeeming value. Looking forward to it.

5) I’m droning on today. I’ll try to keep things shorter.

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.

1) It’s supposed to snow in the New York area Sunday into Monday. Let’s hope the people who complained about the National Weather Service overpromising on a blizzard get to complain again.

2) I’m not an NFL fan, so I don’t care who wins the Super Bowl. But I was in a restaurant having dinner when Seattle staged that comeback against Green Bay two weeks ago, so I kinda hope the Seahawks win. However, if New England wins, people will be happier (or as “happier” as New Englanders get) when I go up that way next weekend, so that’s not such a bad outcome.

3) Mitt Romney should enjoy this weekend while he can. He’ll be in all the Sunday papers and mentioned on every network news talk show. Then he can go back to doing what he did in obscurity for the two years after he lost to President Obama.

1)  It’s Friday, January 30, 2015. It’s 2 days until the Super Bowl and, better yet, 3 days until the day after the Super Bowl.

2)  It’s the birthday of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dick Cheney. Go figure.

3)  Mitt Romney apparently won’t venture into Harold Stassen territory after all. 

Stassen, for the young’uns, was a former Republican governor of Minnesota who sought the presidency over and over again. The first couple of times, in the 1940s and ‘50s, he was a serious contender. After that, he was a running joke. In all, he sought the White House 10 times between 1940 and 1992. 

Romney isn’t close to that yet. Had he gone this time, it would have been his third try. And he even got the GOP nomination once, something Stassen never achieved.

But he lost to President Obama in 2012, and the fact of the matter is it wasn’t nearly as close as Romney and his backers thought it was. That’s partly due to the fact the president’s base stayed with him, but it’s also due to Romney’s ham handed way of campaigning.

The car elevator. The 47% remark that showed up on videotape. “Corporations are people.” The Benghazi trap at the debate with the president.

All that would have been revisited, and then some. Democrats were practically salivating over the idea of running against Romney.

So Romney made the right choice. He’ll have to settle for having been governor of Massachusetts, a very successful venture capitalist, the guy who ran the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics — and not another Harold Stassen.

4)   Because I respect my friend Katie Benner’s journalistic chops, I read the Newsweek cover story on Silicon Valley’s mistreatment of women. Katie urged folks to get past the prurient, made-you-look cover and read a thorough, in-depth telling of a sordid tale.

Katie was right. It’s worth the time.

It’s not that you don’t know, or imagine, that this is what Silicon Valley is like. You’ve heard tales of misconduct and misogyny in this Petri dish of nerds and money.  But Nina Burleigh uses the travails of two would-be entrepreneurs with a pretty solid idea to show how hard it is for that idea to advance when women think of it.

The solution the article seems to be forth is that women have to be more willing to invest in women entrepreneurs — and women entrepreneurs have to be more willing to ask straight out for funding.

And, one other thing, because I always imagine my daughter when I see young women making their way in the world: Keep a steak knife handy if a would-be venture capitalist asks you to put your hand under the table at a restaurant.

5)   For those of you who stay at home on Friday or Saturday night, here’s a remote way to have a big night in the Big Apple this weekend.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, under the direction of Wynton Marsalis, livestreams its concerts at the beautiful Frederick Rose Theatre in the Time Warner Center. For the next two nights, they’re honoring four of jazz’s greats — Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane. In particular, they’re performing works by these titans that were influenced by African and Latin American music.

The concerts begin at 8 p.m. ET and can be seen at wyntonmarsalis.org/live.     

1) It’s Thursday, January 29, 2015. It’s 3 days until the Super Bowl, 21 days until pitchers and catchers report (to the Mets, anyway) and 51 days until spring.

2) I’ll apologize in advance if your birthday is this month, but I don’t like January. It seems to take forever. Maybe because it’s the dead of winter, and there seems to be little hope of warmth any time soon. Maybe because it’s still dark a lot of the time.

All I know is that it’s only supposed to be 31 days and this seems like the 37th or 38th. February can’t get here soon enough.

3) The takeaway from this week’s Obama family news is this: People are so obsessed with the president and the First Lady that anything they do seems to be worth two days in the news churn.

The latest hubbub concerns Michelle Obama’s not wearing a headscarf when she and the president went to Saudi Arabia this week. She also shook hands with the new king.

There was some squawking from Saudi social media users. And with the squawking came praise from those who believe the Saudis are a bit backward in their treatment of women. Even Sen. Ted Cruz, who would oppose apple pie if the Obamas said they like it, praised the First Lady. 

But, as The New York Times points out, Mrs. Obama played strictly by Hoyle as far as diplomatic protocol is concerned. To underline that, other prominent members of the president’s delegation, including former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, also went sans scarf.

In other words, the controversy isn’t.

As someone who is fascinated by the presidency, the Obama presidency is absolutely mesmerizing. I have some ideas about why that is, and I hope to expand on them in the future.

There’s only 722 days until this administration goes from present tense to history. I’m just sorry I won’t be around in 2065 or 2115 when — I hope — scholars will be more clear-eyed about Barack and Michelle Obama.

4)   Oil prices keep a droppin’, with U.S. crude futures dipping below $44 a barrel for the first time in nearly six years, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The markets just seem really confused about the drop and its speed. Most consumers probably aren’t. For the first time that I can remember, I filled my 2007 Toyota Highlander’s tank this week and got change from a $20 bill.

This just seems like a great time to reorder things. To raise gas taxes a modest amount to help pay for improving this country’s miserable roads. To keep fossil fuels on the run by continuing to develop alternative ways to power vehicles, and continuing to raise gas mileage standards.

Will that happen? I’m extremely skeptical.

5)   Brooklyn’s ascendancy continues with the deftness with which Loretta Lynch is handling her confirmation hearing as U.S. Attorney General.

She’s combining a clear refusal to back away from the Obama administration’s reasonable moves on immigration reform with the addressing — if not always placating — of the Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee who control her nomination.

Lynch is the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, whose headquarters is in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. So far, with the way she’s handling these hearing, she’s proving she’s learned a lot from the streets around Cadman Plaza.

1) It’s Wednesday, January 28, 2015. It’s four days until the Super Bowl, 22 days until Chinese New Year and 145 days until the first day of summer.

2) OK, folks, let’s keep this simple. It didn’t snow nearly as much around New York City as expected.          

But that doesn’t mean that government officials “overreacted.”  They did what they had to do. What’s troubling is that all this snarky second-guessing could lead them to be less cautious next time. And there will be a next time — whether it’s snow or a hurricane.

So I was heartened when I saw Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Tweet last night pointing to the audio of his dramatic reading of The Onion, which had spoofed his Sunday warning about the storm. Critics might say the mayor is being callous about the problems shutting the city caused; I say he’s celebrating the fact that he didn’t have to deal with a catastrophe that no sane person really wanted. 

3) It was good to see the attention was paid to yesterday’s 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camps. My former employer, CNN, is airing a documentary on the subject tonight.    

Genocide didn’t end with the approximately 1 million Jews and others the Nazis irrationally hated who were slaughtered at Auschwitz. We live in the world of ISIS and Boko Haram. So it is good to be reminded from time to time of just how systematically cruel and horrific people can be when madness descends, and how we must never accept such behavior in the world.

4) Today is the 29th anniversary of the Challenger explosion.

5) Between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, Apple sold 34,000 iPhones. Every hour. That’s nearly 75 million phones in 92 days. (That’s taken from David Goldman’s story on CNNMoney)

As an Apple fanboy, I can’t say I’m surprised. But I do have to wonder how the company will top this — topping this is what shareholders would expect.

Unlike the iPad and iPhone, I can’t say I see much use for the Apple Watch coming in April. If you need to carry the phone to use the watch to its full potential, why do you need the watch?

My guess is that, sometime in 2017 or 2018, iPhone 8 or 9 will be the killer device that replaces the obsolete iPhone 6. And then, the numbers for the 2014 holiday season might get i-dwarfed. 

1)  It’s Tuesday, January 27, 2015. It’s 75 days until Opening Night at Wrigley Field, 165 days until Independence Day and far too long until it’s sunny and warm.

2)  Some ingrates who live west of the Walt Whitman Mall and Adventureland on Long Island are kvetching this morning that the overnight snowstorm didn’t deliver the dump that the National Weather Service forecast.

      There are two things we now know. One is that the storm tracked further east than the Weather Service forecast. The other is that it didn’t track far enough east to miss people entirely — there’s 10 inches of snow in parts of Queens and more than two feet in some areas of eastern Long Island and southeast Connecticut.

     We know these things because they happened. We didn’t know them 24 hours ago, when we leaned on the veterans of the National Weather Service to tell us what to expect.

     They didn’t shake a Magic 8 Ball or consult a Ouija board. They didn’t put dried flowers in a bowl and see which way the wind shifted them. They used their expertise and their computers, and made the best forecast they could — given that the storm is incapable of communicating its intentions in perfect English.

     Which is not the language of some of the Weather Service’s critics on social media. This sample from this morning: Its a bit rediculous, you people and the weather channel constantly stir up people into a frenzy when you put out alerts on these storms. You stir everyone up into a panic and then sit back and say, oh well our predictions were wrong… seriously? If i was wrong this many times at work, i wouldnt have a job. You people are pathetic…

     There is also criticism of the government leaders who shut down New Jersey and New York. This comment about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie: Perhaps this underscores the over reactive personality of Gov. Christie and demonstrates how he might react a real national crisis….POORLY

      Now there’s a snowball’s chance in hell I’d vote for Chris Christie for anything. But he swore an oath to protect the people of New Jersey, and he fulfilled it. So did Andrew Cuomo, Bill de Blasio and other officials through the region.

      The National Weather Service’s New York office issued a Facebook post this morning that seemed somewhat apologetic (although not an actual apology). “The science of forecasting storms, while continually improving, still can be subject to error, especially if we’re on the edge of the heavy precipitation shield,” it reads. “Efforts, including research, are already underway to more easily communicate that forecast uncertainty.”

      My two cents is that the Weather Service did a terrific job, as it always does. It owes us no apologies. We owe it a little gratitude for keeping our lives in their focus.

3)  Please, please, please get this straight: WINTER STORMS DON’T HAVE NAMES! Juno can be a beach in Normandy where Canadians especially proved their valor, a movie with Ellen Page (also Canadian) and, of course, a Roman goddess.

Because some marketer decided that it would help a TV network (I don’t understand how, but I’ll let the social media experts explain it), there are supposedly serious people calling this snowstorm by a name. The proper name is “That Snowstorm in Late January” for the rest of 2015, “That Snowstorm in Late January Last Year” in 2016 and “That Snowstorm in Late January of ’15” thereafter.

4) The Koch brothers should learn something from the snowstorm.

The billionaire industrialists plan to spend $900 million in next year’s election cycle, promoting conservative causes and pushing for Republican control of Congress, the statehouses and — one would assume — the White House.

That’s more than twice as much as they spent in 2012, according to The New York Times. And there’s the catch. Despite that money, President Obama was re-elected and the Senate remained Democratic.

Large expenditures would seem to stack the deck. And, yes, as we saw last November, it can work.

But, like the snowstorm forecasts, big money is not a sure thing.  And I know that if I spent $900 million on conservative causes like the Kochs, and then, come Jan. 20, 2017, watched Bernie Sanders take the oath on the Capitol steps, I would be really pissed.

5) Indiana’s version of the old Soviet TASS is coming.

    According to The Indianapolis Star, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is starting a state-run news service, operated in part by members of his communications staff. State officials will write up news releases as if they were news stories for publication in some of the Indiana’s smaller newspapers.

    The Star quotes one of those publishers as hating the idea.

    “[The] notion of elected officials presenting material that will inevitably have a pro-administration point of view is antithetical to the idea of an independent press,” Jack Roland, publisher of the Portland Commercial Review, tells the paper.

    I suspect Pence, who might have thoughts of seeking the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, would bristle at the comparison made in the first graf. Or he might just shake it off — and have his tame news service write a story about winning a journalism award for integrity that his staff creates. Because once you start down this slope, it’s hard to stop.

1) It’s Monday, January 26, 2015. It’s 6 days until the Super Bowl, 21 days until Presidents Day and 54 days until spring.

2) I’m especially thinking about spring. The New York metropolitan area is about to get nailed with what could be the worst snowstorm in its history. 1888. 1947. Fuggedaboudit. So spring can’t come fast enough for this scribe.

3) The folks at Five-Thirty-Eight point out that, should the blizzard forecasts prove accurate, six of the 10 biggest snowstorms in New York’s history will have occurred since 2000. 

Now, I’m willing to guarantee some TV scholar or wisecracking lawmaker will use this fact as evidence that global warming is bunk.

And the problem is that calling it “global warming” has actually minimized what’s going on. It’s “climate change,” and anyone with eyes and a little sense of history knows what that means. It’s not just the fact that snowstorms, thunderstorms, hurricanes and the like are bigger than they used to be, but big storms happen more frequently than they did when I was younger. It seems as though we get into these patterns that produce these massive weather events, and that poses a safety risk for millions of people.

4)  Donald Trump is apparently ticked off that “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd scoffed at the idea that Trump is “seriously” considering a presidential run. 

Actually, Mr. Todd and I should both be ashamed of ourselves.

Putting “Donald Trump” and “seriously” in the same sentence — as I did in the first sentence of this section — is a violation of reason and sensibility, no matter what the context. It insults people’s intelligence. I apologize.

5) A new documentary on sexual assault at the nation’s leading campuses is creating a buzz at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s great that “The Hunting Ground” (whose backers include my former employer, CNN) can focus attention on this issue.

I’m looking forward to seeing it when CNN airs it sometime this year.

The Rolling Stone article about the University of Virginia that created such a furor late last year was a setback for those who believe this problem is a scourge. By not talking to anyone at the fraternity in question, the writer and editors left questions about the credibility of the young woman who was the story’s subject. That stunk.

I have no sympathy for a mindset that sees young women as prizes, commodities or notches on a belt. I want the film’s producers and backers to make an ironclad case against that mentality and rout it from every campus in the nation. And what I don’t want is some well-lawyered fraternity or sports program to come back and say, “They didn’t give us a fair shake. They never talked to us. We weren’t allowed to give our side.”

Let them give their side, as distasteful as it would be. I have no doubt young women who make accusations will be tarred as someone less than idyllic.

But sexual activity without informed, clear-headed consent is rape. Let that truth prevail, and if those accused choose to sully a young woman’s reputation instead of explain their own conduct, hold their goddamn feet to the fire.

No, it’s not.

So why is this Web site called Subjectism?

The original name was supposed to be The Subject Is M…, and every topic would begin with the letter M. Being that I’m Mark M. Meinero, I have an affinity for the letter.

But I registered the site as subjectism.com, not thesubjectism.com. And the letter M is not as topic friendly as I originally thought — unless I wanted every other post to be entitled “My, etc.”

So then I had to think about justifying “Subjectism.”

And here’s how I do it (wish me luck!):

I really don’t want to write about personalities or trivialities. (I’m sure I’ll slip into it) I want to write about real issues, real things that happen. Bruce Jenner’s current gender doesn’t interest me. The fact that President Obama mentioned the rights of transgendered people in the State of the Union address does.

Plus, there’s the idea of making up a word. That, I like.

So we’ll try this. I’m sure there’s some other name I can come up with if this doesn’t work. But this sounds right to me for now.