Clear, clean sunshine this Friday morning on California’s north coast — not a cloud in sight, and frost on nearby rooftops, first time this year, I recollect.
Thirty-three degrees reportedly within the hour right now, and there’s appearance of some wispy ground in nearby trees — of what can spied from a small back patio situated in an apartment complex.

Odd-sense-to-it news this day already (via BusinessInsider: ‘Saudi Arabia announced a 2015 budget with a huge deficit Thursday as the world’s largest crude exporter begins to feel the impact of its own decision not to shore up oil prices.’

Way-way-too-rich kind of crazy with ulterior motives.

(Illustration: Tessa Hunt-Woodland‘s ‘Solar Flare,’ found here).

And another quirky item, maybe of some type circular rhythm of corrupted greed (via USAToday): ‘The Seth Rogen/James Franco comedy at the heart of the controversy involving Sony hackers racked up nearly $1 million on Christmas Day in 300 independent movie theaters around the country, according to Variety.’
Rogen and company are going to make a shitload of cash off this one, way-unintentionally, of course.

And regrettably, this type shit released Wednesday has become not-so-odd (via Bloomberg);

The National Security Agency today released reports on intelligence collection that may have violated the law or U.S. policy over more than a decade, including unauthorized surveillance of Americans’ overseas communications.
The NSA, responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, released a series of required quarterly and annual reports to the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board that cover the period from the fourth quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2013.
The heavily-redacted reports include examples of data on Americans being e-mailed to unauthorized recipients, stored in unsecured computers and retained after it was supposed to be destroyed, according to the documents.
They were posted on the NSA’s website at around 1:30 p.m. on Christmas Eve.
…
In 2012, an analyst conducted surveillance “on a U.S. organization in a raw traffic database without formal authorization because the analyst incorrectly believed that he was authorized to query due to a potential threat,” according to the fourth-quarter report from 2012.
The surveillance yielded nothing.

If not mistaken, torture amounted to the same thing, huh?

And hard to believe sometimes the speed of time (via Yahoo): ‘When a 9.15-magnitude quake opened a fault line deep beneath the ocean on Dec. 26 a decade ago, it triggered a wave as high as 17.4 meters (57 feet) which crashed ashore in more than a dozen countries, wiping some communities off the map in seconds.’
In the US anyway, Hurricane Katrina coming nine months later stripped away memory cells.

Outside, the sky is still bright and shiny, oddly onward into the weekend, so to speak…