So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 10) How homes and/or home improvement only lead to sorrow

This past weekend, I went to Home Depot and bought a boatload of redwood boards so I could make a third raised bed in time for fall planting season. You know why I'm regretting my ability to whip through a to-do now? Because ...

While some people were busy reminding us all there is no situation in modern America that can't be summed up with "Well, you chicks bring this on yourselves with existing and all," others were noticing that holy crap, the same Russian/Ukrainian hacker ring that hacked 40,000,000 accounts in last year's Target data breach is back for a sequel: Home Depot. This breach could be bigger, affecting all 2,200 U.S. stores and stretching back at least five months.

So what? This latest breach reminds us that hey, U.S. retail chains are continuing to expose customers to financial vulnerability because they are using magnetic-stripe credit cards instead of adopting the much more secure chip-and-pin credit card technology that would reduce these kind of data breaches. This is, in part, because retailers, card issuers and payment processors are busy arguing over who would bear the costs over moving to a chip-and-pin system.

Who cares? Some would say we don't, because these retail data breaches are so dismayingly common, we're all out of panic or urgency. Also, individual consumers have very little power to persuade retailers or card issuers to just get on issuing the chip-and-pin technology in the U.S. already.

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Speaking of home improvement -- or lack thereof -- there's a new housing crisis alarming demographers in the U.S.: "Increasingly, the housing stock built by and for Baby Boomers doesn't meet anyone's needs—neither a younger generation looking for starter homes that don't exist, nor an older generation confronted by accessibility challenges." The answer is not merely "Just retrofit your house so you can shuffle around in it, oldie!" because senior quality of life extends beyond individual housing: Most (car-centric) communities don't have the transit or social services infrastructure in place to handle an aged population.

So what? Community infrastructure doesn't spring up overnight, and the lack of housing-market liquidity means that more people will be aging in a place that's not thoughtfully designed to accommodate them or incorporate them in daily life.

Who cares? One would hope we all do, because we're not unfeeling monsters who fling our most vulnerable populations into the gutters the minute they cease to make anyone any more. Then again, given how casual we are about the high rates of food insecurity among American children, maybe we are.

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Let us stop contemplating money and mortality and gaze instead on the radiant visage of Dwayne Johnson, who is finally -- finally! -- signing a letter of intent to commit to either the Marvel- or DC-Universe, and has chosen to play Black Adam in a DC comics movie to be made, um, whenever. Black Adam had a fairly cuckoo bananapants plotline in the weekly "52" series back in the Aughties -- he marries a chick, turns her into Isis, gives away part of his power to her little brother, then watches his new brother-in-law get eaten by a talking croc with hipster sneakers (I am not making this up), and that somehow turns into him taking on the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, becoming a widower and blowing up the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It gets weirder from there. Again, not making this up.

Anyway, who better to sell you on ridiculous plotlines wrapped into a bitter candy coating of violent vengeance than one of the world's most committed WWE superstars? I would watch this man in anything and this piece in the Toast on what Dwayne Johnson must be like as a friend speaks to me.