My 2-year-old can hear the refrigerator door opening from across the house, but it’s the distinctive squeal of a garbage truck’s brakes that makes her drop everything and race to the door.

Every morning when she wakes up, she asks “Garbage truck coming today?” in a hopeful little voice.

Six days of the week she’s disappointed. But when she goes to bed Thursday night, I get to say, “The garbage truck will be here tomorrow.”

Her eyes light up as she exclaims, “It’s Friday!”

(Repetition is everything in a toddler’s world.)

Quite a lot of people insist that the cure for certain afflictions which plague our planet, chief among them its increasingly fevered brow, is technology.

I happen to agree.

Yet implicit in this attitude, it seems to me, is the belief that this technology will inevitably be of the “new” variety.

If any reasonable doubt remained about the absurdity of the claim that smoking marijuana is a victimless crime, one toppled tree has crushed it.

The same tree that crushed the life out of Steven A. Uptegrove.

Hitler died 64 years ago, but his name — or at least his moustache — gets in the news so often you’d think the old monster was still kicking around.

Although he’d be 120, and so possibly incapable of the sort of evil that defined his life.

Probably you’ve noticed that Hitler has become a favorite, albeit a posthumous, tool of propagandists who endeavor to make their political foes look especially nasty, but who disdain devoting a lot of time to assembling a logical case to bolster their allegations.

These lazy molders of public opinion seem to have decided that it’s a silly exercise to exhaust themselves with hours of tedious research when there’s a perfectly good four-letter word available.

That word being “Nazi.”