Milky Way Week in Review


Our cousin and Canadian correspondent, Lemuel Dash, reports that folks are wearing anti-infection masks on the streets of Toronto. There's a press report that the reputedly laid back and tolerant Canadians are casting a suspicious eye at anybody that looks Chinese. And somebody else is reporting that so far there are no SARS cases in Japan, despite the frequent traffic to and from Hong Kong. That complicates the "yellow peril" picture, but it won't stop the kind of folks who treat anybody with a vaguely unfamiliar skin tone as al Qeda.


Brother Morgan (and for all we know, he might be a Zen monk by now) was impressed to see his nearby city of Eureka, CA make the Big Crawl on CNN for having the highest gasoline prices in the U.S. Unfortunately, the price they quoted was 5 cents a gallon less than what Morgan had just paid.

What's with this Google news site? Their computers seem to have these recurring obsessions-one week it was the Dixie Chicks (same basic story headlined for five days straight) and lately it's been cannibalism among dinosaurs (with a variation lately on cannibalism among early humans.)

Back to Boredom Already?


I can't believe it! No more white explosions in the green night, and embedded reporters with movie star matted hair and theatrically dirty faces? No more maps and pointers, anchors with caffeine voices, city by city, block by block? Air strikes, armored columns, firefights---all gone already?

And the vocabulary we've just barely learned: embedded, regime change, decapitation. Of course that last one turned a little grisly, when the U.S. tried to "decapitate" the Iraqi regime with four huge bombs that left a sixty foot deep crater where a restaurant used to be. They may not have gotten Saddam, but they definitely separated the head from the body of a young woman. But no use dwelling on that. We kept the ugly wounds, the pain and the dying babies off screen.

But how could it end so quickly? One minute we're watching the rowdy crowds in Baghdad and the Marines pulling down that statue of Saddam. And the next minute...The stock market tanks, and the cable channels start reporting other stories. I guess that was the signal:The stock traders all watched the statue come down, and when they turned back to the business at hand, what they saw was the same old screwed up fading economy that was there before all the adrenalin started pumping and the flag began to wave?

Could this be the end of blowing up stuff? Now it's all talk of reconstruction, restoring order (those burning hulks of cars are pretty neat, though) and putting together some government. And, oh yeah, the whatayacallit, hue-mani-tarian aid. Borrrrrrrrrrrrrinnnnnnnng.

And SARS and North Korea and the old Israel/Palestine, Britian/Ireland stuff had the gall not to solve themselve while we weren't looking. They're still there! Really, REALLY boring.

Damn, we're back to the same old same old, and it's a hell of a letdown. But wait---why is Rumsfeld talking about Syria all the time now? Could it be---sure, why not! We've got all those troops over there, all those planes and tanks and stuff, still in good shape. Two wars for almost the price of one! Wind it up! Let's crusade!