'Bred Crumbs
03.21.03
Thanks to Alex for the pointer to Salam's blog from Baghdad. The matter-of-fact courage and even humor here amaze me.
Where is my exhibitionist neighbor* in all this? It's a beautiful day; why isn't he out on his balcony, masturbating for peace?
* If you tried this link earlier and found it wanting, my apologies. The referenced entry keeps disappearing inexplicably. Ev, once you're all situated at Google, can fixing the Blogger archiving be the first thing you do? Please?
03.20.03
There is this thing called shitting your own bed. It is such an obviously bad idea that even the dumbest of mutts doesn't do it.
And yet, hundreds of people in San Francisco are doing it right now.
Puffed up with the same intense self-righteousness that helped drive Bush to bully the rest of the world* and plot the war, they're disrupting America's most anti-war major city as if the city itself had launched the missiles. And no matter how much traffic they snarl and how much they wind up hurting an already unemployment-ridden economy, it's not going to stop the war in any way.
Meanwhile, thanks squarely to these assholes, former sympathizers like me shift several swift degrees to the right, to the extent that I'm seeing footage of them blocking intersections and thinking, maybe there's a use for SUVs after all.
* Link via Jonno.
03.19.03
Here's what I did back twelve years ago during Round 1 that I'm not doing this time: obsess over TV coverage of the war. An occasional check of the news will do it, and the rest of the time, it's on with other things.
Why not? I can do even less about it all now that it's started than I could when it was just the White House telling me my opinion didn't matter. Well, I guess I could throw myself off a bridge or get in the way of other local citizens even though they largely share my doubts, but I'm really unclear on what all that's supposed to accomplish. So, no. I won't do that, and I won't glue my eyes to the set just because that awful Aaron Brown is smirking and speculating wildly while one corner of the screen shows endless shots of nothing happening, or while a tape of Bush is playing for the umpteenth time in hours but is still labeled BREAKING NEWS.
I will do my best (and so far, a decent job) not to consume myself in worry. I will light candles for peace and hope and the safety of people's loved ones, but I will work, I will tend to my stuff, I will divert myself. I recommend you do the same.
03.17.03
Over the weekend, I hit upon an unexpected side benefit of Robbie's homemade PVR: I can pump Internet radio through the surround sound in his livingroom, thus escaping the sorry state of local commercial radio.*
Or that was the theory. The trick is finding a surviving station worth listening to. radio.wazee tides me over for a little while, but I need some more options. Any suggestions?
* What of the dance station I was so enamored of? you may ask. Well, I lost interest once it became clear, in only a couple of months, that the station's total playlist numbers no more than about fifty songs.
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