Like a Rock to the Forehead

Today I saw this headline:

U.S. May Have Botched Training of Iraqis

May have.

I didn't bother to read the article. Don't these people watch The Daily Show?

Putting the Terror Back in Terrorism

Suicide bomber at a bakery.

EILAT, Israel (AP) -- A Palestinian suicide bomber attacked a bakery in this southern Israeli resort town on Monday, killing three other people, police said. It was the first suicide bombing in Israel in nine months and the first ever to hit Eilat, Israel's southernmost city.

Eilat is a beautiful place at the southern tip of Israel. The weather there is so mild that people sleep in tents that they've pitched on the beach. The water there is a beautiful turquoise blue, and fish swim through it displaying their fantastically bright colors that I thought only happened under a black light until I saw them in person. I've been there on vacation twice, and neither time did it occur to me that I might get blown up if I stopped in a shop to buy some rolls. Constantly thinking about being blown up during every day events is terrifying.

An Islamic Jihad Web site said the attack was meant to help bring an end to weeks of Palestinian infighting that has 60 people in the Gaza Strip since December.

"The operation has a clear message to the Palestinian rivals. It is necessary to end the infighting and point the guns toward the occupation that has hurt the Palestinian people," the site said.

Damn. In my passive-aggressive way, I was actually hoping that they would just continue the infighting until all the violent ones were dead. I'm not even going to ask my characteristic "is that wrong?", because I'm pretty sure it is, and I don't actually care.

More Personal Crap

Oh, sure, I could pontificate about the Middle East, or about the rights of women, or about Ted Kennedy and his rant about minimum wage that I just found courtesy of Blanton's and Ashton's, but no, I'd rather talk about the fire in my kitchen yesterday.

My dad set a Hot Pocket on fire in the microwave. I didn't know you could do that. He smothered the flames, put it in a garbage bag, and then put the bag on the back deck, where it proceeded to ignite a deck chair cushion. Alas, the deck chair is lost, but we still have a deck, and a house, and all.

Unfortunately, we also have a holy hell of a lot of smoke. I didn't even think about how the smell of smoke gets into everything. My room is across the hall from the kitchen. My clothes smell faintly of charred pepperoni and plastic. Every once in a while I catch a little whiff of this, and it's driving me insane. Argh.

Yes, we bought a new microwave already. I cannot imagine living a day in my house without one. Not for me, mind you, but my dad refuses to admit that he can turn on a stove burner.

Pressed for Time II

Iwish I had more time to blog, but at least I had time to read about the Libby trial at Jill's place. She's Brilliant, you know.

Odd Horizon

Listening to the radio this morning, I was faced with the concept of an election pitting Hillary Clinton against Rudy Guiliani. Neither one of them is my favorite candidate for the job. I feel that she's too focused on politics (the schmoozing kind), and I feel that he's a pompous jerk who sometimes pushes for the wrong thing based on his personal feelings. Still, when I thought about it for a few seconds, I realized that both of them are light years better than what we've got, and I've lived through this (so far).

Basically, my brain keeps telling me that any new person at all will be better. It's getting in my way, though, because I don't want to settle for "better", I want to actualy work towards "good".

So.. That Happened

First - an apology. I haven't' been blogging because I suddenly seem to have a real job that expects me to do work during the day. I apologize for my absence and hope I can start to work out my own darn schedule.

Second - the story I had to tell the world. I was driving up 287 through Boonton, when I saw a blue streak go across the sky. It looked exactly like something burning up upon entry into our atmosphere. It did not look large. So there I was, thinking about how cool it is that I finally saw an actual meteor when they're supposed to be hitting the earth in droves anyway. all the time, when something Else happened.

There was a giant bird flying over the highway. Not unnaturally giant, just a really big bird specimen. It was the kind of bird you look at and say, "Man, that's a big bird!". And then you realize that you've made a Sesame Street reference without meaning to, and you don't mention it, and you hope to god that no one else does, either, but if you're with my dad, of course he mentions it. *sigh*. Anyway, either a crazy downdraft hit, or the bird went insane and decided to land in the middle lane of the highway in the middle of traffic. It almost hit the car in the middle lane, swerved up a bit and over towards me, and avoided my windshield by feet. Feet! And I'm telling you, the wingspan of that bird was nearly the width of my windshield. This was the point when I noticed that the bird was an eagle. Not a bald eagle, but it definitely had that head and the pointy beak. Like this one.

So there you go. Meteor and what I'm pretty darned sure was an eagle that's not supposed to be in the eastern U.S., all in one 40-second period. I don't think the rest of my day is going to be able to keep up.

I Feel Naive

I keep hoping that the current administration is suddenly going to start acting reasonable, and that things are going to level off right in the middle of the road, where they should be most of the time, anyway.

Something I heard on the radio this morning made me start thinking about this. Someone was reading the news, and they were saying how the call for more troops doesn't meet approval with "the Democrats", but the fact is that what we're doing now isn't working, and many people agree that just suddenly pulling out of Iraq would absolutely not work, so something in the middle, maybe even this exact proposed surge, could be the option to put Iraq and the U.S. in a better place.

It's not that I'm sure that I agree with this, it's just that I was so pleasantly surprised to hear it phrased as reasonable suggestions instead of straight slanderous insults that I'm thrown off of my usual game.

Or maybe I'm just a Pollyanna.

More Stuff That I'm Thinking

Because I figure if you're here, reading, you actually care.

I'm thinking that much in the same manner that you cannot get blood from a stone, you cannot get 20,000 more troops from an organization that does not have 20,000 more troops to give.

Delaware Democratic Sen. Joe Biden, a contender for his party's 2008 presidential nomination, told MSNBC that Bush was making a mistake by planning to put more troops into volatile Baghdad and needed to work toward a political solution in Iraq between Sunnis and Shi'ites.

"I think the president has got it backwards again. This escalation, he's going to come to regret. We've tried it twice," Biden said.

Biden's a contender for the '08 nomination?. Really? Because you couldn't pay me enough to vote for the man who sided with the credit card companies that rule his state on the bankruptcy bill. That bill really pissed me off. Delaware is small, but it's full of pointy bits.


So there you go, my disjointed thoughts for the day.

Rabbit Season, Duck Season...

...nope, it's Diet Season. New Year's is resolution time, when a gazillion people go on diets. For those of you who think that pills on the American market are the answer to your weight loss woes, let me once again remind you that pills are crap. If pills worked, we'd all take them, and we'd all be skinny. Because I know this, I am not at all surprised when I read that the Federal Trade Commission is fining 4 diet pill manufacturers for false claims.

[FTC Commissioner Deborah Platt] Majoras, speaking on TODAY, said the FTC investigation found that the marketers of Xenadrine had a study that said those who took a placebo actually lost more weight than those taking the pill.

"They not only didn't have studies to support the claim, they actually had a study that went the other way," she said.

I guess that there are some diet pills out there that really do work, like phen-fen, which was dangerous enough for the FDA to yank, and, of course, speed, but, um...

Yeah, I'd take them too, if they'd let me. Which brings us to the next article on MSNBC, Reading diet articles linked to eating disorders.

Don't Believe in Much

...and I certainly don't believe that Someone named "the Lord" talks to Pat Robertson.

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - In what has become an annual tradition of prognostications, religious broadcaster Pat Robertson predicted Tuesday that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.

"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show "The 700 Club" on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."

Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.

No offense, but it doesn't take a lot of scamming skill to predict mass killing in a country that's involved in a war. Just sayin'.