This is maybe just idiosyncratic of me, but I think the last three links in this MeFi post are absolutely hilarious. I don’t even know the songs. (OK, actually the last one isn’t *as* funny. But go for the Christina Aguilera and the one with Björk, fer sure.)
I’ll again just direct you to a metafilter post, and perhaps the the wikipedia article on synchronicity, because (as if we had any doubts), Douglas Adams was really on to something.
Robert Jordan has a life-threatening disease. I am now two books behind in the Wheel of Time series, which I started reading in 1996. (Holy crap that was a decade ago!*) I’ll probably have to start over before going forward, but I haven’t had the time to do this since going back to school. He has one more book to publish in the WoT series, and about “thirty years” of writing yet to do, and he says he is “going to finish all of those books, all of them, and that is that.”
I’m sure I’m not alone in hoping for the best result from the treatment he will be receiving in the next month. Good luck, Mr. Jordan.
Representative John Conyers Jr. from Michigan assembled a report on the Bush administration’s ethical and legal transgressions over the past 6 years, presented it to Congress in December as a case for impeachment, and it was, of course, promptly ignored. This excerpt from a Harper’s Magainze essay about that report is worth a read.
I mean, if you’re feeling like you could really use something depressing to focus on just now.
Drawing on evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of credible witnesses—government officials both extant and former, journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and foreign—the authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud, the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth, secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from the truth. The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the report’s corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords of the flies weren’t in the business of killing people, they would be seen as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of the absurd.
Before reading the report, I wouldn’t have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don’t know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country’s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world’s evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation’s wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal—known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child’s tricycle. Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?