bunt sign

Tuesday, January 22, 2002

Well, I was going to write my own clever interpretation of the way the U.S. is treating its prisoners of war, who are not really prisoners of war because there is no war and if there was a war they would be prisoners of war and would have to be treated as such, whereas since there is no war (except when it's convenient to call it war) they're just detainees that we happened to catch fighting on the wrong side of the non-war, and they're much too dangerous to get the rights we would give to them if they were mere prisoners of war, and who says we're torturing anybody, we're not, we're abiding by all the conventional conventions of the Geneva Convention, at least all the ones we think are necessary to abide by, considering there's no war and therefore there are no prisoners of war. But I decided not to write that, because the Red Cross seems to be satisfied that we're not doing anything wrong (then why does it look so bad?), except (and the Red Cross didn't mention this; this is my own opinion) we seem to be thumbing our nose at the rest of the civilized world, which is hardly ever a good idea, especially when we're at war. Oh. Right. No war.




So what can I write about? Work? I wrote about that yesterday, didn't I? About how well things were going? Yeah, well, that was yesterday, which was Monday but not really because it was a holiday for a lot of people, and there was no mail, which is really the key, not the quiet phones but the empty mailbox, because today I got two days' worth of mail, three if you count Sunday, and it kept me busy half the day just opening it, and the other half of the day trying to figure out what to do with it, and none of the day doing the things that made me so happy to be working yesterday, even though it was a holiday for some people but not me. The lack of a real Monday this week has been rectified. Today was it and then some.




The weather? Does anybody where it's really cold (or where it's really warm but sometimes gets cold, or anywhere else for that matter) want to hear me complain about the fact that it gets down into the twenties at night, that being a little below freezing on the antiquated Fahrenheit scale that's still used in this highly advanced nation because if you said Centigrade most people would have to get out a slide rule and then look for an engineer over the age of fifty to show them how to use it, just to figure out that it's cold? Damn cold? No, I didn't think so (that is, I didn't think anybody would want to hear me complain about the cold, but brrrr.)




looking east

Looking east from the edge of the garden, through the yard and beyond.



One day I'm going to write about TV and how horrible that new show First Monday is despite having James Garner and Joe Mantegna in it, or about football and how the Raiders need to give up whining about the bad call Saturday night even though they're absolutely right that it was a total travesty that flies in the face of fair competition, or about this novel I'm reading, How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby, and how I like the book but it makes me uncomfortable reading something written by a man but told from a woman's point of view even though that's quite possibly a sexist attitude although one could argue (were one so inclined) that it's equally or at least equivalently sexist to accept it without questioning its validity. But I think I'll save those topics for some day when I have nothing to write about. Oh. Right.




previousbunt signemailnext

Latest recommendation:

Saundra, Headspace, January 22, Greetings, Professor Falken

Recent recommendations can always be found on the links page.


One year ago: A Softer Voice and a Sharper Eye
"The cat seemed oblivious, but the birds were obviously nervous."

Two years ago: Monkey With a Pen
"It was so much better in the days when a kid from the neighborhood brought the paper around on his bike every day."


Subscribe to the list to be notified of updates.

Yeah, the bad guys know us and they leave us alone.