Wrap-Up
At last: my favorite end-of-year list.
I have to admit I don't know a fair proportion of the people in the list. I just like the pictures.
Sometimes I try to keep up with the news, since knowing stuff makes end-of-year lists about stuff more meaningful. But to tell the truth, whenever I read a headline, my eyes glaze over by the second or third word.
For example, just from today's New York Times: "Delay Expected In...". Well, what else is new. The delay is always expected to be in. At least, that's what the delay's secretary always tells me when I call. That is, when she's not telling me the delay is currently in a meeting, and can she take a message? Frankly, the New York Times needs better sources.
A more newsworthy headline would be "Delay Expected To Be Late". Except that's more than two or three words, so I wouldn't read it.
"Outside Groups Spend...". Well, duh. Outside groups are always spending. With all that money, you'd think the outside groups would at least offer decent compensation and benefits. But since you're outside the group, they pay you freelance rates at best. With zero health coverage. Such working conditions are particularly exploitative because, outside the group, on assignment all alone, it's easy to get lost and die of exposure. So write your congressman, and dress appropriately!
"U.S. Diplomat Killed...". This headline leaves me hanging. Who did the U.S. diplomat kill, and why? Well, it probably doesn't matter. The U.S. has a hard-line policy of refusing to negotiate with diplomats, no matter how many innocents are killed. And rightly so: to give in would demonstrate to diplomats everywhere that diplomacy gets results.
Anyway, it's all academic. I'm just not motivated to care about the world or anything in it. How can I possibly care about what's going on in the world when the world is so aggressively disinterested in how kissable my lips are?
Benazir Bhutto assassinated? Well, if she didn't want to be assassinated, she shouldn't have had herself flown to where the assassins are! She should have skipped assassin country and had herself flown straight to my lips. Lips aren't well-known for their ability to share political power in Muslim nations, but neither are they known for assassinating anybody. Well -- sometimes lips perform character assassination, but everybody knows that characters aren't people.
Third anniversary of the catastrophic tidal wave hitting Indonesia? Feh. How about the ninth anniversary of my face getting hit by a tongue wave?
Now, Indonesians are known for many things -- being Muslim, making Nike sneakers, drowning when underwater -- but they are not known for the frequency with which they make out. If they had wanted to solve that particular national crisis, all they had to do was hop a plane to my house. Then they wouldn't have been on the beach when the wave hit. Really, they have no one but themselves to blame for how things turned out.
Iowa primaries neck-and-neck? Candidates pleading for last-minute donations to put them over the top? No thanks. They don't talk about the issues that matter. If any of them even hinted at imposing term limits on my lack of lip-locking, I would donate like a shot. I would go door-to-door in any weather to talk passionately about this pressing issue. But my lips are off the table. It's just another example of the disconnect between Washington insiders and the American people.