Author: Gary

When I was in college, I tried various methods for waking up in the morning. I found that having the alarm clock next to the bed made it too easy to turn off and go back to sleep. Putting the clock on my desk at the foot of my bed still allowed an easy return to horizontal and, thus, slumber. During a couple of times that I didn’t have a roommate in the second bedroom of my apartment, I put the alarm clock in the bathroom so that I’d need to stand upright and navigate a couple of doorways to make the noise stop.

Even that location had some routine to it that, after a while, I’d probably have been able to do half-asleep with more practice. Technology has an answer: Clocky.

Clocky is an alarm clock that wheels itself away from you and your reach. Alledgedly, it will find different locations each morning. I can imagine after too much drinking and not enough sleep wanting to silence the noisy rodent with a firearm.

I just saw a news wire story about Zawahri calling Bush a lying failure, and it made me think that it could not get much more obvious that military presence and action by the U.S. is exactly what al-Quaeda wants. I mean, they surely know their principal opponent by now, if there was ever any uncertainty at all. This comment will add a nice dampening affect to any intellectual analysis that might be creeping in.

And then I remembered the video for “When Two Tribes Go to War“, which might suggest a solution. Instead of a wrestling match, though, we could send Bush II, Rumsfeld, Cheney, et al, down to Tombstone Iraq to tell al-Quaeda to get out, and then wait for the gunfight to end.

On Day to Day this afternoon, they talked to an 18-year-old high school student who had recently enlisted in the Army, because she wants to be a doctor. The possibility of death in Iraq? No, she doesn’t know — and doesn’t want to know — how many Americans have died there; it really doesn’t matter, because she’s “a strong believer in God”, and if it’s a person’s “time to go”, well, there’s nothing to be done about it. Her initial plan with her recruiter doesn’t have her slated for shipping out, but it might not be long until she joins many like-minded individuals in the desert in a philosophy that unites people across lines of conflict.

Biden was on To the Point this morning, calling for a three-state, federalism solution for Iraq (Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites), which is what I’ve thought should happen for a while now — not that I’m anything like an authority, but I’d much rather see my tax dollars going to try this strategy than our current one, whatever it is.

After adding Rick Steves’s weekly travel show as a podcast to iTunes a few weeks ago, I finally got around to adding a few more podcasts and noticing that the iTunes store has a directory of podcasts. I clicked “Comedy” on the top-level iTunes page for podcasts where I find the president’s weekly radio address (which is also listed in “News & Politics”).

I haven’t added it. I feel like maybe I should, but his now familiar and unvarying delivery of anti-information is one of the many thing I look forward to not hearing after 2008.