Two measures of how small the world is getting:

First: I didn’t realize it until after it aired or I might have blogged in advance, but tonight the Discovery Channel aired an episode of their Perfect Disasters series that I worked on, in which Sydney is almost destroyed by a hypothetical firestorm.  My contribution was fairly small; I was contacted by the British producers just before the episode was about to go into production in Sydney, so my bits are quite teeny, and the credit goes elsewhere for almost everything.  Point is: my contributions went off to the UK and then Down Under without even leaving this coffee table.

I know you all use email, too, and have far-flung friends, of course.  Neat, huh?  But dang, seeing a tape of the ep tonight (in which almost all of the characters are whimsically named for fellow Jeopardy! players, incidentally; it was sort of a long writing night, and it seemed funny to me for some reason, which explains why an Aussie firefighter named “Ken” was busy rescuing “Professor Dan”), it just really struck me how small this planet is.  I’ve never even met anyone else involved in the program, but there go “Kate” and “Eric” et al, scurrying around a bushfire in Oz.  Wow.

Second, I flipped on the tube to keep me company while writing just now, and the DirecTV dish — nothing unusual these days — has a live Indian broadcast of the Oz cricket team playing Bangladesh, live from Dhaka.  I’m sitting here watching Bangladeshis cheering madly in between Indian commercials for cell phones, air conditioners, hair gel, and Indian Oil gas stations — the exact same broadcast millions of people all over the subcontinent are probably watching right now. 

The Hindi, by the way, translates as “my gas company was willing to do business with the Union Carbide assets of Dow Chemical, but Bhopal, Schmopal — if this XtraPower Fleet Card program can save me a few rupees at the pump, what the hell.”  (The deal was called off, incidentally, after Bhopalis sent protest letters to the prime minister written in their own blood.  You get the feeling that sort of thing wouldn’t work here, though.  It might only make Cheney hungry for steak.) 

Anyway, yes, global communications, nothing new, obviously.  Heck, the Beatles played “All You Need Is Love” to some insanely huge live worldwide audience almost forty years ago.  But what’s amazing, really, is just how ordinary bridging these crazy distances has become.  It’s fabulous, and we should appreciate it, I think.

Maybe we (and everyone else) would bomb people less.  Couldn’t hurt.