And not exactly the way they probably meant. Grabbed from recent visits to the MySpace login page:

Wow. Mitt Romney?

MySpace has completely redefined the word "cool."

Also, "new," come to think of it.

I’m way behind in posting stuff from this trip, a situation which won’t be changing anytime soon, so bear with me.

But Montserrat. Man.

When I was in college, I first heard of Montserrat as the tropical haven where Beatles producer George Martin had set up a recording studio frequented by everyone from The Police to Elton John to Stevie Wonder to Lou Reed.

I read a little about it, and it sounded fantastic, a faraway and exotic place I never imagined I’d see.

Unfortunately, the island was largely wiped out by its long-dormant volcano in 1995. The capital of Plymouth was completely engulfed, the airport was destroyed, and about two-thirds of the residents left and never came back.

These days, most of the island is a closed-off Forbidden Zone (actually, they call it the "exclusion zone," but same thing). In the last few months, the volcano has even started to get all rumbly again.

Still the remaining locals are doing their best to make a go of it, hoping to market (a) the island’s lush beauty to adventurous tourists, and (b) large swaths of uninhabitable rock as building supplies to less unfortunate islands. I figured what the hell and flew over.

I was one of only three passengers on the flight in. This didn’t bode well for the whole tourism thing.

The island truly is gorgeous. In its day, it must have been one of the most beautiful places on earth. On the west coast north of the exclusion zone, there are still barely-touristed beaches you can spend some of the nicest days of your life on.

You can even spot occasional moments of marvelous dark humor.

But what the travel guides I read never mentioned — but common sense should have told me — is that most of the people you meet in Montserrat are still the same survivors who lost everything. Their lives have never been the same. And most of their families have moved away. There is an emptiness here.

And when the volcano is in sight and a resident raises their eyes, there’s often a haunted look on their face that soon tries to reproduce itself on yours.

And on an island this small, it’s impossible not to be reminded.

If you’re in the Caribbean, it’s worth a visit and a stay. You’ll see beautiful stuff every waking minute, your memories will ache with the beauty and sadness, and you’ll be helping nice people who could use a break.

Montserrat. Man.

Prisoner of Trebekistan gets a nod in this Detroit News story about the way quiz shows seem to have changed over the years.

I’d like to elaborate, btw.  There’s a frequent charge that our country has dumbed down, and if you compare the questions currently asked on Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader? (which I didn’t even know existed) to the questions asked on, say, Twenty-One, there seems to be a prima facie case.

And granted, there are days when I think the future of quiz shows will be a show called Who Can Push The Big Red Button, with ten beautiful girls standing next to ten three-foot-wide buttons, nine of which are blue.  Pushing the lone red button gets the contestant $50,000.  Can the contestant do it?  Join host Don Imus and find out.

But the big-money questions on Jeopardy! are still pretty damn tough.  The big-money Millionaire questions are, too.  Just like in the 1950s.  I think shows like Deal Or No Deal don’t tell us anything about any possible changes in our knowledge or intelligence; people have enjoyed games of chance since long before TV was invented.  Deal Or No Deal’s current popularity may only tell us that our culture intuits luck as a factor in economic success a bit more, and if so, that would be a logical reflection of some of the structural changes we’ve seen in the last quarter-century or so.

There was a time when working-class people like my dad could very predictably get a good, stable job, buy a home, and have a relatively stable life, purely through hard work, which was extremely well-valued.  Not quite so much anymore.  Interesting to notice that Deal Or No Deal’s contestants seem to be consistently working class.

Talking out of my ass, as usual.  But that’s what I think, anyway.

Oh, and none of this is in Prisoner of Trebekistan.  Which is barely even about Jeopardy! in some ways.  But a lot of you know that already.

Spotted on the island of Nevis.  Clearly, some human being has been enchanted and recast in the form of a goat.

Seems happy enough about it, though.

As a long-suffering Cleveland native, I’m certainly used to Indian fans willing to find joy in even the worst defeats. But this is a whole other level.

These Indian fans (as in India India) were cheering wildly — IN-DI-A! IN-DI-A! etc. — yesterday at the Cricket World Cup:

This enthusiasm comes despite the fact that India was eliminated from the tournament almost three weeks ago.

The two teams actually on the field were England and Bangladesh.

Imagine how vocal these folks would be if their team were actually on the same continent.

Gotta admire the energy.