Home from Tobago (about which more shortly), I go online today to peek at what I’ve missed, and holy crap — this government’s constant lurch into a lunatic parody of a corrupt third-world regime remains unstoppable:

About $4 billion in Iraq war spending “could not be tracked,” although the war party illegally hijacked $2.5 billion to prep for the Iraq war while Bush was claiming he was still seeking peace.  Meanwhile, after the deadliest month so far this year in Iraq — a war that is supposedly going to stop terrorism, remember — we find a worldwide three-fold explosion in terrorism.

Didn’t see it much on CNN or Fox, but a bipartisan Senate investigation has just blamed Bush — by name — for a delay in the response to Katrina.

But there’s sure plenty of noise from the usual morons about people who love this country wanting to sing the anthem in Spanish.  Lo siento que tan muchas idiotas en mi pa

An acrostic (click to download a better-quality .pdf file) based on a quote from this very site, composed by kind reader Arsino

Heading southeast for about a week.  Not sure what the online access will be like.

If you still see this message after, say, Friday, there isn’t much, or I’m too busy running around to post.  Either way, hoping to have a couple of cool pics and a good story or two shortly.

Stay tuned.

Oh, and please don’t anybody bomb Iran while I’m gone.  Thanks.

UPDATE: I’m here, it’s fascinating, and yep, online access is limited.

But cool pics a-plenty and a good story or two around the end of the week.

But my goodness, judging from the TV ads, India looks like a fabulously itchy place.

I’m keeping myself company while working late (again) with the second cricket test between Oz and Bangladesh, this one from Chittagong.  It seems to be the live Indian feed again, complete with commercials.

It seems like half the ads are for creams and powders to keep your body from spontaneously swelling, turning red, and driving you slowly insane with pain.  This must happen a lot, apparently.  Not being able to understand Hindi makes the whole thing a notch more delirious.  Neat!

Now that I finally have that dang Dermi-Cool jingle out of my head (see earlier post, below, and praise Shiva for the relief), I’m giggling at a competing ad, depicting, in sequence: a fashionable young man in considerable discomfort, a cartoon of a bright red swollen crotch of ambiguous gender, and then the same guy dancing with a cute babe in a disco.

Oddly, a Hindi slogan begins the ad with a little arrow pointing at the guy’s lower torso, but later, the words reappear with the arrow pointing at the cute girl’s lower torso.  I’m guessing that a phrase like “hot body” in Hindu is being remapped to refer to both a man’s itchy groin and a woman’s fantastic butt.  Thus the humor.

Either that, or it just says “abnormally red and swollen genitals.”  Also funny.

(Rainy day?  Make up your own!)

And now as I write this, the damn Dermi-Cool ad is back on!  Crap!  Thande Dermi-Cool ka!  It’s back in my head!  Aaaaahhhhhrrrgggg!

Itchy itchy itchy, this India.  At least judging from the cricket ads, which of course is no way to judge.

I must go there and see someday.

… is that you don’t have to do death every damn year.

I return now, after spending most of the last few days enduring the government’s annual attempt to dazzle me with the four basic mathematical operators before taking large chunks of my money, partly to finance pointless killing in my name.

Without getting into boring detail, my tax situation is a little complex.  Thing is, if you read too closely, the IRS doesn’t exactly help.  Over the weekend, I was instructed in writing to both (a) submit and (b) not submit a particular schedule, and to send the kaboodle to two alternative, mutually exclusive locations.

Yes, I read very carefully, double- and triple-checking.  Eventually, I chose to follow the instructions that looked like they would be seen by more people, choosing safety in numbers.

This way, at least I will have company in jail.