One damn glance

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Only light coatings of bloggity goodness for about five more days.  Busy.  Also, there are days I almost can’t look.

Glanced at Google News this morning, and for some reason, the sheer horror of where we are right now really hit me.  Here’s one random day’s news, all of which has now become oddly routine (most of the following, including the first link in every entry, comes straight from the Google News front page):

Iraq: further descent into madness.  Mass hangings by the government.  Even the U.S. State Department admits to death squads in the Iraqi police your tax dollars are helping support.  Saddam’s old torture hole Abu Ghraib is still open, years after it should have been shut down.  But Bagram, the old Soviet machine shop in Afghanistan where U.S.-held prisoners detained without trial have been tortured with mock executions, will stay open.

Next stop: Iran.  With whose army, I have no idea.

Meanwhile, wire reports claim that the Dubai company is bailing on the deal to hand over security at 21 key U.S. ports.  Bush’s bizarre insistence has been weird enough, but the inability of the media to notice that the deal was not for six ports, as you keep seeing — the deal was for twenty-one — is nothing short of amazing.   Any reporter who can’t get that basic fact right two weeks into the story doesn’t deserve a job.  Collect ’em all…

The GOP-controlled Congress is ravaging food health and safety labeling.  And ethics reform?  Are you serious?

In business, the U.S. trade deficit sets yet another new record.

In health, bird flu is about to reach the U.S.  Incidentally, despite that fact that scientists have tracked the virus for years and it has the potential to kill many millions of people, the U.S. government has done little to prepare until very recently.  A massive Katrina may await us.

In the national pastime, the game’s greatest home run hitter has been gorked to the gills on go-juice, something everyone with eyeballs has understood for years.  He’ll just keep on playing, his teammates will close ranks, and nothing will probably happen.  Which is a perfect emblem for the times.

Was it always like this?  Was it really?

Please do not make fun of my deep square leg

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The weekend begins, and while I seem never to stop working, the TV turns only to sport…

Am trying not to blog excessively re cricket, since I don’t want you to hurt your forehead when it bangs into your keyboard as you suddenly drop into deep slumber.

But holiest of holy crap, South Africa had an amazing One Day International against Oz today. I saw the whole deal via DirecTV, TiVo, and lots of fast-forwarding, and it was a heck of a show:

  • The best performance by any bowler in South African ODI history (Makhaya Ntini, 6 for 22).
  • The biggest victory over Australia in South African ODI history (196 runs).
  • The 4th-worst defeat in Oz’ ODI history, and the worst in almost 20 years.

Granted, Oz was missing three of their (I almost wrote "our" — still) best players, and the Newlands in Cape Town is apparently always hard on the team batting second. But wow. I’ve seen autopsies that were a fairer fight.

I’m working late tonight, so for company I’ve got NZ against the Windies from Eden Park right now. (My big Friday night!) This has the makings of another strange match: the Windies, chasing 234 runs, seem to be attempting not to win, but to lose just slightly less horribly as Australia did. So far, they’ve scored seven runs in the first nine overs. This isn’t just care with the new ball; a few more overs of this, and it’s surrender. At this rate, they’ll lose by… (doing a little math) only 195 runs.

So there. That’s exactly one run better than Oz got killed by.

UPDATE: The West Indies roared back delightfully, beginning about two seconds after I finished this post, and finally won the match with two balls left, something all men aspire to, despite the trouser-dropping (literally) fielding efforts of New Zealand’s Lou Vincent, who lost his pants while skidding along the turf after successfully diving to stop a ball from reaching the boundary. After seeing Vincent hop up and throw the ball back in with his knickers around his ankles, all while keeping a straight face, the Kiwi crowd gave him a long standing ovation. Well deserved, I say.

And somehow, people can think cricket is boring.

PS — incidentally, cricket is hugely important to the subcontinent where Bush is now photo-opping his way out of embarrassing headlines at home. Imagine all U.S. sports sort of rolled into one, and that seems to be what the sport means to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as far as I can tell.

Naturally, Imran Khan, former captain of the Pakistan cricket squad (and about as famous there as Michael Jordan is here), has been placed under house arrest for the duration of Bush’s visit. Khan is now a highly-visible member of parliament and opposition leader who says things like this:

The problem is that we have a parasitical ruling elite. Their whole object of coming into power is not to help the people. The whole object is to actually grab power and pander to certain interests… The transfer of resources is actually going from the poor to the rich and hence the gap between the poor and the rich is increasing by the day. You have Musharraf talking about 6% growth rates, but actually poverty is increasing…

Sound like a familiar complaint? Khan’s not perfect by any stretch, but (like hundreds of millions of others) he certainly espouses a brand of Islam that leads you to build hospitals, fight for equality, and work for peace.

So, yes, like clockwork, Bush and Musharraf must again display their true commitment to freedom, and consistent with Bush’s vision of how "democratic" governments behave, of course they lock the man up. He’s a grave threat, obviously.

This will make us so many new friends.

Two more Koufax mentions

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(UPDATE: Voting is open. To vote, just visit any of the four links, scroll down, and leave a comment at the bottom as your vote for whomever you like.  To vote in other categories, go here.)

A quick thanks to the kind folks at Wampum for mentioning puduland here to two more categories in their preliminary voting for the Koufax Awards. The voting hasn’t started yet, but this site will be up for (sanely or not) four awards:

Flattering as heck, and frankly not terribly accurate. I think there are more deserving sites in each category. There are people who only do funny, and they post a lot more, and they deserve the Most Humorous. And there are people doing real hardball investigative stuff every day, and they surely deserve the Best Series and Best Blog stuff. Best Writing? Even if I was freakin’ Shakespeare (who rarely used the word freakin’ incidentally, much less kiester, gigondous, or waterpudu) I’d assume that should go to someone who at least blogs more frequently than I do.

Still, it’s nice to be mentioned.

So go over to Wampum, thank them for the work they put into this, poke around the other named sites (there are over 100 good ones to choose from, between all the categories), and maybe even throw a dime or two in their tip jar for pulling together so much good stuff in one click-friendly place.

And when the voting starts, yeah, I’ll probably mention it, but really. There are more deserving blogs.

It’s not like the categories are:

  • Best Pudus
  • Oddest Set Of Interests
  • Most Intermittent
  • Best Things That Aren’t Pudus That The Blogger Insists On Calling Pudus Anyway

In which case, now we’d be talking.