Weird moments from the weekend...

Strange: Running into the owner of our favorite neighborhood bar at a house party.

Stranger: Being invited to said party by two guys we met that used to live in the house in which we now live.

Strangest: Learning that the great-aunt of one of those guys died in the bedroom we now sleep in. (Quietly in her sleep we are told, not bludgeoned to death. Thank god.)

Weekend Roundup...

Well, I didn't get much accomplished this weekend, on account of Olympic Fever. There's only so many qualifiers / prelims / quarterfinals of any one Track event that I can watch before I'm sick of it, though. Why are they showing so much running anyway? Whatever happened to the Field? Let's see some of the interesting stuff already: Hammer Throw, Pole Vault, Discus, etc.

Also in Olympic News:
- Sacramone got robbed.
- If you are an older female olympian, and mother, this is your year!
- The super-hot Polish Women's Volleyball team's dreams were cut short by the super-beastly USA team.
- The official Chinese Olympic website is horrible... Less censoring, more troubleshooting please.
- Phelps is loaded! The $25,000 he gets for each medal must seem like chump change next to his endorsement paychecks.

In political news, McCain's threshold to define rich is 20 times higher than that of Obama. When asked this past week to define rich in terms of annual income, Obama's response was $250,000, while McCain's answer was $5,000,000. That's quite a difference! Don't worry Phelpsie, you're rich in either one's eyes!

Also, the NYT buried an article about McCain's "response" to 9/11. Apparently he flew off the handle, jumping on the "Invade Iraq" bandwagon before it even got out the garage. Quick to link Saddam Hussein to both Al Quaida and the anthrax "attacks", he sang praises for Rumsfeld & Co. Wrong on all counts, old man! Anyone who thinks McCain has got the chops for military "strateegery' or foreign policy needs to read this.

Of course, hidden behind all the Olympic and election hoopla is the highly provacative Russian invasion of Georgia. While the news seems to be that Georgia pushed for a fight despite NATO warnings to back off, the Russian response was mostly likely (and I hate to repeat a Bushism) "highly disproportionate". If this news doesn't concern you, know that quite a few Ukrainians think that they're next, and many Poles (my wife included) fear that Russian military commanders may make good on their belligerent promises.

I'll willing to guess there's still quite a few old assholes in Washington that welcome the idea of a return to the Cold War. Such wishful thinking will prove foolish when they realize that the US doesn't really look like the good guys to a lot of the world anymore.

I'll leave you with a gem of a quote from an article in the The Times Online:

"In the old days under Soviet rule we didn't believe a word of our own propaganda but we thought that information was free in the West and we longed for it," said Katya, a middle-aged Muscovite. "But we have learnt since that the West has its own propaganda and in some ways it is more powerful because people believe it."

Congratulations media and leadership of America! You have succeeded in fucking up anything good that the U.S. accomplished in the past 60 years. Hope you're rich because of it! And I mean like quadruple McCain rich!

Now you understand the genius of the terrorist fist-jab...

Cindy: sacrificing her health for the campaign. What a hero!