Good and Bad News

Well, let's see what the week held, shall we?

Thumbs Up To Patrick Fitzgerald. Scooter Libby is only the first domino! I feel the way big Republican supporters must have felt when the first indictments started tumbling out of the Whitewater investigation. Although those were somehow overpowered by a ridiculous fuss about whether Clinton liked Hummers more than Ah-nold.

Thumbs Down To me and others like me. Where are the donations for Pakistan earthquake aid? The UN has given warning that it may have to scale back its operations. Let's dig a little deeper shall we?

Of course, this leads to a certain amount of musing: How many corpses per dollar? What does it take to pry my hard-earned (and in most of the places where it may be best used, unimaginable) wealth from my hands?

And the eternal "What can we do?". For people who can stand the atrocious accompanying feeling of helplessness, I recommend Stephen Lewis' series of Massey Lectures, presented this week on CBC Radio One. Massey is the UN Special Envoy on AIDS. It seems as though this, being a slow-moving disaster, doesn't cut to the heart of humanity the way mass destruction does.

Maybe it's because we can't imagine being the prisoners of attitudes to disease that were cultivated in the 14th century. Thao Mbeki seems to have flip-flopped on a once-bold stance.

The Pakistan earthquake is terrible, but if action is not taken against HIV, millions will die. The sheer magnitude of it all is enough to make a man weep. And the solutions are relatively simple: More money for anti-and-retrovirals, and the ABC's: Abstinence, Being faithful, and using a Condom (of course, in some quarters, it's only the first two that qualify for money).

I look forward to seeing how Dick Cheney fills out an orange jumpsuit. The only question is: Is there a way to get him sent to Gitmo?

Pretty grim post, eh? But this is a few minutes out of my life. For some, it is their life.

In brighter light, seventeen workers at an Alberta company won $54 million in the national lottery recently. Incongrous, no? I pity the HR director of that company. Yet the greater wonder to me is that any of them are even thinking about coming back. If I won even as little as a million dollars I wouldn't hang about. Of course, maybe they like their jobs more than I really enjoy trucking.

Today no trucking is required of me. Stuff I need to do:
1) Return defective portable CD player to Future Shop
2) Seek out season 4 of Babylon 5 (a vice inflicted upon me by the SO)
3) Find a litre of DOT 5 brake fluid and possibly refill the reservoir on my Nash
4) Collect a repaired piece of my scooter (remind me to tell you the saga sometime)
5) Have coffee with an old friend
6) Talk to the Customer Screw--I mean Customer Servicing Department at Digital Networks
7) Likewise Trend Micro

Stuff I actually plan to do? Items 1 to 4. Maybe.