- Saddam Hussein was hanged on the Moslim holiday of Eid Al Adha. This is like holding an execution on Christmas. Some Iraqis are calling it a "blessing" of the season. Other Moslims are calling it a desecration of a holy day. One commenter at Dean's World notes that this kind of needless complication smells of White House bungling.
- I wake up this morning and click on NPR just as the news reader is saying "President Bush is lying in state at this hour." He meant "President Ford" but that was one hell of a way to wake up on a Sunday morning.
1. True. A couple decades ago, I was the assistant to the project manager of a sewage recycling demonstration project being built in Tijuana and was an invited guest to many sewage related events. Raw sewage and caviar makes for a surreal afternoon.
2. True. In the muskeg swamps of the northern Yukon you either adapt to the mosquito swarms or they drive you insane. Not a little crazy, stark raving insane. After a couple weeks to adapt (and a mid-summer snow storm that killed off several tons of the bugs and left the survivors sluggish) I began to relate to the little mothers just trying to feed their children. Then I would kill them.
3. False. This is something I wanted to do while in college but a surfeit of fear and common sense prevented it. It is true that you mostly regret the things you never did.
4. True. I was loosely connected to the Mountain Lion Preservation Foundation and this was a research trip. Traveling with a mountain lion researcher consists mostly of standing on a ridge with a guy carrying a radio receiver, having him point to a distant thicket of chaparral, and hearing that there is a lion hiding there that you can't see. The blood thirsty raccoons were the most memorable part of the trip.
5. True. Among the things I learned on that trip: Hotel restaurants in Skagway won't serve hippies. Disputes over parking places in Ketchikan can be decided by who has the biggest gun. When traveling on the Alaskan State Ferry system, stay away from the tourists and hang out with the locals - way more fun. Even huge dogs won't bite if you don't show fear.
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