Doug's Darkworld

In my random readings I came across the quote above, and it’s bugged me since. I wander the streets of Berkeley looking at the people walking around and wondering at just how strange it really is that masses of cells can be animated like that.  So of course I thought I would share it with my gentle readers.  Reality really is bizarre, only our familiarity with it makes it seem normal.  Try not to think about it too much.

OK, so another week of broken promises. I meant to write something on Iran, but can’t get past two problems. The first being my conviction that the demonstrations in Iran really aren’t all that big a deal and are being both exaggerated and misrepresented by the press. The second being that I’m really sick about hearing about Iran, I’ve written about it often before, and the mere thought of reading and writing more about it fills me with lethargy and despair. I will however be writing about the Battle of Gettysburg soon, and my promised post about Allied blunders in World War Two is still in the works. Of course in my research for that I keep finding ghastly new mistakes that Churchill made. My God, every time the man meddled in military affairs, thousands or tens of thousands of Brits died.  And that was just in World War One!

Moving right along, the week’s world news. Michael Jackson is still dead. Sarah Palin’s political career is dead. Al Franken’s comedy career as gotten muddled up in politics, I don’t even know what to think of that. Is it a step up or a step down? The economy is easy to sum up this week: Sears and K-Mart start Christmas sales in July. Right. I am not reassured.

I am pleased that I was able to integrate my DougsDarkworld Twitter into the blog site, as astute readers will have noticed in the right hand column. Now when readers send in interesting links I can post them right away. And people who still don’t have Twitter accounts can still see what I’ve posted there from the blog. So I’m simultaneously blogging and twittering … or blathering as I like to call it.

Lastly, a friend sent me this article: The Free and the Dead. I thought it was a good take on the economy, current events, and the whole strange trip the USA has been on since the end of World War Two. It’s been an interesting period of history, what comes next is anyone’s guess. I’ll keep blogging about it all though.

Have a great weekend everyone.

(The above image is a work of the British government and is public domain  under UK copyright law since it was taken prior to 1957. It’s a picture of the HMS Cressy, one of three obselete British cruisers torpedoed and sunk by a single German U-boat at the outset of World War One. Over 1450 sailors drowned, many of them teenagers from a  military academy. The three obsolete ships should never have been sailing where they were stationed, and Churchill was at least partly responsible. The quote in the title is used without permission, I am claiming it as Fair Use under US copyright law since it’s a very small quote, it’s used for illustrative purposes, it’s not being used for commercial purposes, and its use here in no way harms the reputation or commerical prospects of the author. Whew, that was a mouthful. I did notify the author, but am not going to attribute it without their permission.)