Humor us

I need a break from constant power outages. Enter CNN, of all things, in a throwaway line at the end of a story.

It seems former Osama bin Laden driver Salim Ahmed Hamden is facing a life sentence if he loses --and detention until the end of the War On Terror if he wins-- in his Guantanamo trial. He's been classified as an "enemy combatant". Now he knows a little more about the U.S. military: Catch 22.

Yeah, it's mean, especially because I'm chuckling, but I reluctantly have to agree in this case. Am I inconsistent? You bet!

A quick check and I ended up with a Wired blog. Interesting, but nothing to get me out of my funk.

Ah, but there was a link to God Destroys Boise for Not Being Gay Enough. Hey, at least those malware bozos are starting to provide entertainment in exchange for installing their trojans.

Oh, CNN wasn't done. They also reported that researchers "discovered" another 125,000 lowland gorillas. That's something like discovering America, but good news after all of the dire predictions of their demise I've been reading. Here's a New York Times take.

I wanted to say something about Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn yesterday, but everything I wrote between outages came out ponderous and preachy; something close to his political and social views. It's that black (heh) CUC mood.

But I enjoyed, if that's the word, his early books. I do wonder if I would feel the same today. Maybe Cancer Ward would hold up or The First Circle, which I haven't read. I doubt I could wade through One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich or The Gulag Archipelago any more.

He was an important writer during his fifteen minutes and some still think he was one of the best writers of the 20th century. I don't doubt his courage in exposing the Soviet system and its labor camps. Let's hope countries like Iran and China will be lucky enough to produce a similar voice.

Complicated, great and imperfect like a figure in Greek tragedy, he died Sunday.