Ah Choo!

12 April 2011

Washington sleeps under a carpet of pollen. It coats the windshields of our cars. It sticks to our clothes and to our animals. If we sleep with the windows open — to turn off the gas and electric bills for those brief days in the fall and spring when we don’t need either the heat or the AC — we awake to what Fitzgerald called “that foul dust that preys on the wake of men’s dreams” covering our sheets.

Spring has grown ever shorter these days, some say due to Global Warming, but this year it came and went not in the course of months, weeks, or even days, but hours. It was exactly two hours long. Sunday the temperature was in the 50s, and yesterday it was in the 80s. Spring happened sometime between midnight and 3 a.m., when it was replaced by summer. The weather is said to be confusing the hell out of the plants and animals, who don’t know when to bloom or mate.

Meanwhile, down in Cote Ivoire, Gbagbo has finally surrendered. Three tyrants down, four more to go. In Yemen, the rebels are saying Saleh is going to face prosecution for killing his protesters.

You have to wonder: don’t these guys see it coming? They must have a lot of dough socked away in the UK or Geneva or Dubai — why don’t they just book while the booking is good? Do they really want to end up like Sadaam, swinging at the end of a rope, Texas style?

They say he was so heavy, or the drop was so far, that his head came off.

Ouch.

Rupert Scofield

Rupert


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