I'm a slow waker. I could stay up all night for a pittance, but couldn't be roused in the morning if the four horsemen of the apocalypse were watering their steeds on my lawn. I fought it for years, wanting to be a fast waker, but alas, I am not. Some nights I wake in the middle of it and it's like nothing happened at all. Full awareness. But most mornings I have sunk so deep in the mattress, there is no small hope of bestirring me. That last hour of sleep between, say, six and seven AM, I am on a distant frontier of dreamland, and it's a long haul back.

When I finally make it downstairs I need my pot of coffee and the couch to get the day going. I like to have the news on, the one lasting effect of 9/11, but today there was nothing. Lead story: middle age man and wife go missing in South Carolina, their cel phones remain unanswered. It might be a big story, but they might just want to be left alone. When my wife and I go on vacation, it's to get away from those phones!

So I got my news from the Internet this morning:

Lead Story/International I consider this to be good news, as a few paragraphs down is mentioned how many suicide attacks were pulled off in Afghanistan last year. 160. 160! 160 suicide bombers blew themselves up last year! In one country and in one year alone! That's a lot of crazies. Who brainwashes them and why? Seriously? Let me know when you find out. Meanwhile, international forces will do their level best to blow them away before they all, uh, blow themselves away.

Politics This answers the age-old question: What if we held an election and no one turned out to vote? Answer: your fate is decided by others. No one seems to care that their neighborhood will now be annexed. I love how if just one person turned out to vote, it would have decided the contest.

Science and Technology Work on the space robot, DEXTRE, continues. The astronauts are described as performing "demanding construction work". Yeah, pushing a wheelbarrow in zero gravity must be exhausting. You have to go to the last paragraph to get to the more significant news item, that the Japanese orbiting closet, KIBO, is in a temporary location until other pieces of it are hauled up in May. That's interesting. Have you ever heard of a remodel that didn't encounter shipping delays? Me neither. Kibo, by the way, is Japanese for "hope", so I guess it's a big, expensive, outer space hope chest.

Nature Anthropomorphization of the dolphins continues around the globe as they perform their moral obligation for all the humans to see. Could it be that they just looked like they were guiding the whales out to sea? And perhaps merely swimming alongside? Don't get me wrong, the bottlenose dolphin is a graceful and beautiful creature, but a "great capacity for altruistic activities"? You never hear all the stories about the dolphins great capacity for humping the swimmers in the petting pools in Hawaii, Australia, and the Caribbean. Seriously, it's true.

And finally...

Local This item confirms what my own neighborhood street has established. I spied some workers out there yesterday, just standing around chatting with the residents. Nothing was accomplished. The neighbor closest, the old man who decided not to run his garage as a polling place this year, has been circulating an email. In it, he refers to a "water eruption" and "underground water streams" which I find fascinating. I look forward to the excavation and propose we bottle the spring water. Also, he demanded that something be done about his water-stained sidewalk.

I'm not sure why, but it always makes me laugh when I hear people say, "Seriously! I demand something be done about this!" It implies that they are not being taken seriously, that their demands are not being met, that we're all unwitting victims, and so forth.

It's what the news is made of.


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