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Very worrying, actually.

There are only so many hours in a day, and since I have recently been Commissioned to work on a very high yield project, I have made something of a conscious decision to ignore U.S. political news. Well, actually, that's not entirely true. What I have done is to email Google to see if they can gin up an extension of Google News called "Surprise Me!".

If Google can pull this off, what it will mean is that when you click Surprise Me!, you'll only be shown stories that fall outside a very clever algorithm of Bayesian Bushism and other bad karma. So stories like "Condi and 12 other mindless sycophants nominated for high office!" and this Gonzalez story? They wouldn't even appear. What a time saver! You'd only get stories like "Dog survives bite from rabid human!" and only then if the dog's survival involved something remarkable like a brain transplant. Why bother reading "news" about events that are *completely* predictable?

I don't want to be flip. The Happy New Year has been pretty weird what with the misery and death of so many fellow metahumans in South Asia. Imagine going to bed one day with nothing and waking the next day (or maybe not waking) with seriously *less* than nothing ...and some significant proportion of close relations vanished or floating battered and lifeless in the harbor. All this would appear on Google Surprise Me!

I confess that the Tsunami compelled me to dig out a pair of rabbit ears and watch the only local TV station they can receive, a CBS affiliate. It is then with sadness then that I managed to catch the televison version of this story.

"If we'd waited any longer, I would be wearing a burka". Sigh. Poor Daniel. Where might he have gone in life if not raised by such a patently ignorant mother? Stupidity. Stupidity. But this -- Stupidity -- is what powers the misbegotten, mortal Iraq juggernaut of the Shrub jugheads. Would the story of Lynda Unger appear on Google News Surprise Me! ? I don't know. My algorithm needs work.
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Jim


'Tis the exceptional fellow who lies awake at night thinking of his successes.