Monday, March 8, 2010

Our Lopsided World

Scientists have just proven that an asteroid killed off the dinosaurs. That is, if you believe that a 65 million year-old event can be proven with any precision. Once I've perfected my weather forecasting skills, I might take a stab at investigative archaeology, and prove conclusively that global cooling killed the mighty lizards . . . although the asteroid theory at least explains why the world is so lopsided.

Take President Ahmadinejad of Iran for example, who says the the attack on the World Trade Centre was a big lie. I guess he might have a point. Thousands of eye witnesses, news footage of crumbling towers, and a year of clean up - not to mention hundreds of murdered emergency workers - are hardly enough evidence to draw any solid conclusions.

Go figure. While scientists are polishing their arguments about a 65 million year old asteroid, we have a nut case that can't wrap his mind around an event that occurred less than a decade ago. Talk about a lopsided world.

While we're on a lopsided theme, I sort of watched the Oscar extravaganza on Sunday night. Sort of. I couldn't bear to give it my full attention when there were important things like Facebook and blog research to do, so I peeked over the top of my laptop screen and offered an occasional comment, proving once and for all that I’m not a complete ignoramus when it comes to famous people.

I have an irrational tendency to root for the underdog, so when Hurt Locker Director Kathryn Bigelow won for best director, I stopped for a moment to listen to her speech. Her warm, fuzzy words about firefighters put a small dent in my cynicism about the rich and powerful, and I dug up this rambling article from last June, which talks about the impression she wanted to make with Hurt Locker.

I might have to go out and see it now.

Am I the only crackpot that thinks it’s lopsided to have the glitz and power of Hollywood on one side, and world chaos on the other? It isn’t Hollywood’s fault that religious fruitcakes are murdering each other en masse in Nigeria, or that destructive earthquakes have hit Turkey, Chile, and Haiti, or that a devastating civil war ravages Iraq. I could go into a monologue about how healthy, thriving democracies (that spend gazillions of dollars on parties) could offer answers to the desperate places of earth, but most of those desperate places don’t really want democratic answers.

In direct contradiction to the previous statement, kudos to the Iraqis, and this time my tongue is not even in my cheek. It takes guts to vote when you know there are fruitcakes waiting to blow you into paradise for casting a ballot.

I’m hanging on to my claim that this is a firefighting blog by a very thin thread, but hey, I did mention firefighters once. In my own defense, it’s hard to stay focused when there are movie stars and terrorists to make fun of. Maybe I should scrap the investigative archaeology idea and write for the National Inquirer instead . . .

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