Picture Postcards from the Big Blue Marble

Today we're on to the second half of 2010. Seems to me it just got started and we're already packing stuff up for the last time. I'm not sure I got my money's worth, and have misplaced my receipt and know there's no refunds or exchanges without it. Truth to tell, I'm not sure where I would go to even inquire about a refund.

It's probably next to the office where people go to get their good names back. I love that stuff-the forty-eight point Bodoni bold headline "Senator/Governor Drinks His Own Bathwater!" and two days later, after the story's source, the cheerleader on tequila, has sobered up enough to admit she made the whole thing up, in little tiny letters on an inside page, the paper apologies and so what if you didn't see it, it still counts. Not sure where any of that happens in the online editions.

What did you promise yourself, or a significant other, you'd accomplish in 2010 and how's that working out? Time's a wastin', pilgrim. Okay, so maybe you're a little light on accomplishments-what did you get (at least) get started that you're hoping to complete? Yeah, that's the problem, innit? Biting off more than we can chew and then not caring for the after-taste when we try to swallow it.

Are you waiting for things to start 'to look up'? I heard that on the TV the other day-a news reader in the studio was making small talk with an on-scene reporter somewhere in the Le B(P)rea Tar Pit (the P is silent which is more than can be said for Tony Hayward) and one of the people the reporter had been talking with down in the Gulf region has been on his uppers since Hurricane Katrina which is nearly HALF a decade ago, and he's waiting for things to start looking up. Hold that thought-you have to possess the patience of Job, not Jobs, to hang on this long and not hang yourself in the process.

I don't mind if the government falls/Implements more futile laws. I don't care if the nation stalls/And I don't care at all. When your choices are comfortably numb or a few bars of The Great Song of Indifference, how do you choose anything other than the Grand Order of the Grudging Shrug? But because it's it's a new month, and today is Canada Day (thanks, Agatha) and our birthday is Sunday, and we've still got six months left on this year, perhaps we should drive this baby off the lot and open her up out on the highway and see what she can do. Sometimes the road goes on forever, or seems to.

-bill kenny