Putting the ET in Secret

I really live in a dreamworld, I guess, populated by surreal and cereal figures of sorts but in their own way they make sense. 

Take the infamous egg of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty Dumpty, and the adroitness with which he manipulates language to advance his position. "'When I use a word,'" Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'" 

No sense in this case makes eggselent sense. His Eggness might want to consider a career in diplomacy and start with a stint in Kabul as that sad little 13th century nation continues to wobble and weave its way across the dance floor of the current world history disco without ever getting within five hundred years of being contemporary.

I'm still trying to understand both this headline and the story from a recent edition of Stars & Stripes. Sorry for being obtuse, but how do you have secret discussions when they are the subject of newspaper story? It's like eating kosher ham or being slightly pregnant, perhaps even both at the same time, I think. 

We've been engaged in the same kind of pointlessness for decades with the Rock Soup eaters of North Korea on the shape of the napkins to go on the negotiating table once that shape is agreed upon in the negotiation center once its location is agreed upon, etc, ad nauseum. 

I admire our patience but suspect it's just attention deficit. And a decade after blithely wandering into a nation so bereft of infrastructure that chaos is a capital improvement, sacrificing thousands of American military members' and countless other peoples' lives in the meanwhile, we'll sit quietly by now as two of the Robber Clans figure out how to divvy up the booty. 

It's interesting if also a little disquieting what some call peace. Sometimes it's the same thing others call obscene. Damn words and their meanings, again. 
-bill kenny