SO much going on in the World

It's not the morning yet, but I sat down at my desk just now and was sadly looking at this cute, chunky little "Democracy Now" coffee cupthat I bought for that librarian. It came in the mail today, so I sat and looked at it and thought, "this cup is so cute and solid, so much more so than the flimsier lightweight cups over at his place. I should give it to him because he actually needs it." This went on for a while and I decided that this sort of thing is boring for you to read and I'm keeping the cup.

I couldn't find much more information about the Friendster/Eharmony deal, except that the CEO, Scott Sassa, was recently brought in in August. He made news in the world of computer types because he fired troutgirl for some pretty innocent blog entries about Friendster's switch from Java to PHP. Silly, huh?

But then, there were other important things going on, more important that the receipt of the shiny Democracy Now mug in the mail, more truly terrifying than corporate media gossip, more depressing than breaking up.

It is very scary, for example, that Israel's defense minister made a public threat against Iran and called for U.S. support. This reminded me of that prescient article that some of you may have read by Seymour Hersh

This should be a worthwhile event to go: Greg Palast and Pratap Chatterjee are speaking on Monday the 28th at Columbia's Teachers' college. I'm teaching that night, but maybe someone else will go and describe the event.

I was looking for more about that story in Ha'aretz and found out that someone has just been arrested and charged with plotting an assassination attempt on President Bush. You can read about it here in the Guardian
(I found the timing of this somewhat bizarre, as I was just in the gym listening to Will Durst on my mp3 player as he talked about how loose Bush's security seemed to be in comparison with Cheney's after 9/11....for, it is really Cheney who is president after all, as this book will explain.
I'm anticipating that when I get up to drink coffee out of my sparkling new mug and head off to my luxiurious open rehearsal at the Philharmonic tomorrow morning that there will be all kinds of fresh panic in the air, and especially since they just convicted Lynn Stewart for what seemed like perfectly reasonable activities for a lawyer in a political case, I can't imagine that it's going to be easy for this guy to get decent, aggressive defense.