I'm back

So...we were in south Alabama all week. Little news from the outside world for the first few days, certainly no internet access (the in-laws had somehow managed to fry their computer).

You go out of town for a week and everything happens. We spent twelve hours on the road yesterday fleeing Hurricane Dennis -- which looks set to hit the Alabama/Florida Gulf Coast directly where we were spending the past couple of days.

Of course there were other things -- Live8, the G-8 meetings and -- above all -- the London bombings. Our last two days on the coast were spent with my brother-in-law and his wife and our new niece. Most of that time was spent on the couch absorbing the 24-hour news cycle via CNN. The news shifted endlessly back and forth between hurricane coverage and events in London. The strange thing, though, was that none of it seemed real -- the news anchors are so glib, so perfectly coiffed, so inane as they spew the meaningless words that keep them on the air constantly, so "I'm American, foreign events don't matter to me." Isn't it ironic that technology that touts its ability to shrink distance and create a global village creates such a distance of empathy and emotion?

More later...