Game. Blouses.

“...So I took them all inside and made them pancakes.”

I was a little long-winded last week. So this week, just a light breeze.

The story of the week so far ( aside from Jon Stewart’s new beard) seems to be WikiLeaks dumping 92,000 classified documents related to the Afghan war on the Internet for everyone to read. The content ranges from America soldiers venting frustration to assertions that the Pakistani intelligence services are funding terrorism in Afghanistan with money provided for other purposes by the U.S. government. According to experts who seem to have nothing better to do than read through almost 100,000 pages of coded Times New Roman print, there really isn’t anything new in these documents - nothing we haven’t known for at least the past couple years. But finding new information really isn’t purpose of dumping that much information into a medium as vast as the Web. The point of an information dump on this scale is to simply bludgeon people over the head with the idea that this whole war is pointless. The overarching thread running through all these papers is the fact that we’ve been blowing things up and putting them back together in Afghanistan for almost 10 years and very little has actually changed. When Soviet tanks rolled into that country in December of 1979, we in the West ridiculed them for underestimating their enemy and failing to follow the old axiom of never getting involved in a land war in Asia. Thirty years and hundreds of billions - perhaps trillions of dollars later, we seem to be unable to admit that we may have made the very same mistake.

From the desk of What-the Hell-Took-So-Long, Tony Hayward is stepping down as Chief executive officer of British Petroleum. Usually when a company announces that replacing a CEO was a mutual decision, it means the decision was anything but mutual. However, in this case, I think I believe them. It’s pretty clear to anyone with a television that from the the very first day of the spill, Hayward has been clumsy, awkward and completely lost in dealing with the government, the media and the local interests. I don’t think anyone outside the Gulf Coast region wants this disaster to be over and done with more than Tony Hayward. He said he wanted his life back. Looks like he’ll get it. Which is more than we can say for the people of Louisiana at this point.

The Utah Supreme Court overturned two rape convictions of polygamist FLDS leader Warren Jeffs and ordered new trials. According to a CNN report,

“In Jeffs' trial, Elissa Wall testified that she repeatedly told him at the time that she did not want to be married and was uncomfortable with sexual advances from her husband, Allen Steed. She said Jeffs advised her to pray and submit to her husband, learn to love him and bear his children, or risk losing her "eternal salvation."”

I tend to think that men who like Warren Jeffs who prey on people searching for meaning and fulfillment in their lives are pretty despicable human beings, deserving of the punishment dealt to them for their acts. Apparently Utah disagrees. I guess there’s a reason I live far away from Utah.

Finally, four years ago a Fresno, California man purchased a box of small glass photographic plates at a garage sale for $45. He has since discovered that his small box of negatives are actually images shot by the one and only Ansel Adams, and may be worth about $200 million. That’s right. He made a 4.4 million percent return on his $45 investment. You know, I wonder how much that “Dogs Playing Poker” print I got at the flea market two years ago is worth today?