Global warming has claimed its first nation, Tuvalu, known only for its valuable internet domain name (.tv). It has given up and will move to New Zealand.

Some guy who saw that annoying French film The Red Balloon (which my two elementary schools both subjected me to many times) set himself aloft with 600 balloons, cutting himself free and parachuting to earth from 11,000 feet.

So the food packets dropped on Afghanistan are yellow and the unexploded cluster bombs are also yellow. That was clever.

The honeymoon is finally beginning to show signs of strain, and as a post-Clinton "president" should have known, it's the spin, stupid. You'll remember I commented a few days after 9/11 that all the talk about reassuring Americans that it was safe to fly was more about spin than about actually making it safe, and was phrased as such: making Americans feel safe. No one noticed that, but when they tried to do it at the start of the anthrax thing, with absolutely no information, just being reflexively reassuring, it began not to look so good. Now they're evidently lying about Bush's health. He's not getting thinner, he just redistributed it.

I have another quote, or paraphrase actually, that applies well to American foreign policy, although it was originally applied by Sir Oswald Mosley to Mussolini's foreign policy: it triumphs like a drunken driver, not by reason of his own skill but because all sober people had been concerned to get out of his way.