haha

A man and his wife were sitting in the living room and he said
to her,
"Just so you know, I never want to live in a vegetative state,
dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever
happens, just pull the plug."

His wife got up, unplugged the TV and threw out all of his beer.


I got quite a laugh out of this one- definitely the funniest thing I gathered from my time on the internet today. CNN's headline is "Hajj stampede kills hundreds" (I would link if this computer had that on the toolbar...). Islam, and I guess religion in general, keeps amazing me with how it motivates people to do things that seem so completely irrational. The same thing could be said about Christianity in the Middle Ages too, I suppose, but somehow now with the war in Iraq, Iran possibly building nuclear arms and threatening Israel, the focus is all on Islam. Stampedes and suicide bombs and 9/11 just show the fanaticism that seems so prevalent in that area- and it's just scary.

My other scary piece of news for the day came from Turkey, where they now have 18 cases of bird flu, and where some arkies are traveling for spring break. I know a couple have had second thoughts about it now, and I wish they wouldn't go. I think this is probably a case where losing your money might be the wiser move. I guess the risk of getting bird flu from Turkey is relatively minimal, especially since I wouldn't anticipate the arkies traveling to more rural areas, but if you get it the recovery percentage isn't particularly high... the risk/reward ratio is a little too high for me. I can't really do anything about it though, so I guess I'll just have to hope for the best. I always thought of Turkey as so far away, but looking at a map the other day I realized it's pretty close, just an ocean or sea or something away.

I also realized that my concept of Europe is seriously flawed. IF you handed me a map, I could find all the major bigger countries, and probably deduce some of the others, but if you asked me to draw a map of Europe from what I imagine in my head it would come out totally different. England and Ireland never seemed so far north- and when did Germany get that big? Geography is definitely not my strong suit!