No News is Good News

You guys know that I don't follow the news like you do (How do you find the time?) so I don't know enough about this Russian thing to argue with you about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I don't believe it, and I'm not saying that I believe it either, I'm just saying that I'm getting tired of hearing about it. I was the same way about Watergate, and I followed the news even less in those days than I do now. I guess I just don't have the tolerance for repetition that some people have. Watching an old re-run that you haven't seen in years is not the same thing as hearing the same news over and over again day after day, and watching the same 20 second film clip play over and over again in the same broadcast.

Another thing is that all this talk seldom leads to any kind of action. I like to talk as much as the next guy but, at some point, I get tired of just talking and I want to do something. My friend and I talked about going to Alaska all through high school. We recruited a few accomplices in our senior year, and one of them got so excited about it that he couldn't wait till we graduated, he quit school and set out on his own hitchhiking. I ran into him years later when I was home on leave from the army. He told me that he only got as far as Kansas, ran out of money, had no job prospects, and joined the army just to get something to eat. I told him that he should have looked at a map before he started out, because Kansas is not on the way to Alaska. As graduation day approached, the other guys seemed less and less interested. I couldn't get any of them to make any concrete plans with me, so I went by myself. It was easy, I bought a one way ticket on a non stop flight from Chicago to Anchorage. I don't remember what it cost, but it was cheaper than going any other way because I didn't have to pay for food and lodging. When I got back, my original friend said, "I can't believe you really did it.", and I responded, "I can't believe that you didn't." 

I'm pretty sure that no whales were harmed in the filming of "Moby Dick". I seem to remember seeing a thing on TV about how the movie was made. Some wild whales were filmed from a distance, but the close up action scenes were all done with fake whales. I think they won some kind of award for the way they made Moby and his pals look so real.