9-12

Did I say no biological differences between blacks and whites?  If so I clearly misspoke.  Well biological differences is an odd term, what does it mean?  I suppose we could say all grizzly bears are biologically the same, but of course each one is slightly genetically different from its brothers and sisters.  It might be said that me and the dawgs are biologically the same but clearly we have genetic differences evident in our heights, and hair and eye colors. 

Well of course as we humans made our way out of Africa the further north we went the more we became pale like Old Dog to soak up the dim light there amid the fjords, and those that moved south into more tropical Africa became darker to shade themselves from the harsher rays down there.  So it's not surprising that black athletes in general should be able to take the heat better than whites, in fact that is why they were the favored slave material for the hot southland.  Of course almost all black people born in the USA have black forebear somewhere in their family tree, and a good proportion of white folks have some black forebears.  I'm certainly not going to read something so long that Beagles doesn't want to read it himself, but I'll wager that not all black people can take the heat better than all white people, but that it is a mixed bag.


911 come and gone.  Good.  For awhile there it had the makings of some kind of national holiday with announcers droning out names and rapturously talking about how it brought us all together like it was some kind of good thing.  Call me sacrilegious but I just don't go for solemn hand over the heart as flags fly by to a mournful tune thing.

I had a temp job as a paralegal reading through volumes of stuff related to a trial and looking for the mention of three different names.  I was doing my normal get ready for work stuff, listening to NPR when they announced that some sort of plane had flown into one of the towers.  It didn't seem like that big a deal on the radio, like maybe it was a piper cub or something, but I tuned into CNN because I wanted to see what it looked like and there was a smoking tower and behind it another tower and a plane crossing the scene which didn't seem that ominous right then but a few seconds later it hit the other tower.

This part about seeing the plane hit the other tower, I was telling it to a friend yesterday and he said he saw the same thing and later in the day I heard Trump saying that was what he saw, which of course means nothing, but I wonder if this is one of those things where people think they saw something that they actually didn't.

Anyway, I went to work in a downtown tower, but then rumors went around that the Sears Tower, then the tallest building in the world, was going to be hit, and somebody said what the hell and they evacuated downtown.  I remember seeing a woman in a hijab on the elevator going down and feeling sorry for her as she must have been feeling all the eyes on her.  Down in the street it was like Godzilla was coming to town with cops on horseback and all.

I'm a peacenik, but I didn't mind so much going into Afghanistan, how could we not do that?  And at first it seemed like a pretty good idea.  I am no fan of the military but I have to say our guys looked good on horseback riding with the Northern Alliance.  But then Bin Laden somehow slipped away, and then there was less reason to be there, and then we were installing some local champion of democracy and it began to look like Vietnam, and then Cheney and his neocon boys started beating the drums for invading Iraq, and well, we all know how that went.