speech or no speech

A fun evening last night. We stopped at the Saloon for Happy Hour, then walked down the street to see Oscar-nominated, maybe Oscar-favorite The King's Speech. A good movie, but my expectations may have been a little too high, and you know how that goes. Colin Firth will probably win (and deserves) an Oscar for his portrayal of King George VI (Queen Elizabeth's dad), a sort of accidental king overcoming a stammer to inspire England through World War II.
*****
I'm not sure who it is that is inspiring the Egyptians through their current, mostly non-violent Twitter Revolution -- who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, who are we rooting for? It constantly amazes me that with all the 24-hour news coverage we have available to us that we know so little about anything outside the borders of the United States. Who knew that President Hosni Mubarak was such an oppressive tyrant or that he somehow made himself some 40 billion dollars on the backs of the Egyptian people? And why did his vice president have to be the one to announce Mubarak's resignation? The dude was too busy to make his own resignation speech? Maybe he was scrambling to hide all the money that was way too much to hide under his mattress.

vacationing in the opposite direction

Due to the nature of my work, I can't be taking winter vacations, but everybody else around me (other than co-workers) seems to be headed for short trips to warm places. A nice break from the sub-freezings if you can afford it...

Then there are the anomalies: the people who come to Minnesota during the winter instead of leaving it. My niece Becky was here a couple weeks ago, visiting from Philadelphia. Philadelphia isn't quite as wintry as Minnesota is, but it's not all that much different -- maybe not so big a deal. But now we have visitors coming from somewhere much warmer: San Juan, Puerto Rico. Jerry lived in Puerto Rico for a year many years ago, and his friend Jose from back then is paying us a visit and bringing along a friend of his, Jose-Felix.

...And they are actually excited about coming here. Having lived in the Caribbean his whole life, Jose-Felix has never in his life seen snow. He will see plenty here. They want to go ice-skating and skiing. The St. Paul Winter Carnival is going on this week, so Jerry is going to take them to the ice-sculptures in Rice Park. You get the picture.

We'll see if they still want to do all those romantic-sounding activities once they step off the plane tonight and the temperature is zero degrees.
*****
It's February 2, Groundhog Day, and the groundhog in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, didn't see his shadow, so that means an early spring. HA!
*****
I just read that Anderson Cooper was attacked by an angry mob in Cairo today. What the heck are you doing in Egypt, Anderson? Do you really have to be there to report the story? This isn't a hurricane!

getting turned off

The anti-government protests in Egypt are getting larger and more dangerous, and that country is in major crisis. Apparently the Egyptian government thinks it's not in its best interests that the angry mobs be able to communicate with each other, so their government has for the moment shut down their Internet. Which makes me wonder, how do they do that? Do they just flip a switch and it's gone? Could our government do that too? And what would that look like if the Internet were suddenly gone, even for a day? Would it get us away from our computers and into the streets, developing into a rabid mass of Twitter-less nomads?

As Conan was saying in his monologue last night, if you want people to stay immobile in their homes, then the last thing you'd want to do is get rid of the Internet!