Tagged: news
Good News/Bad News
Dear Planet Earth,
There’s conflicting news coming out of the Twitterverse today. For one thing, I’m apparently not the first person to coin the term “Twitterverse.”
But onto the real stuff. Humans in Austin, Texas raided a slave labor camp and even took out a couple drill snakes in the process. They freed over a hundred people, bringing up their resistance to about 350 strong. I contacted one of the raiders who told me that they plan to carry out even more assaults against the mole people in the coming weeks. They’re putting up defenses around their city just as we are here in New Seattle. Good luck to all of you in Austin.
The people of Blackfoot, Idaho were much less lucky. There was a resistance group there made up entirely of civilians who had been holding their own since October. They were attacked in the middle of the night on all sides. The mole men didn’t bother taking prisoners. They shot and killed dozens of men, women, and children. There were only two survivors of the tragic massacre. They’ll hopefully be safe within the borders of New Seattle in a few days. We’re excited to meet you, Maggie and Emily.
Sinking
Dear Planet Earth,
Our escape from LA drags on. Lieutenant Halston tells me it’s barren out there. The entire city seemed to just pick up and leave. They’re going to continue searching for at least a couple days more. Our group came to the consensus that we’d stay in places for no more than a week — any longer than that, and we’ll get lazy and vulnerable.
Mrs. Bing’s slowly improving, or so Maria tells me. They were in one of the suites for six hours together this afternoon. I sat outside the door with my laptop, trying to find any useful news online. Apparently, China tried to bomb one of mole people’s drills in Beijing back when they still had bombs and a military. It didn’t work.
The door opened suddenly and Maria emerged with her usual stoic face. She took a long, deep breath and didn’t seem to notice me sitting on the floor nearby.
“She needs rest.”
“She needs a straitjacket,” I said.
That got her to look at me. She gave me a hard stare, a glare really, filled with an intensity that usually only comes from a mother, not a potential girlfriend (as I’ve been laboriously working on).
“Maybe you’d need a straitjacket too, if your husband and two daughters had been killed in front of your very eyes. Maybe you’d try to off yourself when you realized that everything you’ve ever accomplished in your life was gone forever. Maybe you’d develop a fucking heart and realize that you’re not the only person in this crumbling mess of a world.”
She let that sink in, and I guess I did too.
I whispered, “Did she really try to kill herself?”
“She needs rest,” she said again. And she walked away.
Better Than Cougar Town
Dear Planet Earth,
CNN has a live stream up of the latest crew to enter the no man’s land once known as the Republic of Uganda. The mysterious and catastrophic earthquake is causing the video to look interrupted and full of static, but they claim to be using a landlocked transmission source that will broadcast clearer than satellites. If the situation gets any tenser, they’ll have to bring out their real secret weapon, the last and only resource our modern news media has to deliver information and make lasting impacts on the world around us — Anderson Cooper.
Seriously though, this is as good an excuse as any to put off your English class projects and stay glued to your screens. The must-see disaster of 2011 is upon us, people. Okay, so I’m not making it sound as serious as it really is, but it’s hard to keep up a concerned, dignified composure all the time — just ask Anderson.
Silence
Dear Planet Earth,
As I alluded to yesterday, and as some news sites are actually reporting, it has now been three days since the world lost contact with the earthquake relief workers in Uganda. This may be due to a loss of radio towers in the area or even an influx of magnetic metals that has moved up to the planet’s crust and is interfering with satellites. The more people they send in, the less we seem to know.
No matter what’s going on in there, we can safely assume that it’s an unprecedented level of devastation that goes beyond any average earthquake. Before we lost contact with media on the ground, the earth was apparently still shaking for the past eight days and the tremors grew large enough so as to affect southern Sudan. The death toll was at 73,000.
I’ve mentioned this before, but in situations like these every person can make a difference, even if it’s only five dollars at a time. Please donate to AmeriCares and support Uganda in their time of need.
The Quake
Dear Planet Earth,
This Ugandan earthquake thing is getting out of control. I might not be the sharpest stake in the vampire hunter’s drawer, but even I know that the earth isn’t supposed to shake for five days nonstop. Authorities are doing their best to evacuate the affected areas as swiftly as possible, but every news report is hammering the fact that their resources are stretched thin.
I strongly suggest throwing a couple bucks at your favorite aid agency, if you haven’t already done so (and I guess, even if you have). Even five bucks can go a long way and you’ll get a warm, fuzzy feeling in your heart. You can text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 immediately. The American Red Cross is always good, but I’ve heard that they don’t use their funds as efficiently as they could; I’ve been donating to a group called AmeriCares during the past few global cataclysms and they haven’t squashed my naivety yet.
Procrastination 101
Dear Planet Earth,
It’s been a couple of days now. I wish I had more to blog about than the earthquake in Uganda and how the mainstream news is basically ignoring it, but I need something to distract me from Earth Science homework and college essays.
I can’t understand why my school forces seniors to take science classes anyway. I don’t want to sound like a Republican presidential candidate here, but there has to be more valuable uses for our time besides learning the most basics concepts of ideas that change every ten years. We really know so little about the universe–it’s origin, it’s future–even our own planet’s ocean floors continue to elude us and cause us to make all sorts of crazy theories. So, for forty-five minutes a day, I could learn a lot more applicable information from say, a home ec class or even just a study hall class.
There’s my two cents. I guess it doesn’t have a lot to do with Uganda.
Your Local News
Dear Planet Earth,
So, this was a pretty interesting news day, huh? On top of Steve Jobs dying, Chris Christie and Sarah Palin finally confirmed what they’d been saying all along. I’ve only been paying attention to politics for the past year or so, but I really have to say that it doesn’t look a whole lot different from the dramas playing out on TMZ (which explains a lot of the overlap).
The one piece of news that really stuck out to me and seemed to go under the rest of the press’s radar was presidential candidate Herman Cain’s comments about the protests on Wall Street. This guy wants to be president of the United States and he actually said these words: “Don’t blame Wall Street. Don’t blame the big banks. If you don’t have a job and you’re not rich, blame yourself.” Well, that really got my (and I would hope, any rational and moral person’s) blood boiling.
This afternoon, I spent a good part of the day wandering the lower part of the Strip with some friends and, as usual, found a homeless man begging for money. He smelled awful and had a terrible gash on his knee completely uncovered. He was tan, tanner than any homeless person I’d seen before, and he was asking for just a dollar. A single dollar to turn his life around and get him the American dream he was promised.
Of course, I ignored him. My friends and I used a fake ID to buy beer and got drunk behind the Stratosphere. But I couldn’t get the image of the homeless guy out of my head. Two hours and three bottles later, all I could see was the guy’s rocking silhouette in front of a long line of neon lights and limousines. And am I any better than Herman Cain? Would Mr. Cain really tell this guy that he just needs to get his act together? Would Mr. Cain visit the tent cities across the country and preach to them to stop being so lazy?
I really don’t want this to turn into yet another political blog, but his comments really got to me tonight. On a lighter note, Russell Crowe’s going to be in the next Superman movie.
Beneath Average 