I can’t resist blogging, can I?
NY Times’ columnist Thomas L. Friedman is back from sabbatical, with a clear theme in today’s column “Iraq: Politics or Policy?”: “We’re in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we’ll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world.” He reiterated this on “Face the Nation” on CBS this morning (I was channel-surfing and there he was, telling Bob Schaeffer the problem that the current administration has and how the Kerry camp isn’t all that much better; yep, Friedman’s back all right).
Seattle Mariners outfielder, Ichiro Suzuki, has broken a record for most hits within a season, and not only does it change the way Americans view Japanese players, Japanese people are apparently hoping Ichiro’s changing the way Americans view Japan as a nation and as a people. I don’t know if it we can makes such a conceptual leap, but at the least, baseball is a big thing to somewhere other than America.
You know the world has changed when dialing the 212 area code leads you to someone, who via cell phone, is in… Baghdad? Fascinating article by Ian Urbina on “Area Codes, Now Divorced From Their Areas.” Urbina notes:
In this era of mobile telecommunications, calls now connect people, not places. Cellular phones, changing governmental regulations and new Internet technology have torn area codes from geography, allowing people to have phone numbers with area codes distant from where they live. Though not new, the trend has kicked up a pitched debate among a colorful collection of technological pundits, telephone historians and Web preachers who specialize in the topic.
“For many people this will come as a deeply confusing development,” said James E. Katz, a sociologist and director of mobile communication studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. “You delocalize area codes, and it’s one less North Star and one less compass point that people have to help orient themselves in an increasingly complicated world.”
It is confusing – your number(s) identify you and follow you; yet these numbers were once identifying where you were, but now you’re really mobile. Um. Ok.
Have a nice Sunday.