Thoughts that float at the end of the year

I'm listening to "It's Raining Men" by the Weather Girls - don't ask, you'll find out soon enough. But as I do something so out of character, the work on my desk is at a 3 year low, and I have a 10 mile bike ride a day I have had a lot of time for more random thoughts to fill my head.

The first is rather frivolous. Soda vs. Coffee. I have never understood people who drink soda to start there day, be it diet or the sugar drenched version. I can get on board with red bull or mountain dew I suppose, but I encountered a few people on my National Players tours, and now have at least one in my office, who drank a Georgia based Soda as their day starter. It seems such a waste of effort. To equal the caffeine content one would have to drink a lot of that stuff, in fact I have a friend from college who developed a "problem" with said beverage, though I believe that he has gotten it under control even though he is in Grad School now. I do not deny that I have a problem with coffee, but I consider it the flip side of my "drinking solution." But more to the point, coffee is a social beverage as well as a work stimulator. Do you ever ask some one out for soda? Not since you were 11 right? But out for coffee is still like an acceptable preliminary date, as well as the go to meeting format. Soda is for the middle of the day people, not morning, not evening. Plus all that sugar is worse for you than the caffeine in my 3...4...8 cups of coffee.

Now I'm listening to "Air Hostess Song" by Gomez - a B side that has become part of the live performance of Revolutionary Kind, it's off the new "Five Men in a Hut" compilation (particularly good if you don't want to buy all of the pre2004 albums, and it has a wicked alternate version of "Rhythm and Blues Alibi" a song I use for musical auditions.)

Sorry that was more of a thought float than I had intended, back to a more serious thought. Has the "War on Terror" and the "War on our Budget (AKA the Iraq War)" made us more cosmopolitan? I've been thinking about the names that I can pronounce and recognize now that in 2001 I would have been at a loss to get my tongue or mind around. Jalal Talabani, Muqtada al-Sadr, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, Nouri al-Maliki, Kim Jong-il, Osama bin Laden, John Boehner...oh snap, now Whitesnake's "Here I go Again"...but these names are all ones that make us stretch our minds. We have to learn how to say them, if only to prove how much smarter than our President we are, but also it engage in an informed debate. In fact, few things make me angrier than hearing a Liberal refer to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as "Mack Mood I'm-a-dinner-jacket." While funny, it's also ignorant. It's the same mentality that brings us the "Barak Osama...uh..I mean... Obama, oh by the way did you know his middle name is Hussein...I'm sorry what was your question Tucker?" conservative "banter" that is now re-soiling our airwaves in the aftermath of the rights crushing defeat in November.

Foreign relations used to be the great unknown, and it still is just in a different way right now. But if you think back to 2000, when it was revealed that Gov. George Bush couldn't name the leaders of Chechnya, Pakistan (oh the irony there,) or India, that information was essentially laughed off because few "regular" citizens knew them either. Is it possible that a by product of this colossal foreign policy train wreck could be a more informed electorate that will last a generation? Is it weird that I typed all of that to "Let's Go Crazy"? Prince makes most things better.

Anyway, I don't have any answers, just floating thoughts. I'm leaving you with "I Will Follow You Into the Dark," Death Cab.