Christmas in Baghdad

It's not really that often that a CNN.com article makes you stop and go "Oh, wow..." but...

Oh, wow...

The teaser:

Maybe it was the time the taxi dumped him at the Iraq-Kuwait border, leaving him alone in the middle of the desert. Or when he drew a crowd at a Baghdad food stand after using an Arabic phrase book to order. Or the moment a Kuwaiti cab driver almost punched him in the face when he balked at the $100 fare.

But at some point, Farris Hassan, a 16-year-old from Florida, realized that traveling to Iraq by himself was not the safest thing he could have done with his Christmas vacation.

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: I think the kids are gonna be just fine. Look at this:

He said he wrote half the essay while in the United States, half in Kuwait, and e-mailed it to his teachers December 15 while in the Kuwait City airport.

"There is a struggle in Iraq between good and evil, between those striving for freedom and liberty and those striving for death and destruction," he wrote.

"Those terrorists are not human but pure evil. For their goals to be thwarted, decent individuals must answer justice's call for help. Unfortunately altruism is always in short supply. Not enough are willing to set aside the material ambitions of this transient world, put morality first, and risk their lives for the cause of humanity. So I will."

"I want to experience during my Christmas the same hardships ordinary Iraqis experience everyday, so that I may better empathize with their distress," he wrote.

Transit Strike

Fuck.

Project of the day: Get to LaGuardia. Preferably not on foot.

I hate the transit workers. Their demands are unreasonable. And it pisses me off that the MTA caved on raising the pension age to 62. Hey Albany! Why don't you pass a law raising the pension age for ALL government workers. Or here's a wacky idea...

401(k)s. Their time has come. Pensions are so my grandma.

I'm sorry, I'm not showing appropriate deference to the plight of the poor benighted worker, who, despite not having an education, manages to earn $60k a year, with benefits, at only 40 hours a week, and then pick up $25-30k a year for the remaining 30 years of their lives. That must be a horrible way to live.

You know the cab drivers? They work at least 6 days a week, 12 hour shifts. That's harder. The fruit guys. Hard, cold. Lots of jobs are hard. There's a very small violin playing somewhere.

Fuckers.

Call out the National Guard. It can't be that hard to drive a subway. Get them out here, fire the union workers. Break the union. Go Reagan on us, Mike. C'mon.

Fuck'em.

12:48

No word yet. I'm going to bed. I hate them all.

Midnight

Three minutes. In three minutes we will know whether or not I will have to walk 3 miles, in the ice and sleet, up hill, both ways, to the hospital for joint diseases, all because the f$*#ing transit workers union demands the right to retire at 55 (a compromise from their demand of 50 and the city's demand of 62, and 55 is the status quo now) and a large raise and a pony.

I hate them.

MTA too.

Unless they don't strike. Then I love them.

1 minute.

The Stage Manager's Guide Vol. 6

The stage manager only calls in dead. Thus, if you're really sick but not actually dead, you have to go to work, which sucks royally. On the other hand, you get the God-mic, which almost makes up for it.