A bit of this and that from the weekend.
Ever have a vivid dream where you are doing something that you know (in your waking mind) that you've never done and don't even know how to do? That happened to me the other night. I dreamed that I was in an unfamiliar city, in an area with low-rise buildings. It was lunch time and I ended up in a convenience store looking through microwaveable frozen dinners. I didn't find what I wanted, so I went back out in the street, dropped my skateboard to the pavement and started scooting down the road. Of course, I've never ridden a skateboard in my life, but in the dream, I knew how to ride one and even had a good balanced feel on it. It was very strange.
I watched an episode of the Explorer show on the National Geographic channel, in which the narrator (an Asian-American woman) went to North Korea with a Nepali eye doctor to document him performing some 1000 eye operations on North Koreans as a humanitarian gesture. The show was eye-opening not just for the blind patients who had their sight restored, but to the viewer as well. North Korea has to be one of the most hellish places to live on Earth. Anyone who steps out of line in any way will be sent to the forced labor camps, along with everyone in their extended family. This kind of terror, along with a cult of personality of Kim Jong Il that would have made Stalin blush, makes for an almost insane surrealism. At the end of the show, when the bandages come off and the patients can see for the first time in years, they don't thank the doctor; no, they bow to pictures of Kim Il Sung (founder of the North Korean state) and Kim Jong Il and declare their loyalty in the most fervent of terms. Everyone in the crowd applauds the dictator, and you get the feeling that just like in Stalin's Soviet Union, the person who stops clapping first runs the risk of being sent to the camps. After watching the show, I was even more grateful than usual to be an American.
Well, they found the body of Jessie Davis, the murdered pregnant woman in Ohio. Show of hands: Who was shocked, shocked! to find out that the "baby-daddy" confessed to being involved in her disappearance? It's a sad state of affairs, but like the Natalie Holloway disappearance a couple of years ago, there's a morality play and a cautionary tale here: In this case, it goes to show that it's a Bad Idea to hook up with a married playa and get knocked up by him, twice. Just as Natalie Holloway was partying with the wrong crowd and it caught up with her, so too did Jessie Davis get involved with someone she shouldn't have (a married man with an alleged history of philandering and some accusations of domestic violence in his past), and she came to a bad end. Bad decisions have consequences.
