Tuesday Bleats are always thin, meager things; sorry. Mondays are busy. I was writing a column tonight when I strolled downstairs for a cold crisp ale, and saw the news: we’d killed Saddam again. One man, seven doubles - that makes eight lives. I see those cartoon cats in Warner Brothers cartoons, ascending upward on a cloud, wearing wings, sporting a halo, a number on their celestial garment to indicate which life they represented. Which one didn't we get?

In one respect I'd come to hope that Saddam would be handed over to the crowds, strung up like Benito. It would be instructive for the region to see that when the Street finally rose up and accomplished something, it was not to wave signs and urge jihad, but to separate the tyrant from his mortal coil.

In the absence of that, atomization by bunker-buster is just fine. They say that four were dropped - hope the fourth one was the charm. First bomb: everyone stops. Second bomb: everyone looks at everyone else. Third bomb: everyone is overtaken by the electric sluice of fear; panic and denial exchange a flurry of blows. Fourth bomb: a great and horrible hand.

We’ll see tomorrow. If he’s dead, what a Monday: Saddam dead, WMD found, and US forces swipe the ashtrays at a Presidential palace. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, men.

I slept on the floor for two hours this morning. Slept for two hours on the floor the previous night. This is the only way we can get her to stay in her bed. I’m sure it’s the wrong thing to do. At 4:30 AM better solutions don’t seem plentiful. So I was tired and stiff and cranky all morning. Naptime was no better - an hour of grim negotiations. After the nap, off to school. We played for an hour, then the parents went to the conference room for coffee and cookies and genial kvetching. After ten minutes one of the supervisors came in, a sign that one of the kids is acting up, or acting out, or needs his keister swabbed. All heads turn to the door. It was a new assistant, and she didn’t know which parent to address.

“Natalie?” she said.

I rose. A few of the moms who’d been in the class all year noted that Gnat never needed Daddy; this was odd.

I went back to the play room. Blood! Blood everywhere!

Today was Bubble Day, and there was a plastic tub with a half-dozen bubble-blowing implements, right next to an electric fan. The floor was slick with spilled soap. Gnat had slipped and clipped her face on a plastic table, and bought the trifecta: double-barreled bloody nose and a bit tongue. My poor dear. My poor poor baby. Spent a half an hour on stanching duty, consoling her, playing, daubing the spouts, washing away the red red krovva, trying to make her laugh.

That’s our last week: pink eye, ear infection, double nose bleed and a chopped tongue.

I must now get back to work and rip up what I wrote before, since it’s possible, again, that Saddam is dead, again. I’ll leave you with this piece of amusing remarks from a Chermun newspaper. Instapundit linked to a translated story from “Die Zeit” (“The Pimple”) and the translation, like many robot jobs, chokes on an number of German words - they pass right through the robot like seeds through a bird’s digestive seeds. (Big, big seeds.) So you come up with something that can only be called Gerglish. Here’s the first few grafs:

In this, the real world the USA are to be defeated at present not.

Wise you are, Master Yoda.

Therefore the Amerikahasser invents itself approximately around the globe simply another world. Everything in front the Iraqi regime, which is under the impacts of the allied troops in the last courses.

I’ll say.

That US troops penetrated in Bagdad, a "propaganda lie" is, bruestete itself an Iraqi "information Minister" on weekend. In reality the aggressors of the Iraqis are struck into the escape and "crushed"; one the US Besatzer on the Bagdader airport "slaughtered". He offering no prospects the situation of the regime, the more zuegelloser and savages become its propagandistic Fantasien.

How zuegelloser can the Information Minister get when it comes to fatasien about the Besatzers?


The boldness, with which the communist manifestos reality is denied and turned in the opposite, certainly probably hardly rises from the almost insanity; it is calculated obvious. The Fantasmen of the Baathisten is purposefully directed toward the broad Arab public, which wants to betaeuben their pain over the own faint by conceited victory messages.

I fainted once, and hit my head on the desk; ten aspirin couldn’t betaeuben the ache.

We experience a frightening further schraubendrehung in the collective Psychose of the Arab nationalism: Still during the current events material history is replaced by a mythische Gegenwelt.

Gegenwelt: that’s what you get on your skin after you’ve been slapped by history. And now, the ultimate Gerglish sentence:

One finds another form of propagandistic Fiktionalisierung, as it were, to their intellectual variant with the Indian authoress Arundhati Roy, your amerikaphoben Hasstiraden pushes in the formed western establishment for years on ehrfuerchtige admission, because Roy, surrounded with the exotic aura of a cultivated third conception of the world citizen, understands it perfectly, the role of the Fuersprecherin of all suppressed ones and miserable ones of this earth anzumassen itself.

Ain't it the truth.