What's news? Don't ask
As mentioned previously, I'm really wary of slow news cycles, owing to the fact that one of the slowest news cycles I ever endured was in 2001, from May to early September. That said, I can't help but wondering how it is I live in a metropolitan area of 2 million people, a state with 16 million, and a country of 300 million -- and not one of them is doing something interesting. That has to be the case, otherwise we wouldn't be reading about:

The debunking of the African uranium intelligence.The Democratic Party is a farce. I remember that from March 7, when it actually happened. Of course, it got buried in the rush to war. It's a real shame the Democrats have nothing more solid than old news with which to beat Bush and his crew. "Damn," say the left. "He's killing us. What can we do now?" "Hey, remember back in March when that Mohamed ElBaradei guy said that stuff from Niger was all lies? Didn't he mention that in the State of the Union? Have we mentioned that lately?" Sad. Where the hell where y'all on March 7? In case you've forgotten: You were marching your asses to war, just like the rest of us, because you couldn't come up with a strong enough argument against it. Next year's election is going to make Reagan-Mondale in '84 look like it was close. Bush might carry all 50 states and five Canadian provinces at this rate.

The stunning announcement of a security flaw in Windows. If you have a computer running Windows XP, and you have Automatic Update enabled, you get a patch from Microsoft about once a week automatically sewn into your operating system. Somehow this story crawled on to Page 1 of our rag. This week's flaw affects primarily server software. If you don't know what "server software" is, chances are you won't be affected.

Michael Savage getting dumped by MSNBC, but thriving on radio. You might say, "so what?" and, of course, you might well be right. Most readers of this forum are sane people who have no use for right-wing-wacko radio. I listen to one radio station driving to work and another driving home. When I get in my car at night, he's on the former station. I usually switch pretty quickly, but he occasionally gets my attention -- and really, isn't that the point? -- because he's so off-the-charts outrageous. He got booted off TV because he said to a caller to his TV show something along the lines of, "I hope you die of AIDS, you sodomite." You can't say that on TV. You can, however, say it on right-wing-wacko radio, and much worse. He'd be funny if he wasn't so scary -- despite the fact he seems to intend to be neither. The local rag asked the local station why Savage is still on. Their answer was something along the lines of, "because nobody's asked us to stop carrying his show." Look, I'm as against political correctness as the next guy, but there is a line. I'd decline this asshole if he tried to buy time on my station. I sure as hell wouldn't pay to carry him.

Meanwhile, while all this is happening, John Ashcroft still has a job, the Recording Industry Assocation of America is trying to make felons out of file-swappers, soldiers are still dying defending a country we don't want and that doesn't want us, and people are getting scammed, screwed and soaked daily by businesses big and small because the education system isn't solid enough to make us smart enough to learn how to keep it from happening.

If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.