In just a few short hours Daylight Savings Time will end for real. Half the clocks in my apartment automatically “fell back” last weekend, which was annoying, but a useful excuse all week for showing up late.
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A bit of perspective: Thousands of people, including 170 official delegates from 44 countries, are gathered in Delhi, India, for the World Toilet Summit:
Worldwide, an estimated 2.6 billion people have no access to safe and hygienic toilets, a number the UN hopes to halve by 2015 as part of its Millennium Development Goals.
That’s at least one out of every three people. Odds are, if you’re reading this, you’re not one of them, so if you were looking for something to be grateful about today (probably more than once), there you go.
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Big thanks to Wade L. for forwarding this link from the inspired Lark News: “Left Behind VBS fiasco lingers.”
READING, Pa. — When Sandy Durant learned her church was going to host a Left Behind vacation Bible school, she was overjoyed. Her children loved the Left Behind Kids series, and she and her husband had read the entire adult series.
But when she arrived to find her children gone on the last day of VBS she “absolutely flipped out.”
It didn’t help to learn that it was all a ruse designed to show people what it would feel like to have a loved one snatched away in the Rapture.
That there is some pitch-perfect, Onion/Guest quality satire. While checking out the rest of Lark News, don’t miss what may be the Best FAQ ever.
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Here in the United States, access to sanitary toilets is far more the norm than it is in the global context mentioned above, but there’s also this from the October Harper’s Index:
Estimated amount needed over the next 20 years to maintain U.S. sewer systems: $390,000,000,000
Harper’s cites the EPA as the source there. Looking for a more exact citation online, I instead found this EPA report on the “Infrastructure Gap” for clean drinking water and water treatment, which suggests the Index figure might be on the low side.
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A modest proposal: Mark Day argues that, “If we must bomb Iran,” we should time it to start during the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl, that way at least we’d have something to watch on TV once football season was over.
(I’m still trying to wrap my brain around Sen. Joe Lieberman’s simultaneous arguments that: A) the U.S. must stay in Iraq to prevent the conflict from spreading into a regional war; and B) the U.S. should strike against Iran, to ensure that the conflict spreads into a regional war.)
Other recent YouTube fave: “I’m a Marvel … and I’m a DC: After Hours.”
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