Summer cleaning and London bombing.

When I moved to Vacaville for summer, I moved to Mom’s house, which means I had to take all my stuff from my dorm room, drag some of my storage bins out of the garage, and take over Chad’s old room. (It actually used to be my old room, back in high school. I haven’t lived in it since ’97.) The process demands, to some degree, that I put some order into my life, so I’ve been going through old clothes, determining what should be donated to the Salvation Army, what should be thrown out, and what should be kept.

Likewise I have to figure out what books are going on the bookshelves; and I’m organizing my MP3 collection, which is in a mess but needs to be backed up onto DVDs (yes, I have that many) and stuffed onto the iPod. The really obnoxious thing about MP3s is that you have to keep the original CDs you ripped them from in order for them to be legal. This equates to two bins in the garage. I could make a nice little bundle selling them; but for all the preaching I do against piracy, I would be a hypocrite. Integrity is expensive.

My process is not fast enough for Mom, who has been organizing the garage, watering the yard, and doing a million other little projects that keep her occupied.

Occasionally she does this while watching what I call “white trash TV”—courtroom shows, talk shows, dating shows, etc. Man, do they do a lot of paternity tests. I keep wondering how on earth they get people to be on these shows. You know nothing good will come of it when your ex-girlfriend tells you, “Honey, would you go with me on the Jerry Springer show?” There’s got to be a large subclass of people who are willing to go through any freakish insanity so long that they get a chance to be on TV. Anyway, I don’t bother to watch it; I catch snippets of it whenever I pass the family room.

Of course, I wanted to see the latest on what was happening in London. I didn’t hear of it until after noon; and since there’s no cable TV and Kerry was hogging the internet, I was just going to have to wait until the BBC News came on at 5 p.m.

I get annoyed with the English-language coverage of world news in the U.S. (Spanish-language coverage is much better, but often limited to Spanish-speaking countries in the Americas.) ABC calls its news World News Tonight, but most American TV news is about the U.S., and any world events are usually followed by reaction from Americans. Disaster strikes Britain; so 12 minutes is spent on Britain and the rest is spent on how alert levels in the U.S. are raised, and how we’re not ready to resist attacks. ABC—not to get on their case too much, but I’m currently watching their news—did their usual bit on how their producers left backpacks on East Coast trains and nobody touched them. (I could’ve told you that; I take the train often and there’s no security on them. The only “guards” are the conductors, and typically there is only one per train.) Our trains are largely unguarded, as are the buses. Airplanes are only guarded because you can fly them into things. Trains, not so much.

But this stuff I knew already. I want to know about London, dammit. So now that I’ve been on the internet, I’ve been updating myself on it. Thank God there weren’t as many victims as there were in other places. I don’t know what the terrorists were thinking it would do; but I know what it will do: The British will go after them even more.