It has been brought to my attention that I spend a lot of time talking about shooting people on this site. I'm not sure I'm being understood correctly. I may bring up the topic of getting a gun, but you have to understand the context. I walk around much of the time happy as a lark. But often when I am inspired to write, I recall not the blandishments of pleasant exchanges or the boredom of solitary thoughts, but the dramatic moments. And lately a lot of those moments involve, as they did yesterday, when a fighter jet came screaming overhead and left with a huge sonic boom. Which may or may not have been a low ground cover reacting to the protests that turned violent at the naval base. Yesterday there were protests simultaneously held in a few places, mostly in Oakland. The one held at the waterfront, where a contractor was being picketed by striking longshoremen, got out of control, when the protestors threw rocks at the cops, and the cops fired on the protestors with wooden dowels and wooden bullets. For some reason the longshoremen were the ones who got pinned down in the crossfire. Plus the wooden bullets were apparently meant to be shot at the ground and bounce up to hit people, but the cops shot people directly, so there were all these images of injured people with bloody welts, who were mad because the cops shot them.

The point is, that is all just a mess, and I'm not in favor of shooting anyone. I believe in the right to peaceful assembly and all that. I think if you throw rocks at cops, you're bound to get hurt, so there is no surprise that the protest turned violent. Plus the protestors made a bonfire at the gate of the factory, so they were dispersed with tear gas. Just your basic unrest. Nothing shocking, but I'm just trying to underscore the point that all I'd really like is peace; my lunch would have tasted better if I weren't watching black plumes of smoke rise from fires made by protestors in downtown, with police helicoptors swooping in, and, of course, the sonic boom earlier mentioned.

Speaking of not shooting anyone, I hear they might have killed Saddam Hussein. I'm not sure it matters one way or the other, but he sounds like a bad man, so I guess that is good news. Also in the news, my highschool gym teacher made the national news because he was giving "violent wedgies" to a student for a year or more, plus fondling his genitals. The student's genitals, I mean. Maybe his own too, Fox news didn't say. Anyway, good to see my home town in the news.