Caw! Caw!

The story of the year is going to be food riots, no doubt. This time, riots in Mogadishu, the nominative capital of Somalia. Somalia is still largely lawless after 20 years civil war, and al Queda has a substantial following there. This will only help their cause, no doubt.

Cutting back on the use of biofuels is being heralded by some, but the real impact of the fuel crisis on food prices is still debated.

Tornados
Blindness
Arthritis
Deafness
Large, excited dogs
Traveling in inclement weather
Centipedes
Horror movies

Rook is going on vacation to beautiful Minneapolis, MN.

If there’s anything worth cawing about, we’ll poke our beak in and make a post.

If there is one thing Rook doesn’t get enough of, it’s sleep. Oh, we certainly sleep in late on weekends or occasionally miss an alarm on a week day but that doesn’t even begin to cover the sleep debt we accrue on an almost daily basis — they say the average person needs 8 hours of sleep. Rook needs 10 and only gets 6 on good days.

You might wonder where Rook is going with this. Rook spends our days working like many of you at an unextraordinary job where things are done by computers which we direct by pecking away at a keyboard. Sometimes, certain tasks can only be one by the computers when ‘load’ is low — we have rant here, about incompetents being in charge of processing capacity, but we’ll spare you it, dear reader — and one of these tasks will soon fall upon Rook and our fellows to perform it regularly, meaning Rook had to be at his job for training at the very early hour of 7, when he’s normally not even out of the nest by then.

Now, if you were Rook, I can tell you what would upset him even more than having to get up at this early hour — getting up and being at work on schedule, early, when all he wants to do is crawl back into his nest and be told the training is canceled. We nearly flew the coop right then, we did.

It’s enough to make you want to peck someone’s eyes out!

This crow has a few links about the growing food crisis we talked about in a previous column to share with you.

In Haiti, riots have repeatedly broken out, and there are some casualties. Probably the most serious casualty has been the Haitian Government itself. I assume there are no desperate men at the top of the government with some Ice 9 ready to go for all our sakes.

Egypt had it’s own share of riots too, replete with tear gassing the crowds. An important thing to keep in mind with Egypt is a very restrictive society - they’re quite likely to try and make you disappear if you’re doing anything they don’t like, so this sort of mass action is without precedent.

Technical Note: We are still trying to bend WordPress to our avian will, so expect things to be in flux. We won’t bore you by talking blogger shop as so many of the magpies that clog the internet.