@#$$%**&@#?????

First off, just want to say i seem to be doing hunky-dorily, classes going well, students happy to see me back, sun shining, breathing in, breathing out.  i'm taking a minute here in between preparing for my evening class to make note of a little something.

on the AOL welcome screen there was a little article headline from the AP as follows:  "This Doonesbury isn't funny."  so of course i had to go read it.  you might want to do the same.  i haven't been following Doonesbury with any regularity, mostly when fdtate sends me a particular strip, so i haven't kept up with the storyline.  evidently B.D. (former football player, tough kinda guy) has reupped and been fighting in (oops, i started to type "Nam" - i actually got the N on the page) Iraq.  He's been injured and is about to lose the injured leg in surgery.  the headline is correct.  this isn't funny.  Garry Trudeau's humor is not always something we can laugh at.  sometimes it's not humor.  it's a good deal more complex than that. 

in any case, the paragraph that caught my sense of irony was this one:           " 'About ten newspapers have called Universal Press with concerns about the strip, primarily with language the character uses after learning his leg is gone,' company spokeswoman Kathie Kerr said." (emphasis is mine)  yes folks, that's the way we see things here in the good ol' USA.  the horror is not that a man, an athlete, loses a limb and is forever disabled in a war that makes no sense at all -  it's the language he uses when he finds his leg missing.  let's not really present reality, if we can help it.