Which is kind of how one feels every morning. My hands shake slightly as I unwrap the morning paper, wondering what horrible atrocity might have occurred as I slept soundly through the night. The headlines stun my waking mind: Marines under heavy fire, FBI given new surveillance powers, Queen Latifah to attend mall opening ceremony. Will the horrors never cease? I can't take much more of this, and I long for my former, halcyon days of carefree intellectual wanderlust—burning my pate with the leaves of the ancients, gathering with local bon vivants, and playing idle games of Yu-Gi-Oh.

Just as a magician misdirects the attention of the audience to conceal some deft sleight-of-hand maneuver, so too, a few stories may have crept beneath the concertina wire of the collective consciousness. And a mongrel bunch they are.

Defeating the English

Language, that is. We're seeing more reportage on military jargon entering the lexicon, and this is something that writers should watch carefully.

Not sure I'd go so far as to read Collateral Language, a compendium of war-speak compiled by John Collins and Ross Glover, but you can see that the phenomena is powerful enough to support at least one title.

"It's striking the way in which the U.S. military is able to create new terms and make them part of our language," says Collins.

MEMO Re: Comdex 2003
TO: B.F., VP Marketing
FR: A.L., COO West Dev.

B.F., wanted to prebrief your COMDEX team with guidance from HQ command and control from a macrosense perspective. This year's presentation will be conducted by a joint force composed of marketing and field rep units collectively known as the coalition of the unfortunate. Expect embedded management elements and a robust escort package of admin assistants to provide an agile ground force at the convention. Time being limited, canvas the vendors simultaneously with effects based operations - shock and awe them with a series of attritional-type operations. Provided the competition is neutralized, the tempo of your operation should have a circular error probable of 90%, establishing ground dominance and minimizing perfidy. We'll extract you at LAX following. Regards, A.L.

To the Victor

Go the spoils. Turns out that ABC News "has obtained a copy of a 99-page contract worth $600 million," outlining the windfall some select U.S. firms will be awarded for the reconstruction of Iraq.

The USAID contract is filled with details about plans to construct Iraqi schools, airports, roads, bridges, hospitals, power plants and more.

British troops are serving alongside U.S. troops in Iraq. But the closed process blocked British companies, as well as any foreign firm, from bidding.

Pay Attention

To what your children do online, that is. Scott Tyree, 39, who everybody thought was just a "computer geek," has pleaded guilty to "sex charges involving a 13-year-old girl he met over the Internet who was found restrained in his Virginia home." Alicia Kozakiewicz had vanished on New Year's Day last year, and fortunately FBI agents located her only three days after her abduction.

Agents said Tyree, of Herndon, Va., told them he planned to keep her indefinitely. At the time of his arrest, federal authorities said Tyree referred to himself on a Web site as a "master for teen slave girls."

And very good news arrives with word that 14-year-old Lindsey Ryan has been recovered safely in California. You might recall that Lindsey was abducted by Terry Drake, 56, after she left her home in Michigan to meet with him three weeks ago. In this case, too, the perp and victim had been carrying on e-mail correspondence. Since Drake was a convicted murderer, everybody feared the worst, and at the time of his arrest police discovered five guns. This could have turned out very badly.

Next: Weblog Usage and Abusage.

12:34:31 PM