Jet Lag

I’ve been back in the States for a few days now, and am almost over the jet lag. I’ve always found East-to-West a lot harder to get over than West-to-East.

One of the joys of returning to my home is that I can finally sit in a room with enough light to read.  Three weeks in Britain, and I never found myself in a room that was less than murky.  Which wasn’t on account of the weather— though the weather was depressingly cloudy and cold for most of the trip— but because the British seem to specialize in low-wattage lighting.  There were “reading lights” in the hotels that were so weak they illuminated nothing but themselves.  If I hadn’t been equipped with an iPad with a backlit screen, I wouldn’t have been able to read a damn thing.  Not even the room service menu.

I returned home to a nation whose media had been completely hijacked for over a week by a couple of Chechen hillbillies.  My earlier post was right when I theorized the Boston bombers were homegrown, wrong about their motivation, which seemed to run thusly:

• The Russians have killed a quarter of our people in the last 2o years, therefore

• We’ll blow up Boston, and

• HEY!  COOL!  WE’RE ON TV!  LET’S HIJACK A CAR AND GET SOME SNACKS!

(And when they stopped for snacks, their hostage escaped.)

These guys were so dumb they brought a BB gun with them on their final rampage.  A what?

I fully expected that the U.S. media would disgrace itself, mainly because it can do little else.  And so they reported, incorrectly, that another bomb had gone off at the JFK Library, that numerous unexploded bombs had been discovered, that a suspect had been arrested within hours of the bombing, that a dark-skinned male had been arrested (what?  In Boston?), and that the chief suspect in the bombing was someone named Sunil Tripathi.

I had hopes that the Hive Mind might do better— there were so many photos and videos available online that having them poured over by a swarm of concerned citizens seemed like a good idea, at least until the amateur detectives at 4chan and Reddit sent virtual lynch mobs after a couple of teenagers named Barhoun, and of course the unfortunate Mr. Tripathi.

Well.  Maybe I’m more jetlagged than I thought.  Because all I’ve managed to do is make a post about everything that’s made me grumpy in the last four or five days.

Time to go to bed.