I phoned this one in

By Drew Millard

I assume that in this day and age, the vast majority of all eight of my regular readers have mobile phones. This is good, because I’m about to write about them.

Looking at your cell-phone, you can easily see one way of communicating with people: through making a phone call. But what if you have bad news? What if you have to say something to someone but they’re too annoying to call? What if you’re in a situation where you are unable to call someone due to the noise level or a wish not to make a lot of noise?

That’s where text messages come in. A text message is exactly what it sounds like: it is a message of pure text that your cell phone can send and receive. If you look under your cell phone’s Menu, you should quickly be able to find something to select that says “messaging.” From there, you have reached your text message home, which is styled somewhat after the way email works. You are able to send and receive messages, which you type with your keypad by pressing the number that corresponds to the letter that it represents. Some phones even figure out what word you are trying to type, which can save you time and headaches.

Text messages are awesome. I say this because I have just recently begun a love affair with them. They’re a method of having low-grade communication with a person. Is someone annoying, and yet you still need to speak with them? Then send them a text message, so they can’t talk back unless they send you a text message in reply, which you can simply ignore. Communication made easy.

Text messages are quite neutral. I don’t think anyone has ever gotten more than either mildly excited or slightly annoyed to receive a text message, which means that “texting” is an excellent method to deal with information that is not quite important enough to warrant the intrusion that a phone call brings, but is still vital enough to demand instant communication.

I think that this concept can be best explained by letting you read a few of the latest text messages that I have sent:

1. I have no idea. I am currently craving a bagel.

2. Freeeeeepow!

3. You sadden us. Make money, make money.

4. Ingles or his brother BiLo.

5. Word.

6. Reno 911 the movie comes out next weekend. Yes.

7. Sweet.

8. I hope your grandfather is well.

9. I’m probably skipping the pep rally.

So as you can see, text messages are both fun and trivial, and function best within the constructs of correct and proper grammar without the use of conjunctions. Also, text messages allow you to be silly and get away with it, because none of my text messages have ever elicited the question, “Why did you just send me that?”

I guess this is more of an argument for the questionable sanity of my friends than an argument for the innocuousness of the text message as a greater whole, but whatever. You get the point.

The column that might get me fired

By Drew Millard

War… what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Now for those of you who think that I just ripped that out of a song title, you’re right. However, Edwin Starr was on to something. Why are we in Iraq? Are we trying to save ourselves from terrorists? Are we there to “finish the job?” Do we feel like we need to retaliate against Al Qaeda for the September 11 attacks? Do we have to save the Iraqi people? Or do we just need to show them durned Muslims who the boss is? The answer to all of these questions, of course, is, “Uh……”

Now I know that those of you who read this column on an at least semi-regular basis can tell pretty easily that I lean quite emphatically to the political left. I am not, however, one of those smelly vegans who want to save the universe, one Rwandan genocide at a time. I try to think with my head, and most of the time, I find myself being quite open-minded and pacifistic. Ergo, I am anti-war. Now, some of you may be tempted to put down this newspaper in disgust, but I urge you, please do not. I’m not dumb enough to propose conspiracy theories involving Haliburton and the Military-Industrial Complex. But some things do make you wonder…

Why are we in Iraq? You know what? I don’t know. I was thirteen at the time this war first started, and the first time I realized that some people had a problem with going to war was during the Oscar telecast of that year when filmmaker Michael Moore was booed off the stage because he used his acceptance speech as a platform for making anti-war remarks. So to say that I didn’t have a grasp of what was actually happening at that time is vast understatement. When I tried to actually find out why we went to Iraq, all I could find was partisan rhetoric from both the left and the right of the political spectrum. So after trying to get both sides of the story, I guess we invaded Iraq for a number of reasons which include (but are definitely not limited to) national security, humanitarian action to defeat an evil dictator, oil, a US foothold in the Middle East, the tumultuous aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction, a pre-emptive strike on Iraq before Saddam got too bomb-happy and decided to take potshots at Washington DC, and of course, the Chicago Bears. In fact, it might have even been a good idea to invade at the time, but since we have invaded, we have made several serious mistakes, which many other people more intelligent and more qualified than I have either attacked or explained.

But now that America is in Iraq, what are we to do? Without the guiding hands of US forces, the country would be in shambles. The Sunnis and Shiites are at each other’s throats, and they’re both looking to our army for protection from the other side. But at the same time, the Sunnis are trying to attack the Shiites, and the Shiites are trying to attack the Sunnis, all when we’re not looking. So say that the US just packs up and leaves tomorrow, taking all of our troops out of Iraq. Then the Shiites declare jihad on the Sunnis and vice versa, and the population of Iraq gets decimated by civil war. So the United States, unfortunately, seems to be stuck in Iraq until further notice. Fun, right?

I have no idea how the United States might be able to extricate itself from this quagmire. My only hope about this is that the government doesn’t reinstitute the draft, and the only thing I’m happy about is that I’m not the one who has to deal with all of this mess. That, of course, would be our President and his successor.