tl;dr

Self-fullingness from sfgate:

Human minds evolved to constantly scan for novelty, lest we miss any sign of food, danger or, on a good day, mating opportunities. But the modern world bombards us with stimuli, a nonstop stream of e-mails, chats, texts,...

Subhead Frustrates Understanding

No, You Go Crazy

I get why these two guys are joyously embracing. They're teammates, San Francisco Giants, 2010 World Series Champions, and this page from the San Jose Mercury News is the front of a whole special section on the Series and its deciding game, the line score of which is printed above the picture of the two guys hugging. Fine.

But what's all this about 58 years of frustration? What frustration, and who held it all these years and for what exactly? I'm sure commenters have somewhere gnawed this question to rags and I'll add this:

The subhead reads, GIANTS END 58 YEARS OF FRUSTRATION, but of course the Giants won the World Series 56 years ago, in 1954, meaning that the frustration referred to in the subhead that is now ended must lie two years further in the past than that, not to be resolved by a mere World Series Championship in the meantime, but going back as far as some pivotal moment in 1952 in fact, 58 years ago, just as DeLillo would have us believe in Underworld, some irksome  something persisting until this year's historic season put an end to it.

The precise nature of this frustration is left as an exerise for the reader.

The Reported Explosion

Within just a couple of hours, news cobbled together of the the explosion in San Bruno had gained the attention of the entire world. The BBC News RSS headline, linked to an article on its website, stated, inaccurately, Blaze engulfs San Francisco homes and continued, inaccurately, "Dozens of homes have been set ablaze near San Francisco International Airport, after a reported explosion."

Residents and travelers alike have long noted that San Francisco International Airport is not in San Francisco, but on the shore of San Francisco Bay miles south of the city. If the body of the RSS feed is accurate, and the blaze, caused by a reported explosion, caused dozens of homes near the airport to be engulfed in flames, then its headline is simply wrong, as there are no houses both in San Francisco and near its airport. Complicating matters, the actual homes set ablaze in San Bruno are not only not in San Francisco but not particulary close to the airport, either.

The BBC's RSS feed makes for a crude approximation of the event it points to. "San Francisco" BOOM! would do as well. But it's notable that even garbled word of this local catastrophe was reverberating in London less than three hours after the terrible explosion.

Three Quarters of Football

The MSM is in lock-step, reporting that the Pittsburh Steelers "won" the Super Bowl the other day, beating the Arizona Cardinals by the score of 27-23, just one more instance of the Rust Belt bias of the old line liberal media with its historic East Coast Regionalist anti-American Desert leanings, is what I say. Reports that the Steelers "won" clash with the view of anyone who sees through the MSM's distortion field to what really happened: the Cardinals, pride of the Southwest, covered the 6½ point spread, but does the MSM bother to put that in your headline? Ha! Tell me what the score was while I wave this pile of bills in your face, NYT!

Arizonans hoping for a clearer Cardinals victory, local pride assuaged, the small comfort of being able to say, "O, rest of the nation, you've got your President Hussein Obamination, sure our guy took a pounding there, but we've got THE SUPERBOWL TROPHY BITCHESZZZZ!!!!11!!," saw those hopes evaporate, yes.

And, thirdly, Evangelicals eager to see their man Kurt Warner at the end of the game pointing a finger up to indicate to whom by the grace of which and all, instead watched devout Kurt Warner get totally punked by Touchdown Jesus. That pass, the one Warner threw, the one run back the entire length of the field for a Pittsburgh touchdown? A lesson to every Evangelical, and I'm pretty sure the last time any of them ever prays directly to Touchdown Jesus to intervene in Kurt Warner's life, if they knows what's good for him, is all I'm saying.

The Big Story Is That Things Have Gotten Better

Updated at 8:15 p.m. EDT, April 10, 2008

Fighting in Sadr City has subsided dramatically, but violence still took the lives of 68 Iraqis across Iraq. Almost half of them were found in a mass grave. […]

A mass grave containing 33 bodies was found in Mahmudiyah. The bodies were found together in a house and appear to have been dead for over a year.[…]

In Baghdad, a U.S. airstrike left five dead and four injured in Sadr City in one attack; two boys were among the dead. Another person was killed and four more were wounded in a second bombing. At least two other people were wounded during these or other air strikes. U.S. forces killed 13 suspects across Baghdad yesterday. No casualties were reported after an IED blasted a U.S. patrol. Also, the Iraqi army blockade of Sadr City will end on Saturday.

In other incidents taking place in the capital, one person was killed and four were wounded during a bombing in a central neighborhood. A roadside bomb near al-Shabb Stadium wounded six people. Two police officers were injured during a bombing near Sheik Abdulqadir al-Gailani Shrine. Three people were wounded when shells blasted their home in Bayaa. Also, two dumped bodies were found.

Antiwar.com tallies the dead in Iraq daily so you don't have to. U.S. forces, it says, killed 13 suspects across Baghdad yesterday, many of them by aerial bombardment. Even all these years after the first Gulf War, the U.S. is firing on Baghdad from the air, and hitting the predictable child or two.

Apparently the dead found in a mass grave in Mahmudiyah have been added to today's 35 freshly killed from all over Iraq to arrive at the figure of 68 dead for Thursday, although it's reported that the bodies of the 33 were in a house in Mahmudiyah for over a year, not alive all that time, but until today not notably dead. Perhaps this is just a preliminary assignment, until the proper date of death can be unearthed by whoever might be spared to find it.

The sound of the opening of the odd mass grave on a day much like any other desperate day in Iraq (just scroll down through antiwar.com's meticulous daily coverage of the carnage for proof enough) is that disquieting noise in the background you may hear behind the dulcet tones of John Burns and Dexter Filkins recorded last night on the Charlie Rose Show, by way of DavidKurtz at Talking Points Memo.