we live in interesting times. it's only unfortunate that iraqi blood will have to grease the wheels of american brand freedom and justice. i feel asleep in the early evening but woke up just so i could watch the msnbc war deadline countdown clock go to 00:00:00. 
now i'm sure i'm not the only one, but i was expecting the television screen to be suddenly lit up with broadcasts of gun and missile fire in baghdad. nothing happened. you could hear crickets in baghdad, or whatever it is that make noises in quiet desert nights. how anti-climatic. in times of international crisis, i go to the only source that 's worth going to, a certain 16th century french prophet...you might know him as...NOSTRADAMUS! what does nostradamus have to say about all this? i'm really curious.
my pre-war day started like this: lunch (hotdogs and a fruit elixir), followed by a run, then a shower. walking back from the charles river i saw julie passing by me in her car. by the time my mind made that connection, she was already down the street, too late for me to get her attention. i ran home and called her on the cellphone though, she was just out getting a carwash (true, i barely recognized her shiny clean vehicle), and then she told me she almost passed out at the hardware store, which we figured out might be due to ingesting msg-laced wasabi peas. that was my dose of vicarious pre-war drama.
then i fell asleep watching spongebob, woke up to catch the deadline countdown, made dinner (dumplings), and then the war started.
i think the phrase "attack iraq" should be banned. it's too cutesy, and war is many things but war is not cute. if you see a news broadcast using "attack iraq" or its variant "iraq attack" in a story graphic, please change the channel.
now i'm surfing to find which brand of war coverage i like the best and parking myself in front of that channel. cnn is the old favorite, made their fame from the first US war on iraq. cnn headline is now broadcasting cnn's feed, and so is local channel 5 (the abc affiliate). channel 7, the nbc affiliate, is broadcasting the msnbc news feed. channel 4 the cbs affiliate is not doing war coverage at all (although earlier i saw dan "the man" rather breaking in the news that the war is on), instead choosing to show the regular tv lineup of late night talk shows. fox news i don't like too much, it has a very conservative bent (an animated waving american flag graphic in the upper left hand corner), plus it has the distracting terror alert "high" graphic on their info strip. their news broadcasters are better looking though, i'll give them that. i heard all their reporters were kicked out of baghdad for some reason though (let me guess: geraldo!). necn is also doing war coverage, but because they're a local outfit, they don't have the reach that a more international news broadcasting team such as cnn can have. they're very old school though, they have a poster of iraq marked with magnetic stickers instead of snazzier computer graphics.