The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

Every time the winter cold season starts up in full swing, I almost always think of The Stand. It took me two or three tries to get through the monster uncut edition, and every time I ended up coming down with either a bad cold or the full-on flu. It was a half-amusing, half-worrisome little thing that had the intended effect of never looking at mass illness quite the same way.

Yesterday, I was grateful for the ripple effect that curiosity has on people. toob decided he was tired of not knowing where tiny, obscure countries were and what they were doing there, and learned the positions and names of tons of them in Europe, Africa and Oceana. I was shocked to discover that I didn't even know about a lot of the smaller island countries in the Atlantic Ocean, and a lot of the factoids he found were intriguing enough to start up a study of my own.

Right now I'm muscling my way through Europe; it's the southeastern block of countries that are the killers. I wonder if Europeans have the same kind of trouble with the eastern United States? Tons of tiny, squiggly little territories with weird names and all, while the west is full of bigger countries and easily recognizable borders.

Anyway, work is being a bear, and I have to go back to it. Boo. Boo I say!