Gallimaufry 2

They should be singing "Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White" in Washington, DC right now.   The 2010 Cherry Blossom Festival is continuing through 11 April, although the National Park Service doesn't believe that the blossoms themselves will last that long.  The peak blossom date was supposed to have been 31 March.  For those who can't make a personal tour to the Tidal Basin, there are lots of photos available at the Washington Post website.

Swiss biker, Fabian Cancellara, came in first at the Tour des Flandres (Tour of Flanders) in Belgium on Sunday.  He is the first Swiss biker to win that race since 1923.  The press are calling him "Spartacus" because of the power he showed in defeating the Belgian champion biker, Tom Boonen.  I was able to watch the final moments of the race.  Cancellara made it look easy, coming in front by more than a very comfortable minute and carrying a Swiss flag handed to him by one of the spectators for the final few meters.

Around here it is clear that the bike racing season has begun.  One group of serious bikers swooshed right by me as I was walking along the Lake Road last week.

Another great Swiss athlete, Roger Federer, is not having a good spring in the US, having been ignominiously retired early during his last two tournaments there.   Andy Roddick has been the latest beneficiary of Roger's missteps, having won at the Sony Ericsson Open in Miami on Sunday.  Andy also came in second at Indian Wells two weeks ago.  If we have anything like the wonderful 2009 Wimbledon final between Federer and Roddick in store for us fans this year, the 2010 tennis year should be outstanding.

Tuesday evening, the SNCF (French railway system) was hit by a workers' strike that has affected about a quarter of the Paris train à grande vitesse (TGV = High Speed Train) traffic.  This has caused major disruption to those holidaymakers who are trying to return home after the Easter holidays.  I am so happy that I went absolutely nowhere.  I thoroughly enjoyed going nowhere.

There has been a lot of outrage on this side of The Pond about the recent video released on Wikileaks that shows a massacre of Iraqi civilians and Reuters journalists by US forces who launched an air strike in Baghdad in July 2007.  The Pentagon is also outraged, although its rationale for outrage is not about the massacre but instead because the Wikileaks website is a "danger to national security."  Over here, the outrage is more appropriately about possible war crimes. 

My personal belief is that Wikileaks performs a public service that the US mainstream media (MSM) either cannot or will not perform.  IMO, the US MSM has generally served us all very badly, but most especially during the period from November 2000 to November 2008.  That there has been a slight improvement since is principally because the US Administration itself has changed for the better, not because the US MSM does its job any more thoroughly.  In fact, given its record of ignoring major improvements all-round since January 2009 and hyping the literally insane "Teahadists" and their self-appointed standard-bearer, Sarah Palin (clearly what Gertrude Stein had in mind when she famously said "there is no there there"), the US MSM either must start reporting facts responsibly or be superseded entirely by sources such as Wikileaks.  Had the US MSM been reporting the facts as they should have, instead of acting merely as stenographers and mouthpieces for lying warmongers who themselves had never been to war, it is quite likely that Iraq would not be in the disastrous state that it is today.  

And so it goes ... .