35 W Bridge

Having just returned from a long weekend vacation to the northern Iowa lake country near Okoboji, I went through Minneapolis twice and had a friend come down from Duluth traversing over that now collapsed bridge to pick me up at airport. This makes one realize that airlines losing luggage means nothing in the grand scheme of thing. My prayers are with the families in Minnesota. It was remarkable that there was not more carnage on a much grander scale, and I suppose it is a testimony to our survival skills that relatively speaking so few people perished. The TV coverage was initially eerily similar to that of 9/11/01 in terms of the not being able to look away from the train wreck type of fixation. I stayed glued to MSNBC last night with Dan Abrams and Keith Olbermann making a nice alternative to CNN's Wolf Blitzer until about 11 before I went to bed without my usual Daily Show fix. Donate some blood, money or time to the Red Cross or your favorite disaster relief agency. I found it telling that one of the talking heads at the press conference mentioned Speaker Pelosi first in terms of initial aid offered by government agencies.