The principal news lately has told of a beheading, Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration striving mightily to prevent Iraq and President Bush's re-election prospects from turning to mush. Yet other lesser items have competed for public attention, such as the 17-year emergence of the periodic cicada's Brood X, and - let's see.
(a) Moves for sanctioning homosexual "marriage" in, for instance, Massachusetts and (b) moves for acceptance of homosexuality as normal within such mainline Protestant denominations as Methodist, Presbyterian and Episcopalian.
And let us not overlook (c) the evident split (for the second time within a year) between the nation's Roman Catholic bishops and their handpicked lay panel investigating the (primarily) homosexual predation within the Catholic priesthood. A year ago the panel's chairman quit after comparing the secrecy among some uncooperative bishops to the Mafia's code of silence. Now the panel finds the bishops still impeding the panel's work; the acting chairman and three other panel members (there are 12 members total) will leave next month.
It's odd, all this business relating to homosexuality, when AIDS and HIV are rampant across the globe, most recently roiling even the U.S. pornography industry.
So severe has the five-year drought been in the American West that Lake Powell, formed in the Nevada desert by the Glen Canyon dam on the Colorado River, has fallen to 40 percent of its capacity. Concerns are that if the drought persists, by 2007 Lake Powell - essentially a reservoir - may prove unable to provide water and the dam may prove unable to generate electricity.
As but the latest indicators that the contemporary art market has gone bonkers, earlier this month Christie's auctioned Jackson Pollock's drip painting "No. 12, 1949" for $11.6 million in good money, and Sotheby's auctioned Picasso's early "Boy With a Pipe" for $104.2 million (a record for any piece of art).
And speaking of ridiculous things, Al Gore has announced he is heading a group launching a cable-news network (Newsworld International) offering "irreverent and bold" programming for young adults. Gore insists "this is not going to be a liberal network, a Democratic network, or a political network." Yet that may prove true or mere blather, given that AirAmerica - an overtly leftist enterprise seeking to bring ideological balance to talk radio - is in the process of bombing big-time.