Sometimes I feel like I'm doing a sort-of Reader's Digest thing on this weblog, condensing other sources' feelgood and feelbad items for easier accessibility. Well, Harper's goes one step further with it's "Weekly Review," where in a few short minutes you can digest the events of the last seven days. The experience is frighteningly comic--or comically frightening.

For those who aren't enthusiasts already, here is a link to one of the most dependably entertaining (and depressing) sort-of blogs around.

Most of its text reduces complicated stories to one sentence, so these lines pulled from the run-on paragraphs are not typical, only quite rewarding.

... Rumsfeld compared President Bush to Winston Churchill and said that Saddam Hussein was acting like Adolf Hitler. British historians begged to differ. "Churchill is the only Englishman any of them has ever heard of, with the possible exception of Shakespeare if they were hard-working at school," said Ben Pimlott, warden of Goldsmiths College, London. "In fact, there is no comparison between Hitler and Saddam Hussein, who is not an expansionist within the region. Americans admire Churchill's brilliance, his language and oratory, his feline style. But Bush is a Neanderthal with no knowledge of the world. Churchill had a great deal of knowledge." ...