What Happened This Week?

Readers:

I am back in Cochabamba after being away on retreat for the week in…wait a minute. I am not going to say, because it is a really great place, an absolute must for people visiting the country who want to spend time in a small town. Really, don’t miss a chance to go there and definitely stay at the 25 Boliviano-a-night place where I stayed. I just can’t tell you where it is. I don’t want to mention it and have a lot of people go there and screw it up. You understand, right?

In any event, I don’t have a clue what happened in the world in the last six days, other than my getting bit by a really unfriendly dog in the undisclosed location where I was. Though I suspect that didn’t get reported by AP. Dan Keane, are you there? Does that qualify as a story? I guess not. I’d have to bite the dog, as the saying goes.

Actually the only news event I have even heard about is that former Russian President Boris Yeltsin died while I was away, which I think is very strange. It isn’t strange that he died. I mean he was old and it seems like he drank a good deal, at least so say people who seemed to know. No, what I find odd is the timing.

I have witnesses to corroborate this. Last week in one of our more frenetic last editing sessions at The Democracy Center, out of the blue, another member of the team and I got into a heated debate over whether Boris Yeltsin was deceased. I really can’t say how it came up, other than we all wanted desperately to talk about something other than the work at hand. No one had an answer (until now, I guess), though others at the table seemed a bit perplexed about why we were discussing the state of existence of Boris Yeltsin instead of the finer points of Bolivian gas and oil policy.

I swear, truly, I had nothing to do with his death and my condolences to his family. Also, not to alarm anyone, I did have a dream while away about a U.S. stock market crash owing itself to an announcement by the Bush administration that it had emptied Fort Knox to pay for the Iraq War. But I don’t think anyone should panic and sell just yet. Great, now if there is a crash I’ll get blamed.

In any event, as I mentioned, I haven’t a clue what has gone on the last week. I presume Evo is still President and that Samuel Doria Medina still owns Burger King. Any changes in big things like these generally get told to you when you get home.

So, I leave it to you dear readers to fill in the details. What happened in Bolivia and the world the last six days? Enquiring minds want to know.

And if anyone is offended by the slight flippancy in my tone in this post (trust me, I could post the lyrics to America the Beautiful and one of the commenters here would be offended, it is just their nature, don’t read too much into it), please forgive. We will be back with some dreadfully serious stuff next week and you will be dreaming longingly for the days when the Blog debate of the day was whether Boris Yeltsin still walked the Earth.

By the way, does anyone know if Ethyl Merman is still alive? I wonder about that one too sometimes.

Jim Shultz