Good news and bad news

Let's start with the bad. Pervez Musharraf has declared a state of emergency in Pakistan, and suspended the constitution, as well as taken all non-government stations off of television. Sound like some sort of Military Dictatorship? Wikipedia agrees. Now, our government has an expressed interest in turning dictatorships into democracies, yet we are staunch allies of Pakistan. Sounds awfully two-faced. Some of our other allies: India, Thailand, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Russia, and Morocco. Some other spots that are not free: Sudan, Chad, China, Vietnam, Russia, and others. We don't do much about situations about these other countries. I assume this is because they are either too large, or they don't have any oil.

The good news is that I got all around Albuquerque yesterday without using a vehicle. Alison went to work, and I decided to take the bus to lunch. I took my $1 and my LG Chocolate and hopped on the #5 that runs from Downtown to the east side of town. It takes just about an hour to get out there, so I did some reading on evaporation and stable isotopes. Once I got off the bus (finally) I stopped at the Subway to get myself lunch, and the Pizza Hut to get some for Alison. We ate lunch outside of her office, then I headed back down to Montgomery to get back on the bus. This time the ride was pretty short. Also, the bus was very quiet because it's one of the new CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) buses. Go Abq! Importantly, the Target and the Wild Oats are both along the route, so I can do pretty much all of my shopping and wife-visiting on this single bus route. The drop off is probably about half a mile from our house, so it will be kind of an annoying slog carrying groceries home, but oh well. These are the sacrifices we have to make to live with minimal impact. Later last night, Alison and I walked downtown to the theater (a 3-mile roundtrip walk) to see The Darjeeling Limited, a Wes Anderson movie. It was a pretty good movie, and I liked the fact that there were no truly likable characters. Go see it and decide for yourself. Another nice thing is that all of the previews before the movie consisted of seemingly intelligent movies; no Fred Claus, or Saw IV, or Spongebob movies, etc. People didn't talk much during the movie either (except for me - I have this annoying habit of having to whisper something to Alison every like 10 minutes).