[Who's lying?]

This evening I heard a CNN dispatch by a female reporter I'm not familiar with (she had blond hair) that was a basic overview of the day's events. But she told a tale of some men who had covered a body with some sort of sheet or tarp, held down by a frame of bricks. She said they wrote "Here lies Vera: May she rest in peace" on the covering. But a couple of hours before that report, I saw a photo of a body under a sheet, lined by bricks, with the words "Here lies Vera: God help us" scrawled across the makeshift grave.

So either the photo was doctored or, more likely, the CNN reporter heard/read this story elsewhere and fudged the details, implying that she saw this grave and was reporting to us what she saw, but actually she just got from another source. Or the reporter really did see Vera's grave, but she forgot the epitaph and totally told America that it said something that it didn't.

I know in the Grand Scheme of Things, it doesn't matter, but I'm curious — which scenerio is worse? When you fuck up the little things, can we have faith that you get the big things right?

Anyway, sorry no video link of the CNN reporter's gaffe. I'll post it if one comes along.

Oh yeah, I finally saw the Kanye West (scroll way down) clip. I'm a firm believer in random, off-the-cuff mischief, but I think you have to be prepared to form complete sentences. I bet he was so nervous, thinking, Any second, the feed could turn to static, the lights could go out, and ninjas will have my head and my banking account that he couldn't stop stuttering. As has been pointed out before, I don't think it's that George Bush doesn't care about black people; it's that he doesn't care about poor people.

Hopefully he's too preoccupied with the helicopter crash and the gunmen and the dead exotic fish to worry about his racial or class prejudices (or maybe, more politely, non-worries). And so on.

Already, a renegade tribe of survivors, whose civilization arose from the muck has snagged the national spotlight. We've seen enough movies to know that this was the next step. I mean, it's cool that people are surviving and doing their own thing. Can't complain, since they're alive. It just reads like a screenplay and I'm wondering if the TV people are just starting to make stuff up now.