Elections or Psychic, Lovelorn Europeans?

It's no contest. You know what you really prefer. 31 days of Tweedlesketches by Michael Fleming.

Another Election Day in America, and you may care or not. I even care, but I'm still past ready for it all to be over. So, let's refresh ourselves with what's going on elsewhere.

1) Uri Geller's climbed from the rubble of obscurity, along with a Brazilian psychic, to claim credit for having located Saddam Hussein's spiderhole through paranormal methods. Do not think I'm dubious, but I wonder if this has anything to do with the $25 million-dollar reward? Too bad none of these phenoms have taken up James Randi's challenge. That's a cool mil for the asking- easy-peasy for someone who can pinpoint a tyrant's ditch in a country the size of California.

2) You may not have heard that this weekend, Europe suffered its worst blackout in three decades, affecting 10 million people across Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. Fortunately, it was relatively brief and appears to have been more inconvenient than injurious.

We have similarly entangled power grids here of inconsistent condition, and have had similarly cascading situations. This is an ongoing problem in modern, connected nations. But what's tre European, it seems to me, is that Germany's suffering a brain drain due to economic conditions/taxation for highly-skilled workers, and, according to the Independent's coverage, "The European Commission is investigating the structure of the EU's power market and whether the Continent's giant firms need to be broken up to encourage greater competition." However, the reaction to this situation is not better technological information sharing or standardization of communication mechanisms to allow swift management at functional levels across borders. Oh, No. The answer is the cozy, woolly sweater of Another Centralized Bureaucracy where each country may argue about funding shares and war for internecine dominance.

I'm sure that'll prove to be as credible, efficient, and nimble a system as the one self-inflicted upon the beleaguered Airbus A380, whose EU subsidies mean that politically the construction contracts get parceled in chunks to four different EU countries, and the disaparate parts work together worse than Frankenstein's.

3) But what, you ask, what if you're a lonely U.K freakazoid who just wants love? The London Review of Books aims to serve with personal ads guaranteed to make you laugh and feel better about yourself.