More things from NPR

I was listening to NPR this morning and heard a few things that I wanted to share.

First, this story from Weekend Edition Saturday, which is about a television show featuring 4 Middle Eastern students exploring America. Sounds really, really interesting, but it isn't airing in America, so check YouTube or similar for the show. They interviewed Lara Abou Saifan, one of the cast members. She is Lebanese, and was here in America filming the show during last summer's war between Hezbollah and Israel. Can you even imagine? There's a war going on at home, and you're in a country where no one really cares about anything that isn't happening in their own backyard. It must have been awful for her.

The other thing that I thought about as they interviewed her was that she was the only female cast member. I don't know how they treat women in Lebanon, but I do know that the Saudis don't let women drive, and one of the cast mates was a Saudi, so I wonder if she had any trouble of the chauvinistic variety. The interview, of course, didn't address this.

Next, on Weekend America, I heard a story about rice, and an art exhibit. Called "All of the people in all of the world", it uses grains of rice to represent various populations. Like how many people fit into a baseball stadium. Or how many people in America will be born today, how many will die, how many people in the world are HIV positive. When you see numbers that are incomprehensible, like 64 million, represented by grains of rice, you start to get a feel for just how many that really is. They weigh the rice, rather than counting it, when the numbers get high.

Other than these two things, I've got nothing to share. My online time has been mostly taken up with fan forums (really, don't ask. I'm embarrassed enough about it as it is.) and my book these days. The book is going...slowly. I'm at a point where I'm not stuck, exactly, but at a loss as to how to get from where I am right now to the next action sequence, without dragging it out too much. But in the six weeks or so that I've been working on it, I've written almost 90 pages, when I copy and paste it into a Word document. So it is apparently going all right. Right?