December 19: "We just loved your talk," said an American ex-pat after I had gotten done giving my audience a verbal tour of the US military bases of Iraq, describing to a rather large audience (50 people!) what the life of an embedded reporter was like from beginning to end -- from arriving all jet-lagged at the Kuwait City airport to riding a Rhino into the Green Zone to living in a "can" at Al Asad airbase to riding in a Humvee convoy out to a forward operating base in Ambar -- and then doing the whole thing over again only in reverse. My speech was a bit hit! Plus I got free guacamole on the house.
My audience (at the "Que? Pasa" restaurant and bar http://quepasapv.com) was composed mostly of American, British and Canadian ex-pats. There was a retired architect from St. Louis, a British writer from London, a Canadian former career military officer, etc. And one man was an expert on geothermal energy production. Geothermal energy? Never heard of it.
"They use it in Iceland and Israel," he said. "You tap into the earth's endless heat supply." It's apparently cheaper and cleaner (duh!) than coal and doesn't have the life-threatening side-effects of nuclear energy. "Currently the US government subsidizes the nuclear and coal industries." He said that these industries were subsidized for billions of dollars worth of taxpayers' money which the industries then gave to their lobbyists so they could bribe Congress to give them even MORE of our money for dirty energy that costs an arm and a leg. I forgot the exact amounts that he said were wasted by polluters and special-interest groups in these two industries every year, but it wasn't my fault. I got distracted by the guacamole. "If the government starts to invest the same amount of money into geothermal energy that they have already poured into coal and nuclear energy, we'd have all the clean energy we need."
And while I was giving my speech on Iraq, I also harangued the audience about my book-publishing woes. "You have no idea how hard I've worked to publicize my book in the past month and then somebody who had actually TRIED to buy an actual copy just e-mailed me that it was no longer available on either Amazon or Barnes & Noble online. What! All that work for nothing! I almost broke down and cried.
It seems that the company that printed my book had stopped printing it for one whole freaking month while they inserted my revision into their computer (a process which takes approximately five minutes) but had neglected to notify me that the book was no longer available. Sigh. And what's worse, it won't even be back online for purchase until January 2008! So I passed around my one sole remaining copy of "Bring Your Own Flak Jacket" and everyone said that it looked like a very interesting book. Hell yeah.
Then someone asked me what I thought America should do about Iraq. "I'm not really sure about the details," I replied, "but the very important first step cleaning up that whole mess is to put Bush and Cheney in jail." That answer got a lot of applause.
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