groundhog day

Yesterday a famous rodent came up out of his hole and called for three more months of human rights suppression. Call me crazy but I had this weird sense of deja vu.

You know, it's a year to the day since I received one of the stranger middle-of-the-night calls I can remember. My friends Tyler (who was in India at the time) and Margaret (who was working in Tibet) had made plans to vacation together in Nepal. Tyler emailed me on February 1 to tell me that her plane had been turned around in mid-air and sent back to Delhi when the Kathmandu airport was shut down, after Gyanendra had sacked the government. But Margaret was trapped in Tibet by snowed-out roads, had left her cell phone behind, and had no way of knowing that the reason she couldn't get through on the phone to the Kathmandu Guest House was that the Nepalese king had cut all the lines.

I took Margaret's call around 3 in the morning -- she had turned to me to try to get a message through to Tyler. "Don't go to Nepal, Margaret," I said into my cellphone, in my bed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "There's a coup in Nepal. Go home."

It's a mad, mad globalized globe.