A tiny, personal indication of the continuing decline of American civilization: my friend Ann wants to buy Christmas crackers that play musical notes as you break them open. She has bought them every year at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra store on Michigan Avenue. We went there Saturday: no crackers this year, they tell us. I proclaim: "I'll find them online." I spend a full hour scouring the Web and eBay. I rake through page after page of Google. These objects seem only to be available in the UK, where there is a veritable cult of Christmas crackers. There's a Web site devoted to them here (http://www.absolutelycrakcers.com). Anyway, I could only find them in a few places in the UK such as this: The lowest price: 9.99 British pounds. I am astonished to find that this is about $18 U.S. And this does not include VAT and shipping costs. We suspect this is why the symphony store did not order Christmas crackers this year: due to the plummeting U.S. dollar, they are now too expensive for us here in the states.

Guess who has an op-ed column in the New York Times today? Bob Greene. Yup, that Bob Greene: the former Chicago Tribune columnist who was fired after a sex scandal, the writer many in this town loved to hate. Read his work here: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/22/opinion/22greene.html.

...and speaking of spam, I just visited one of the sites described in Internet Babylon, Interview with God, and found myself instantly bombarded by the Divine Spirit of Marketing. What happened to this site? It no longer seems to be run by its creator, Reata Strickland, who is at Moments With God (http://www.momentswithgod.com). The original Interview with God site now hawks Interview with Jesus DVDs and exhorts members to send out unsolicited e-mail about the site to at least five of their closest friends. Maybe Reata sold the site or the trademark to someone else. Anyone who knows me knows that I am not into the whole Christianity thing, but I loved Reata's story and found her to be a very generous person. I just wonder if she's OK with what's going on at her original site.

Even if you get the feeling that much of the world is going down the tubes, there is always hope for independent creativity. I am happy to see Spamradio (http://www.spamradio.com) is still delivering their unique and amazing audio entertainment to the world; they must have gotten enough donations to keep them going.

I was stunned by the news, at the end of the ABC program This Week, that 40 U.S. soldiers died in Iraq this week. This reminds me too much of the Friday 6 p.m. news programs I used to watch when I was a kid. Every week, they would report on how many people had died in Vietnam. Only I remember that in the case of Vietnam, the newspeople would tell you how many U.S. soldiers had died, and then how many North Vietnamese had died. I have been trying to find a week-by-week death count pertaining to Vietnam but with no luck (suggestions appreciated). However, I did discover that from this blog (http://pieterfriedrich.com/blog/entries/00000272.htm), 1,926 U.S. Soldiers died in Vietnam in all of 1965, for an average of about 37 per week. If Iraq is this generation's Vietnam, we are only at the early stages, in other words.