2003: "This is not The End! It is not even the beginning of The End!"

Well we've almost made it through another year. I, for one, am grateful the planet is still here and we've been spared any plagues of locust or Apocalyptic Horses.

Nobody had a 'fundamentalist moment' and pushed the big button. Amazingly it's been over 50 years since the world's first and only full-scale use of Weapons of Mass Destruction with the double nuking of Japan in 1945. India and Pakistan are both threatening to take that title away from the US by lobbing some weapons grade plutonium into each other's back yards.

Planet X failed to smash into Earth as many on the Internet gleefully projected. California is still with us. The rich got a whole lot richer, and the working class helped them out by investing in the market. All in all little changed on that front.

SARS gave us a min-plague. It was nothing though compared to the heart wrenching tragedy in Africa were a true AIDS epidemic is decimating the population. In the west the giant pharmaceutical companies stand back and watched like vultures at a Lemming run.

The Tories got what was coming to them in Ontario. Slick Eves blamed the hidden deficit on a bad chip in his calculator. Dalton McGee claims he was just kidding when he made all those election promises.

Jean Chretien finally took the last train out of town and Paul Martin caught the bouquet. "Say hello to the new boss! Just like the old boss!"

And in California they elected another actor as governor. Ronald Regan ended his political career with memory loss. Arnold Schwarzenegger started that way. "I don't rememba sexually assaulten all dos women." The sad thing is that all the publicity probably got him elected.

To celebrate the 100^th year of flight the US Airforce showed off plans for it's latest generation of 'death from above'. If Wilbur and Orville had only known.

To take the heat off the war and the economy, George the Younger is expected to announce a new initiative to put people on the moon again. This time he says they'll have proper golf carts not those silly dune buggy things. When asked if he wanted to deliver turkey to the moon Bush replied, "I'm not sharing the Moon with Turkey, Greece or any other damn foreign country!"

Against all international law and common sense, Bush sent the US military into Iraq looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction. The Irony is he could have found lots of them if he'd just sent the inspectors to almost any US military facility.

Where they won't find any WMD is in the old Soviet Union weapons stockpiles. Officials there say the Gypsies stole them all, and Chechen rebels disguised as ex-KGB agents are peddling them to the highest bidder.

The war in Iraq-nam drags on with more US casualties since fly-boy Bush declared an end to major hostilities, and the real war began. Regan is said to have bankrupted the USSR with the arms race. With the Republicans running a US $7 Trillion debt the same thing might happen to the US in the Middle East debacle-and of course they'll drag the rest of the world down with them.

At years end, good news that the world's most wanted Hobbit was finally captured. The US $25 million bounty on Saddam Hussein finally flushed him from a hole in a farmer's back yard. He had only a pistol, US $750 thousand in cash, and a beard a family of Gerbils could live in.

The US Military supplied pictures so we all know what that much cash looks like in one pile. What I really wanted to see was a picture of Saddam's feet to see if they had webs between the toes.

In his official portrait as dethroned tyrant the once scary Butcher of Baghdad looked filthy and disoriented.  If he had made it to the US he could have blended into any street, posing as a mental health challenged homeless person.

He's reported to have made his one call to OJ Simpson looking for advice on how to put his dream team together. And if there is an open trial, some very nasty facts are likely to come out about the cozy relationship Saddam had with Bush the Elder and the CIA, when he first started out in the despot business.

He was captured on the same day as a suicide bomber in Khaldiyah blew himself up killing 17 people and wounding 33. If Saddam is not directing the resistance the question arises, was he ever anything more than the mouthpiece for the people really running the show? When asked this question GW Bush said he'd get back with his answer as soon as his dad told him what it was.

Safe and Happy Holiday to all.