Don't stare at it directly

Stepped out last night to hoist a glass of wine for a friend who has a birthday next week on Valentine's Day. I sat next to a man who grew up in Lebanon, some years in Beirut. He and his American-born wife seem to have some kind of shared international background, but I'm not clear on how they acquired it. They probably told me, but it was noisy in the wine bar, and he was a very talkative person. Mostly in a good way; it was like listening to a live-streaming blog about politics, and I was pretty much on the same wavelength, but it became a tad overwhelming after a while. I'm more of a listener and tend to need to ruminate about issues after I read or hear about them, so probably I wasn't his ideal conversational partner. I pretty much let him talk, and dropped my observations and queries now and again, and he'd be off. Our end of the table of course discussed the Cartoon Wars, and he remarked that every country in the world has its own form of rednecks, and the Muslims going berserk over in Syria are not representative of the majority. Yes, obviously. Just like the redneck fundies who mob and burn women's clinics here and murder doctors over abortion are not representative of us, either. But we seem to be able to prosecute them at some point, anyway, and I 'm not seeing that from the Syrian government, for example. Well, regardless, yes, the berserkers are everywhere. I just don't want them increasing in number. An inportant part of easing culture shock is to help the shocked ones into appropriate technology, family planning, oh, civilization, you could say. Not the kind of "democracy and freedom" our fuckwitted president pushes, however.
A friend picked up me and beloved son and we carpooled down to the University of Washington climbing rock, a manmade structure upon which people clamber to keep their skills sharp. It's been around for a couple of decades at least, and the granite rocks embedded into the concrete walls are very polished close to the ground, meaning the better holds are some ways off the deck. Still managed a good workout on a lovely sunny afternoon, despite keeping to the low road.