This morning, while I slept on the west coast, doctors sedated U.S. president George W. Bush and stuck a tube up his ass looking for polyps in his colon. Happily, after a brief examination, none were found, and the president woke up and got back to work.

How do I know all this? Because it was worldwide frikking news. From the moment yesterday when Bush announced that he would be undergoing the procedure, it's been a headline on national news reports. Then the story appeared again during the BBC's broadcast.

Do I really need to hear any of this? Yes, in a way it was interesting news because of the relatively infrequent transfer of presidential power to the vice president during the period when W was unconscious. But still -- I just don't think the president's ass should make news around the world. I mean, in the worst case that Cheney would suddenly need to act with presidential authority in the two hour period that W was unavailable, the reason could be provided easily enough. We don't need press conferences the day before (as an aside, it makes me wonder if CNN television created a fancy logo for the president's ass story that they used throughout the day yesterday).

The only good answer I can come up with is that it allows the president to increase awareness of regular colonoscopies to detect irregularities in your body before they become a serious health risk. In that respect, his approach was downright subtle, compared with Katie Couric broadcasting her intestines over national TV. Mind you, Katie was narrating the experience, while W was out cold. If Bush had his mettle, he would have stayed awake in order to continue executing the office of president from his rather awkward position.

A few weeks ago, I finally made it out for an appointment with the optometrist. Based on the relentless deterioration of other parts of my body, I feared the worst -- that my eyesight had gotten that much worse, and it was only a matter of time before I would be nearly blind, forced like Björk's tragic character in Dancer in the Dark to work at menial jobs in rural Washington state until I had to shoot a crooked cop who tried to steal the money I was saving to give my son an operation that might forestall the onset of the same progressive blindness the he was so unlucky as to inherit from me. That would basically suck.

I was happy to discover, however, that my eyesight has suffered only a negligible change -- the power is roughly the same, and there's a slight worsening of the astigmatism in one eye. Nothing important enough to even warrant new lenses. What a relief! And besides the peace of mind that comes from a better-than-expected bill of health, I can apply the available insurance money to other purposes -- the frame allowance goes to new clip-on shades, and the lens allowance will be used to provide lenses for a to-be-purchased set of prescription squash goggles. Then I will be unstoppable on the court!

I would also like to point out that I have the nicest optometrist ever. She just had a baby, and she was totally excited when she learned that we were having one (which she had learned from Nath, who is also a regular patient, a few weeks before). Although I've been going to this optometrist for at least five years now, I can't have interacted with her for more than a few hours total. And yet, when I went back to pick up my clip-ons, she handed me a little wrapped package containing a toy and a book for Zebula! How nice can you get? I wish I could keep going there, though with the move coming up, it'll be hard to commute from across the continent. Alas.

I've started keeping a file of potential thingo entries to write if I happen to have the time. The upshot is that if I'm ever in the mood to create an entry but short on ideas, I can always refer to the list, preserving the high standards of entertainment and regularity you've come to expect from thingo.net. Right now the list has three ideas in it. Here's the first one.

My watch has returned. You may remember the long, slowly-unfolding story of my Levi's watch. It stopped working, and a surprisingly complicated chain of contacts led me to a repair center that promised to fix the watch and send it back to me. Well, a few days before I left for Europe, a received a package from the repair center, containing a happily ticking watch. They seem to have fixed the watch, and it has been working fine ever since.

Now, the watch cost about twenty five US dollars (and even that was covered by my philanthropic mother). I was tempted throughout the process to cave in and buy a replacement, for several reasons. First of all, it's cheap in the grand scheme of things (I mean, I just mailed out over a thousand dollars worth of bills). Second, it's easy -- replacements were hanging out in various stores I visited. Third, I have since found similar watches I like even more (particularly a model of the Swiss Army Watch), watches that don't suffer from my watch's fundamental design flaw, namely that the watch face is oriented right-side-up when hanging from your belt loop, meaning that it's upside down when you look down at it to read the time. That means it's only useful as a device for getting people to stare at your crotch as they're trying to read the time, a fact which has its own unrelated merits.

In any event, I decided to tough it out, and I waited. Sure enough, the watch returned to me. My total expense consisted of one or two brief phone calls to Canada and about two bucks' worth of postage to send the watch to Illinois. A savings, I suppose. Now if only I could learn to tell time...

Hi, everyone. I'm back from my trip to Annecy, and that means it's time to dust the cobwebs off of thingo and start writing the occasional entry again. But first, a word from our sponsors:

Don't try to read too much into that. It's completely unrelated to my trip, I just thought it was an amusing photo (taken yesterday by Nath). And it has the benefit of being publishable on thingo, since it preserves Mr. Thingo's secret identity. Mind you, if you look closely, you can see a rather nasty scar between the last two knuckles of my right hand (reduced to about three pixels here, but trust me). I suppose the scar could be used to identify me. For the record, the skin got sheared off during squash when I slid across a laminated wood floor on my sweat-slick hand. Oops. And I'm playing again today.

Needless to say, I had an excellent trip, taking a few days before Annecy to visit Montreux, Switzerland and be a tourist. In annecy I was both informed and inspired by the various goings-on. If nothing else, I saw that the NFB is still one of the world leaders in producing short animations. I even got to see "Primiti Too Taa", one of my all-time favourite animations that I haven't seen in at least ten years. That alone was worth the trip.