The Orange Choice
Thomas Friedman is a columnist for the New York Times, and an avid factoid collector. He did not write this column, but he might as well have.
The world faces a choice, the most important choice it's ever faced since my last column. And the color of the choice is orange.
To explain, I was walking around the teeming market of Shrewsburketttingle, Cambodia, yesterday, searching for an orange. I am addicted to vitamin C, apparently needing it for mere survival, and I hadn't had my citrus fix yet. You cannot believe how hard it is to find an orange in Shrewburkettingle! Only five-sixteenths of an alligator-draw, or thirty-two miles, from the high-rise life of Mengok, you might expect to be able to find an orange or two, somewhere, but while there were such exotic delicacies as Durian, Breadfruit, and Manna overflowing from the stalls, there wasn't an orange in sight. I had to settle for some tangerines, which I found using Google, whose servers are based in California, but which also stores information about tangerines in Cambodia. Email is neat!
Two days later, I was back in the capital. Being the foreign correspondent for the NY Times, I get to stay in really expensive hotels with room service that extend the vision of Western Imperialism across the globe. Calling down as I was sweating over the previous paragraph, I asked for an orange. The doorbell rang just as I hung up the phone. Speaking of which, glocalization is a word I'm going to make up at this point in my column. Anyway, the Asians are so quick and clever, I thought, expecting my orange. Instead, there was a Philippina prostitute named Mitzy wearing an orange thong. (At this point I realized that the metric system can suck it.)
Go here for the thrilling conclusion...