My favorite part of the children's magazine
Highlights was the page where you had to find all the things wrong in the picture. There'd be a fish in the birdbath. Or a child swinging a baseball bat at a football. Maybe Dad would be trying to mow the lawn with the vacuum cleaner.
That was fun.
Finding all the things wrong with this is not.
This is a (not very good) photo of page A11 in tonight's Honolulu Star-Bulletin.
What is wrong with it? Let me count the ways:
- Burger King, Pizza Hut, Subway, Popeye's Fried Chicken, and Taco Bell rate a bigger headline than "Suicide bomber kills 21 Iraqis."
- The deaths of 21 Iraqis is surrounded by 4 columns of Burger King et al.
- The physical juxtaposition of the stories is insulting enough. When you actually read the stories, the contrast is nauseating.
Burgers
A soldier's life isn't what it used to be.
Bombs
A suicide bomber blew himself up in the middle of a crowd of army recruits Tuesday, killing 21 other people in the deadliest attack in Baghdad since last week's election and highlighting a recent shift by insurgents to use human bombs instead of cars.
Burgers
"This generation of soldiers has grown up with name-brand fast food," McCoy said. "It's the taste from home that they're missing. It not only gives them that little moment of comfort, I like to think it ... takes them back home for just the 15 minutes they are enjoying a Whopper."
Bombs
officials at Baghdad's Yarmouk Hospital said they had received 16 bodies from the scene, all of them recruits.
- Unemployment in Maysan in eastern Iraq is running at 80%. Workers at the Pizza Bells are from "third-world countries hired through a labor company in Kuwait."
- 65% of Iraqis are on food rations. There are 23 fast-food franchises at 16 US bases in Iraq with 25 more under construction.
- The average income in Iraq in the late 1990s was $700. You can buy a 42-inch plasma screen TV at Camp Liberty for $3,499. The Camp Liberty PX alone expects to sell $80 million worth of goods this year.
Links to the stories:
Burgers Bombs.