I'm in an alpine mood presently. The office is frigid due to our perennially malfunctioning climate control, I'm listening to the icy alpine spy adventure sounds of Goldfrapp, and I'm inexplicably thinking about Wallace & Gromit.

My offer-letter meeting is at 3pm. It's definitely a career turning point, this merger, and I'm still not sure what to do or what will happen.

I'm tired of wearing a sweater at work, and sharing a cubicle. Proximity is good for rumours, though. Word from my neighbors in the cramped IT department is that despite the decline in benefits and total compensation with the new company, the new salary offers will not be adjusted accordingly.

This does not bode well.

I drift into daydreams about Alison Goldfrapp for a while. She's one of my irrational celebrity crushes. Don't deny that you have any...everybody does. She's above average in the presentability department, but mostly I am weak for her voice, that icy but warm, echoing, loving voice. I can listen to "Deer Stop" over and over, before finally returning to that reverberating Alpine whistle at the onset of "Lovely Head".

Then I get that noodly little organ bit from the first Wallace & Gromit film stuck in my head. In "A Grand Day Out", the pair runs out of cheese, so they fly to the moon to get some.

Once there, they meet a sort of intelligent coin-operated oven-robot thing. An oven-robot which begins to dream of Alpine skiing after spotting some of their travel magazines. All the dreams have this catchy, repetitive organ soundtrack.

I just dream of having a job that makes me happy. My own cubicle, a reasonable temperature, and work that makes me happy. Work I actually enjoy. I'm getting none of these things now.

As mentioned before, the rumours do not bode well for the future.

We are in this building for 3 more years, so the climate and cubicle situations are unlikely to improve.

On the inside booklet of Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain is a photo of Alison sitting outside on a pile of logs, in earmuffs and wellingtons and wearing a pair of binoculars. Her eyes are closed. Above the wellingtons, her knees are bare and dirty.

I could use those earmuffs right now.

I have an incomprehensible compulsion to scrub her knees. That would be a job I could enjoy, but it wouldn't last very long.

The poor oven-robot runs on a timer, so after the coin runs out he stops working. For no good reason, Wallace keeps feeding him coins.

People don't really need good reasons for things, I guess. Ask me to explain why I have this job, for example.

As a consequence of the renewed coin supply, the oven-robot finally gets what he wants. Or almost. He tries to get on the rocket ship to go back to Earth with them, where he can find snow-capped Alps, but they escape and he is left behind with two pieces of metal he ripped off the rocket.

So, he fashions skis out of them and goes alpine skiing on the moon.

What I always wonder about, and has anyone else ever considered this, is what happens when his coin runs out? Then what? Is that a happy ending—he skis and then his coin runs out?

Is this a "be careful what you ask for" lesson?

The job offer comes at 3, and I hope it is in a room where we don't have to shiver for an hour as they explain them to us. And after that, what?

I ask for an increase, maybe. Or a job with the old parent company. I don't know. I should be careful.

Until then, in my dreaming mind I am alpine skiing on hills of lunar cheese. The organ song plays again and again, except it sounds like "Deer Stop".

Maybe I will do the brave thing. Maybe I will quit and make my own job doing something I am happy with. This plan verges on suicidal, but at least I would be alpine skiing when my coin runs out.

Let's face it. American news outlets are awful, and that includes the ostensibly "liberal" ones. Regardless of political slant, the major American news organizations have spent the past century closing foreign and local news bureaus, reducing fact-checking operations, increasing the advertising-to-content ratio, and generally failing us as journalists in every possible way. (More in this very thorough PDF article: The Foreign News Flow In The Information Age)

The BBC is one of the few truly worldwide news organizations remaining, maintaining foreign bureaus in a myriad of countries from which other news organs are content to receive and recycle a wire-service report. Not coincidentally, Reuters, one of the three major wire services (and the best of them in my opinion), is also British.

Most of all, however, I love the British papers. They will print anything. Granted, some of that includes tabloid stories that are even more disturbing than ours, such as News Of The World's "Name and Shame" campaign publishing photos of alleged pedophiles, which triggered vigilante riots.

On the other hand, however, are articles like the two that follow, which I will be very surprised to see reported by any American news organization that is not a weblog or other web-only outlet. I dare say even the so-called "liberal" rags will be wary of picking these up. If you do see these stories picked up by a major news outlet, let me know.

First, news in Friday's Guardian of a statement on the war on terror issued by a variety of American citizens, ranging from the famous to the obscure.

Second, Sunday's Observer (published by the Guardian) has a painstakingly thorough exposition of the Bush family's long history with big oil and energy companies, and how it has greased the rails for their various paths to power. You'll notice that the Enron story has been slipping to the back of the newspaper lately. Read this, and you'll know why it should still be front page news.

When you're done, you might want to write a letter to the editor and ask your local paper why it isn't reporting these stories. I'm planning to do so myself.

That is, as soon as I finish reading The Guardian and listening to the BBC.

not wanting to go home. probably some sword of damocles apprehension / excitement concerning tomorrow's dispensation of job offers.

wishing irrationally for more trees downtown and cicadas singing, as japanese animation would have me believe they do constantly and everywhere in Japan.

also for ways to fall in love with someone without also creating the likelihood of hurting them. in this i probably worry too much about everyone else.

but it makes trees and cicadas seem attainable, and the drive home a little less unwelcome.

the rain saturday night filled shoal creek enough to clear the stagnant pools and start a burbling, almost-merry current again.

it's a small, good thing.