Did anyone else read those Beverly Cleary books about Ralph S. Mouse, the driving mouse, as a kid? He had a little toy motorcycle and a helmet made out of a ping-pong ball, and he made the motorcycle go just by making a "Pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb" noise. In later tales he had a car instead of a motorcycle.

Well, anyway, those stories have actually come to life, after a fashion, across the pond in England, where a hamster was found driving a little car, under his own power, through Cleveleys.

Go Speed Racer, Go!

Sony says Betamax is dead.

In other news, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and a bunch of Israelites crossed the Red Sea without getting wet.

You heard it here first.

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.