If the words of Osama Bin Laden recounting his joy over the WTC attack doesn't leave a lump in your throat and a dull ache in the pit of your gut, the poem he recites at the end of this videotaped meeting with his counterparts will:

I witness that against the sharp blade
They always faced difficulties and stood together...
When the darkness comes upon us and we are bit by a
Sharp tooth, I say...
"Our homes are flooded with blood and the tyrant
Is freely wandering in our homes''...

And from the battlefield vanished
The brightness of swords and the horses...
And over weeping sounds now
We hear the beats of drums and rhythm
They are storming his forts
And shouting: "We will not stop our raids
Until you free our lands''...

A co-worker today asked what a blog is (we get that question a lot these days, don't we?). I said, "It's a cross between journal and journalism." I said what I liked, liked what I said, and blogged it here. More later.

online narcissism

Funny. Just before reading Mike Sanders' entry about being Number One on Google, guess what I was doing. Go ahead, guess. Yep, I had just done my every-few-day jeneane sessum search on Google to see if I had shown up anyplace new. Unlike Mike, no one else has my name. So my personal goal with Google has been different than Mike's goal of making his way to the top Mike Sanders spot. Instead, I've been racing my husband, with the fairly unique name of George Sessum, to see how many pages of google search results we can accumulate. I'm up to five. I've left George in the dust as he anxiously waits to bump to page 3. The difference? I blog. He, on the other hand, hasn't gotten a grip on this time-consuming sport just yet.

Before I started blogging in October, googling Jeneane Sessum brought up one sad result: My unsubscribe to the Acid Jazz mailing list. Disgusted with making other people famous throughout my career in PR, I took a liking to this blogging deal (ordeal?). It gave me a chance to be author, not ghost writer. Thinker, not gopher. It gave me a reason to BE. And now I am someone. Like Mike, it's not really "power" that I feel as I push through my google results. I guess it's a feeling notariety. Respect. Acceptance. Fame. These are good feelings--and something that the day job usually doesn't afford the common guy or gal.

And as I ponder, I'm glad that all the stuff that comes up about me on Google (so far) is good. No humiliations suffered yet.

I wonder how long it will be before search engines start to offer a paid service for NOT listing specific search results... Say you posted something rather explicit on an offbeat site, or posted an online rant about your boss or mother-in-law, later to learn that Google has outed you... Would you pay to be "unlisted," like some folks do with that old hard-copy behemoth known as the white pages? It's a thought. Maybe an odd one. We'll see.

So thanks for making us think Mike. Personally, I love the idea of leaving a legacy to my daughter... One day she'll search up her mama's name and show her friends what I thought. What I wrote. Who I was. And that I talked about her an aweful lot. Hopefully she'll be over 18 though.... I think I've dropped a few curse words here and there. :-)

later...

One of the few moving pieces I've read about the war is this piece by Robert Fisk on his experience as a journalist beaten by an angry group of afghan refugees. A historic piece of first-person journalism, this piece depicts the character of the journalist, whose job as he sees it is to understand more than one side of an issue that has been dramatically oversimplified for the masses.

"They were uneducated – I doubt if many could read – but you don't have to have a schooling to respond to the death of loved ones under a B-52's bombs. At one point a screaming teenager had turned to my driver and asked, in all sincerity: 'Is that Mr Bush?'"