Comment - Here's an excerpt from the article: While movies often cast the geeky kid with the cello as the high school anti-jock, playing music can tax small muscles in much the way competitive sports strain the larger ones. Jennifer Gamboa, past president of the performing arts special interest group of the American Physical Therapy Association, likes to refer to musicians as "upper-extremity athletes." Says Gamboa, "A lot of times this is a new concept for musicians as well."

Advice to my young readers who are musicians: be careful, be aware of injuries, don't push your bodies too hard.

News - CNN makes it tough to recognize the strategic gains being made: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/25/international/worldspecial/25STRA.html

Comment - I finally turned the TV off last night. I got tired of hearing every two minutes about the Apache helicopters that were driven off by "low tech" Iraqi ground fire. Some of the announcers seemed almost gleeful that the powerful U.S. Army was getting its face slapped.

Where does this attitude come from? I think it's due to Star Wars III. Remember the pastoral Ewoks using logs and rocks to defeat the evil Imperial Storm Troopers? I feat that's the unconscious mental image that is guiding the tone of much of the reporting I've seen on CNN.

So, the flood of detail pouring out of the TV coverage is swamping the big, strategic picture, namely that the noose is tightening. No, the Iraqi Army has not folded its tents and slunk away (yet). But the U.S. controls virtually the entire country outside of Baghdad. And Baghdad will fall. The only question is how many U.S. soldiers will have to die in order to protect Iraqi civilians who are purposely put in harms way by Saddam's thugs.

By the way, a big reason the Apache helicopters were driven off is because the Iraqi soldiers were firing from the tops of civilian buildings...buildings the U.S. had announced it would not attack. Why doesn't the media denounce the Iraqis who are using innocent civilians as shields?

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10:26:28 AM