More on the monsoon posting below:

As I said yesterday, only one reference in the first 50 hits Google gives for "monsoon."

(Others are restaurants and rock groups & etc. I didn't care to go any farther. Could be the first 100.)


But here's some more from the AP that I find on Salon.com but not in the New York Times or our local SF Chronicle:

Death Toll Rises in South Asia Floods

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By WASBIR HUSSAIN Associated Press Writer

August 03,2007 | GAUHATI, India -- Hungry, frightened and shouting for help, families perched perilously in treetops or on the roofs of their flooded homes in Uttar Pradesh as the death toll rose Friday from a month of torrential rains...

One woman in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh who identified herself to television reporters only as Savitra said food was running low.

"We have not eaten anything for last two days," she told local Enadu TV. "Whatever we had at our home was washed away."

At many places in the state, river levels rose so fast that villagers couldn't flee.

"The gush of water was so sudden we did not get the time to react," Vinod Kumar, a resident of a flooded village in Basti district, told Enadu TV. "All of our things have been washed away. We do not have food, kerosene or even a match box...

"At least 12 people, mostly children and women, died of rain-related incidents in the last 24 hours," Surendra Srivastava, a police spokesman, told The Associated Press in Lucknow, the capital Uttar Pradesh.

Other parts of India were also hit hard. In Mumbai, the country's bustling financial capital, people waded through knee-deep water that covered many streets after severe overnight rains... "

MUMBAI? This is not some remote rural area. This is a metropolitan center of 20 million people (as in twice the population size of New York).

Map from LonelyPlanet.com

This is not Bangladesh where this is a regular horror, since the first 100 or so miles inland are only inches above sea level. Not that those people in Bangladesh don't count, just that flooding is so terribly frequent there -- and a rise in the ocean of two inches should put most of it underwater. Those people don't just need help from time to time and concert to concert. They need a major project to either relocate to drier land or do what the Dutch did with their sea level situation. A topographical map says it all:



Of course, a new video game ("ICED!") needs a full page in those daily magazines we like to call newspapers.

I know, what can anyone do? But to just not even notice it? That's a little cold, isn't it? Or has Dick Cheney set the standard for compassion in America.