Yesterday I was really depressed →[More:]It was a tough day for me: two of my tenants, two guys who were formerly lovers who no longer live together got into a fistfight and one's mom got in the middle to try and break it up and got hurt, the ongoing morass that is America, cleaning out--four years after his death--my grandfather's house. All these things just were tough, some physically, some emotionally.

In cleaning out the house, I came across a ton of Houston newspapers, mostly from World War II and World War I. Scanning the bullet points (which read like the ticker on Fox News, nothing ever changes, does it?) from a paper dated 1918, I saw "Woman screaming on deck throws baby into German U-boat, which explodes". I didn't have time to read the article the, I just showed it to my mom and questioned how we could ever consider ourselves different from the fanatics against whom we are struggling today.

I had been close to tears most of yesterday because of these events.

This morning, with my coffee, I decide to read this nearly 90 year old newspaper, and specifically the article about the crazy woman.

Turns out, the British ship had been torpedoed by the submarine, and quickly began to abandon ship, but one person hastily devised a plan to strike back.

Y'see, the "woman" was actually a male soldier who found time to put himself in drag. The "baby" was a bomb. The "woman" acted hysterically to get close enough to throw the "baby" down into the hold of the U-boat and BOOM. U-boat sinks.

The "woman" was awarded the Victorian Cross.

War is still horrific, but actually reading the story rather than the bombastic bullet points -- the words "woman" and "baby" did not have quotation marks in the bullet points, but did in the article -- cheered me up quite a bit, which makes me feel a little odd, but there you go. War is hell, but sometimes can be amusing with nearly a century's worth of distance.

This morning I called my mom and told her to turn off Fox News and start reading the paper, so she'll stop calling me in the middle of the night to tell me things like Arafat died of AIDS.