Compound sitting and International TV

Jenna and I are house sitting for her somewhat well-to-do-friend for a week. There's an alarm on the house that will make your head explode if it goes off so we have to be careful not to accidentally press a button on the key chain that turns on the perimeter laser beams.

Like all the houses here, there are bars on every window and external barred doors outside the wooden doors. Here, those external bars are pad locked. So you can imagine what the key chain looks like for this house. I feel like a janitor.

I've been watching satelite TV. It's interesting to watch the news on Euronews, BBC and Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera is the only independent middle east news station (as oppossed to be ran by a specific government.) It got a lot of attention for airing comments by Osama bin Laden after 9/11. There are journalists from all over the world represented at the station including American and British reporters. Last night, we watched a program about the privatization of cities in Atlanta. There are suburbs that have actually seceded from Fulton County, Georgia and are being ran by a Multinational Corporation. The problem is that the tax revenue generated within the new city limits doesn't go to the rest of the county thus crippling public services like hospitals and fire figghting (mainly in the poor, black areas.) It's really interesting in the time of corporations going bankrupt and collapsing. What if the corporation that runs your town collapes? There goes the sewer, power, garbage pick up, street repairs and everything else that a typical municipality takes care of.

Oh, wait. The corporation that runs these towns in Georgia is CH2M-Hill Inc. which is a Denver-based company specializing in full-service engineering, consulting, construction and operations, and just happens to be the major contractor for the U.S. in Iraq and Post-Katrina New Orleans. So I guess that corporation won't be going bankrupt soon.

Anyway, international TV is really interesting. We watched a Ghanian soap opera that looks like it was shot with a camcorder. There's also a station in Iraqi. Even though there are some interesting things, TV is still crap all around the world. Those international news stations still just have 30 second news stories and coverage of things like the making of the largest Ostrich sandwhich in the world.

Well, I guess I'll watch some more TV.