Longest. Book. Ever.

Well I'm pretty proud of myself. I just finished the longest book that I have ever read, War and Peace. I usually read a couple of books a month, but this one took me 6 months to read. Granted, I didn't hardly read the book at all during the fall semester, but it still took me a long time to finish it. The book was 1691 pages long and consisted of 15 "books", 2 epilogues and 365 chapters. According to one of the translated versions on amazon.com the book has 597,773 words! That's more than 100% of all books on Amazon. As always, I've posted a review of this book on my book review blog. Read it here.

Politics

Sad Week

It's been a sad week around here. There have been so many accidents and tragic deaths in the last few days. It's really tough and makes me so sad. Here are some of the news stories that I have felt impacted by:

Eric Sieger killed in Iraq - I grew up in the same ward as Eric Sieger. He was quite a bit younger than me but I remember him and when he and his siblings were adopted. He is the first person that I've known to have died in Iraq. His funeral was today.

Home blows up - Las week, a house in Saratoga Springs blews up with the mother and a Questar gas guy inside. The house was totally destroyed. A father was left single with an 18 month-old in the hospital. Sad.

Drunk teen driver kills 3.5 - On Friday, a 17-year old boy drove drunk and killed the pregnant mother, Ben (11) and Anna (9) of the William's family. The father (an LDS Bishop) lived, along with two children (one of whom wasn't in the vehicle, the other of whom is in critical condition). The father publicly announced that he forgives the teen. He is a much stronger man than I.

Trolley Square shooting spree - Earlier tonite, a crazy man walked through Trolley Square shooting people at random. It is still unknown how many total victims there are. There are 6 dead (including the gunmen), but many are still in critical condition. What a disturbing thing to have happen just 1.5 miles from home.

There are so many crazy people out there. It simply scares me sometimes. How can I protect my family from people/things that are dangerous? I guess that God has a plan for everyone. I pray for everyone involved in these heartbreaking tragedies.

Bush and Iraq

President Bush gave a speech tonite about a change of strategy in Iraq. 'Stay the Course' has thankfully been placed behind us now. If you didn't get a chance to hear his speech, take a minute to read the transcript here. Here is what I thought of the speech.

First of all, I was glad to see him take the blame for the mistakes in Iraq. He said: "Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me."

I don't know whether or not I support the deployment of more troops to Iraq or not. I would much prefer the troops to be coming home. If I knew that more troops would really help bring peace to a country that has had sectarian struggles for hundreds of years then I would be all for the deployment. As it stands...

I hope that this war will end quickly. I hope that someday I will find out what the 'real' reason was for Bush starting the war in Iraq. Was it WMDs, Saddam, oil, al-qaeda, to redeem his father, to show the democrats who's boss, to be a hero or any number of other reasons. I don't believe that we have heard the real reason for the war from the administration.