YARRRGH!

There is a cricket. I don't see it, but I hear it. I think it may be either just outside the bathroom vent or inside the ductwork somewhere.
And it won't
shut
UP!
And it's driving
me
CRAZY!

EDIT: It quit chirping suddenly as soon as I turned off the bathroom light. I heard a couple of pings as if it were hopping away. Turning the light back on yielded no results.
But at least it quit chirping.

Hrm.

NRO reports that Cindy Sheehan got a visit from Viggo Mortensen yesterday. I'm not sure whether I'm jealous--that he was this close and I didn't get a chance for an autograph, that is.
Now, IMO, if Viggo were really Aragorn, he'd do something like this and try to help heal her grief. Her protest reminds me a lot of a quote from Pearl: "You grudge the healing of your grief, / You are no gentle jeweller" (ll. 275-76, Tolkien's translation). She's conveniently ignoring the fact that her son voluntarily joined the military. And she's ignoring the pleas of her family to stop [backed up here, here, and here]. Aragorn would try to help her see where she's gotten off-base in her grief and how she's dishonoring her son's memory.
But Viggo's not Aragorn, no matter how good he was in the part. There are a lot of big-name leftists taking advantage of Mrs. Sheehan to advance their own agenda, and Mr. No-Blood-For-Oil Mortensen appears to be one of them. Somehow I don't think he'd turn up to pat my hand if I parked myself outside the headquarters of the New York Times to protest the fact that their war coverage sounds an awful lot like Al-Jazeera. (John Rhys-Davies might, but that's another story.)
I continue to be amazed by the disconnect in Viggo's mind between the lessons of LOTR and real life. How he figures that America is Mordor is beyond me--strictly speaking, I don't think any one country can be considered Mordor (although Syria, Iran, North Korea, and China might be in the running), because the leader of the country would have to be the Antichrist for the comparison to work. And while Saddam might well have been an antichrist (John does warn that there will be many before the end), I don't think even Iraq could honestly have been allegorized as Mordor. Making the case that Bush is the Antichrist is even harder.
The real lesson is that objective evil and objective good exist, and that it is worth the ultimate sacrifice to protect the good and defeat the evil. I think that's what we did by going into Iraq. JRD agrees, as do many others. And even those who don't agree ought to read the Good News from Iraq posts by Arthur Chrenkoff to see that we are at least trying to preserve the good while we're there. The fact that Viggo won't acknowledge any good news brings him way, way down in my estimation. As does his apparent willingness to join a bandwagon that's taking advantage of a grieving mother and dishonoring a hero.
No, Viggo's no Aragorn. More's the pity.

EDIT: Mohammed from Iraq the Model responds to Cindy Sheehan here. It's worth a read, regardless of your political position; it'll give you an Iraqi perspective.