Watching elephants write op-ed pieces (addendum)

If you're interested in Thomas Friedman, you need to check out this unexpected discovery, his own personal blog. Unfiltered by those prissy Times editors, it's far richer and wilder than what we know; on the subject of elephants flying, for instance:

I came back to the exurbs of Cairo preparing to write a syllabus for the only journalism course of the future, because seriously, there’s not going to be a big demand for this sort of nonsense once our cloned children get their RSS feeds routed into their earbuds. The first lesson: When elephants fly, watch out for their feces.

 Or this, my favorite so far [jump]:

Here, in Kurdish Iraq at the winter solstice, the land of Astarte at the time of the ouroboros, blazing some of the famous Kurdish yule that is the region’s number one export, let’s talk about ends and beginnings.

Because seriously, is the American troop withdrawal an end or a beginning? Did Saddam make Iraq in his own image, or was his megalomania a mirror negative of his naturally fissiparous people? Put it another way. Iraq’s not going to hang together. When it finally breaks up along the lines that Ziggy Brzezinski, Joe Biden and I envisioned over a weekend seven years ago at a chic gringo sweat lodge we had rented and then filled with finest herbs, will the break up be because Iraqis can’t handle democracy, or because they don’t deserve it?

The question is crucial. Crucial to my self-esteem.

And for those who can never get enough mustaches,

E questi mustacchi
Chiamare si possono
Trionfi degli uomini,
Pennacchi d'amor.
(And these mustaches
deserve to be called
the triumph of manhood,
the plumage of love.)