From Russia With Extreme Prejudice

I knew the news was bad before I'd even heard the news. It started with a pair of voice messages from Susan, which were unexpected, since she knew that I'd be far from the phone in honor of next-to-last football Sunday. I'm not an invested fan but I'm observant, and that means beer and chips & salsa and lots of guys delivering the People's Elbow at one another. She wouldn't want to interrupt that, but in an irritable voice her second message asked whether I was, like, still watching football, god, which was also the gist of the first message she left minutes earlier.

So I dial her up. She doesn't waste a breath: "What's the news from Georgia?" That salutation usually runs vice versa, so I'm assuming that I exited the maelstrom of masculinity playing out in the living room with a concussion. When I obediently load up the news, I realize that there were three disasters on Sunday:

1. The AFC championship
   
2. The NFC championship
   
3. A series of explosions in southern Russia, which severed primary gas and electrical lines to the republics of Georgia and Armenia

As it turns out, that's what Georgian President Saakashvili is saying, too. No Russian terrorist group has any real beef with Georgia; it's not obvious why a Georgian proto-separatist group would want to cut off Russian gas, which both heats Georgia and also furnishes electricty. (Or at least such a group wouldn't cut off the power and not claim it.) Saakashvili went so far as to call the explosions Russian policy—a muscular form of oilpolitik.

The Kremlin's been throwing its weight around lately—pressuring Georgia to sell its oil pipeline network; cutting gas exports to nations like Belarus, Georgia, and Ukraine and demanding fourfold price increases to restore the juice. The sudden cutoff is poorly (or sharply) timed: Georgia is looking at a cold snap of its own, and since it depends almost wholly on Russia for its energy, it will be days before Georgia can establish a link to another country (Azerbaijan or Iran).

The Russians have called Saakashvili's remarks "hysteria and bacchanalia." While his comments were hyperbolic and even arch, the circumstantial evidence against Russia is telling. But nevermind all that—it's obviously Azerbaijan carving out its own market.

Anyway, that's my short synopsis. What it means for Susan, bizarrely, is that she got to take a blistering hot shower—she came home to find her notably unreliable furnace blazing. Hope that situation holds. And if she finds electricity tomorrow, she may be able to upload some pictures she's shot with her new camera, which just recently arrived. (Hooray!) In a different vein, nothing can redeem today's sorry excuses for football contests.