There Is No Cat

It’s a small world, after all

Metafilter regular Stavros The Wonder Chicken has been posting about his friend Rick, who was in Bali at the time of the recent terrorist attack. Not only was Rick in Bali, but it turns out he was at the site of the attack and was badly injured. He’s been evacuated to Australia, and is now at a hospital in Melbourne, where things are looking up. Meanwhile, the BBC’s Talking Point section has a page where victims and others witnesses to the attack have been posting.

I wouldn’t say I know Stavros well or anything, but I’ve certainly read his blog semi-regularly over the past couple of years and participated in a number of threads on MeFi with him. It just points out how the world has gotten smaller that I find a connection to a terrorist attack literally on the opposite side of the world. As a resident of the suburbs of NYC that were so severely hit by the WTC attack, my thoughts are with all the victims. One poster from Perth mentions that it seems like everyone in that city will know someone affected by this, and that sounds exactly like the kind of pins and needles experience living in this area was like a year ago.

Not that it gets much coverage here, but it appears that most of the victims were Australian. I think it’s taken a while for this story to get traction even in my internationally-aware brain, what with initial reports saying things like that there were between ten and twenty killed. Later reports make it clear that this bomb was freaking huge. In Australia, 10/12 is going to have the same kind of resonance 9/11 does here. Jonathan Delacour has a number of links to stories about Australian reaction.

Posted at 9:29 PM