Surrealism: step aside Dali! We have Pakistan, Cricket and New Orleans

Is it me or was tonight's BBC news particularly surreal? I am used to surrealism in broadcast journalism but tonight was just facking daft.

Item 1: Pakistani cricketers accused of betting scam. 18 year old bowler allegedly over steps the crease by a country mile on purpose.

Item 2: President Obama is given air-time on British TV while he sucks up to New Orleans residents on the fifth anniversary of flooding of that one US city following hurricane Katrina.

Item 3: Pakistan is still royally f\/cked. One fifth of the country remains under water and the rains are still coming. Harvest this year will be nill and next year too because the farmers won't get the seed in the ground in time. Read: Pakistan will not be able to feed itself this year and next. And while crops won't be sown, you can bet your bottom dollar that extremism will be.

Surreal doesn't even begin to describe it...

There's nothing going on in this country whatsoever, and even journalists realise that there's only so far you can stretch silly-season guff about women putting cats in bins and SamCam's new nipper.

So they have to really, really scrape the barrel and report on stuff happening to people who aren't even English. I think they're barmy personally, I'm always up for more filler stories about cute animals.

Harvest this year will be nill and next year too because the farmers won't get the seed in the ground in time.

Is this going to f**k up your bean stockpiling plans for the impending apocalypse?

Seriously though, to follow on from Mao's point, you should be happy that you have mainstream media news covering global events with precision and integrity.

Item 3: Pakistan is still royally f\/cked. One fifth of the country remains under water and the rains are still coming. Harvest this year will be nill and next year too because the farmers won't get the seed in the ground in time. Read: Pakistan will not be able to feed itself this year and next. And while crops won't be sown, you can bet your bottom dollar that extremism will be.

 

Surreal doesn't even begin to describe it...

Harvests won't be 'nil'. As bad as things are, Pakistan is not Ethiopia, nor will the disaster make it so. Among the most valuable 'crops' are mangoes, grown especially in the most populous state, the Punjab. Mangoes, for the uninitiated, grow on trees. Rice, which grows in conditions somewhere between wet and drowning, will be affected - and that's serious. But harvests of it will not be 'nil'. Wheat production will certainly be affected more drastically. The bigger problem, though, is that the Indus Valley had a very sophisticated irrigation system - canals and dams that sent water from the Indus into the 'breadbasket' states of Punjab and Sindh. This system has been badly damaged. Aside from immediate emergencies, Aid would be better spent on repairing that, and the REAL danger here is that that won't happen.

And by the way, speaking as someone who regularly travels there and has been along the route of the Indus up to the where the river is all but pure melt water from the Himalayan/Karakoram/Hindu Kush mountain ranges, Pakistan is NOT about to swept aside by extremists. People, generally speaking, hate the Taliban and Al Qaeda for all the damage they've done to lives and property.