READY. SET. BREAK. I'm out of mojo and will return with the spring rains. There have been 15 clear days (weatherwise) since the first of the year. I feel like someone wrapped Portland's telephone cord around my neck and dragged me into a swamp.

YOUR NOT-SO-LOCAL ROCKER Stephen McCarthy wanders around Richmond's North Side when he's not in the studio with old alt.country - cum - new jangle pop rockers The Jayhawks.

HIPSTERLAND Mimi Smartypants returns from vacation with observations from the Chicago gangland, such as:

Hipster girl and hipster boy are walking down the street, and I am slightly in front of them, listening. For a while hipster girl names various people they know and disses their modes of dress, which pisses me off because she's all decked out in thrift-store avocado green sweater and chocolate brown pants, and I am thinking: Where do you get off, bitch, you look like a 1970s kitchen. Then, suddenly (if there was a transition I very much missed it), she delivers this soliloquy:

Everyone is so fucking different. People are, are totally fucking different. Everyone is such an individual. The only, like, similarities between people are just fake! Like you pretend to like the same things as someone else, you pretend you are the same kind of person. Just to be friends. But no one is the same, everyone is different. Everyone is so different. Sometimes I feel like an anthropologist [ed. note: pronounced with the stress on the wrong syllable. An-thro-po-LO-gist. I am not shitting you.] because no two people are alike.

Hipster boy: It all comes down to comfort level, really.

Hipster girl: Oh, I'm totally comfortable with myself.

Hipster boy: Me too. I am SO comfortable with myself. It's like: Hey, this is it man!

Hipster girl: Totally.

NEW IN MUSIC I've suddenly gotten hooked on Kathleen Edwards' new release, "Failer." Edwards has been described as a peppier Lucinda Williams. The Canadian songwriter just makes me happy that I somehow wandered from hardcore punk to alt.country.

THE TRAGEDY BUILDS, DESPITE FUNDS Even as President Bush signed over $15 billion in funds to combat AIDS overseas, tens of millions of people live -- and prepare to die -- with the disease. In South Africa alone, one in 10 citizens are HIV-positive. Of those 4.7 million South Africans, fewer than 25,000 have access to drugs that stem the virus, and 600 people die every day. As tragedy builds, an old South African tradition has re-emerged.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — On the second Sunday of every month, in the shade of a grand maple tree in this suburban Johannesburg park, Anastasia Chabalala and a few dozen of her friends prepare for death.

Dressed in black skirts, white shirts and black berets, they start their monthly meeting with a soulful hymn, listen to a sermon from one of their own, lay hands on the weary and sick, and lastly make arrangements to put to rest the latest soul taken to the other side.

"When I come here I feel strong," says Chabalala, 52. "We're free of worries when we're here."

The Masakhane burial society, one of thousands of such groups across South Africa, is equal parts church service, insurance agency and support network. These meetings in Zoo Lake Park are all that keep Chabalala optimistic as she lives through what on bad days seems like a biblical display of God's wrath: the AIDS epidemic.

HEY, PRETTY BOY Leave it to the academics to take the fun out of everything. Beautycheck is the culmination of a research project that wanted to know what made a face "attractive." The good news is that there are many criiteria that go into making an attractive face. The better news is that 88% of the faces people identified as "attractive" were -- in fact -- computer generated.

BOAR:DOM.COM Curious meanderings and imagery from a wanderer. I think I stumbled across this while perusing Salam Pax's site, and it's been interesting enough to lure me back several times.

COUNTING BY NUMBERS CIVIC -- the Campaign for Innocent Civilians in Conflict -- has been working since April throughout Iraq to investigate civilian casualties from the war.

The campaign has survey teams in Kirkuk, Najaf, Ramadi, Nasiriya, Amara, Kut, Diwaniyah, Basrah and Karbala. CIVIC has five administrators working from headquarters in Baghdad and over 150 surveyors covering Iraq. CIVIC will use the data collected to advocate for appropriate assistance. The campaign is working to meet the needs of individuals who require immediate medical care. Surveyors are submitting reports to Coalition Forces on cluster bomb sites and information on other unexploded ordinances. CIVIC will share survey results with all NGO’s who are interested in conducting similar studies in Iraq.

TRAGEDY IN THE CONGO Philip Gourevitch wrote the book on the wholesale slaughter of more than 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, and its aftermath. But he's not the only person on Earth who understands how a trickle can unleash a torrent, and he's not the only voice raising alarms about the rising catastrophe in the Congo, where more than 3 million people have died in recent years. Gourevitch says the Congo -- and like nations -- will be the true test of U.N. legitimacy and effectiveness.

But the measure of the U.N.’s vitality will not be taken in Iraq. The true test lies in those vexed areas of the world that hold no compelling strategic or economic interest for the United States or for any of the other veto-wielding members of the Security Council. Most immediately, the U.N. is facing that test in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where seven hundred poorly armed U.N. peacekeepers in the northeastern Ituri region have watched helplessly over the past few weeks as massacres by tribal militias have filled graves with fresh corpses at about the same clip that the dead of Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror have been exhumed in Iraq.

Accounts of the horror in Ituri have the quality of Hieronymus Bosch’s grotesque tableaux of apocalypse: torched villages; macheted babies in the streets; stoned child warriors indulging in cannibalism and draping themselves with the entrails of their victims; peacekeepers—mostly Uruguayans—using their guns only to drive off waves of frantic civilians seeking refuge in their already overflowing compound; a quarter of a million people in frenzied flight from their homes. For nearly five years, such suffering has plagued much of the eastern Congo along the tangled battle lines of warring political and tribal factions, stirred up and spurred on by the occupying armies of neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. Hundreds of thousands of Congolese have been killed in the fighting, and many more have died as a consequence of the displacement, disease, and hunger that attend it. By any measure, Congo is one of the most hellish places on earth, and of all the hells within that hell Ituri province has come to be known as the most infernal.

LIVING THE SAD, SURREAL LIFE Salam Pax began his web log last year and continued into the early days of the war in Iraq. A resident of Baghdad, he spent a week recently in southern Iraq with a group counting civilian casualties. His more recent posts chronicle life in Baghdad.

Pool side at Hamra hotel. Where every journalist wishes he had a room reserved. If they sit long enough there they could just forget that there was a war going on outside the hotel fences. Jennifer Lopez squeaking out of the speakers and cool $5 beers with over priced burgers and salads. “Please put these ICG reports aside I would rather work on my tan”. Stuff like that. They come in carrying cameras, sound gear or big folders with a red cross on them. Minutes later they are sipping on a beer wearing as little as they can.

Raed simply refused to get out of the water, he kept telling me that the moment I would walk out of the hotel doors I will be back in Baghdad: no electricity, lines at gas stations, prices as burning hot as the weather and a life that looks as if it will never return to normal. You couldn’t define normal now anyway. Have you seen how a fish flips on its sides when brought out of water? This is how it feels in Baghdad these days. You are not even sure if what you say is going to get you a black eye.

I don’t swim. I sat reading a borrowed copy of the New Yorker. An article about the new X-men movie. All systems on autopilot, I really did wish something would happen that will make it impossible for me to leave. But there are things to do, people to see, life rolls on.

WHAT PRICE PEACE? The Washington Post's Anthony Shadid recently returned from Baghdad after a brief trip home, and continues to paint a clear image of what Iraqis are dealing with almost two months after the end of the war. Shadid's reporting -- bolstered by his command of Arabic -- is some of the best coming out of Iraq.