Grr-waah?

As is my wont, I fell off the face of the Earth for several months. That's me-- that's what I do. Until recently, though, I managed to keep my hands clapped firmly over my ears and maintaining a happy ignorance of just about everything. I wake up, go to work, sell shoes, go home, go to sleep. That's it. As a result, this is what I'm terribly uninformed about:

• the stock market crash
• the presidential election in general and the new "Who is Obama?" campaign in particular
• any sort of Israeli politics-- there was something with Livni, right?
• any new books on the market
• gas prices
• the new rabbi at my temple (not national news, but pretty world-shaking for someone who has had the same rabbi for 22 years)
  
• etc, etc, etc

The only thing I came out of my stupor for was the death of Paul Newman, who was all kinds of awesome. But now I'm fully awake... and I'm worried.

Seriously, guys, can't you do anything by yourselves? Do you really need my personal attention to keep this world functioning as it should? Well, now I'm back-- sort of. We'll see how long this lasts.