Missed Dec. 1 by an hour and a half -- dinner took longer than expected, went to later movie than expected, movie was lengthier than expected. Anyway. Link and Think.

Since Sept. 11, the skew of statistics has changed in my head. Four to five thousand is the number that sticks out now; it's the new means of comparison. (Eight million people, the number of people who died in the Holocaust, is my old means.) So when I was reading Kofi Annan's article on what the UN plans to do about AIDS, I couldn't help but be struck by a new number: 8,000. Eight thousand people a day. Six hundred new people infected every hour.

I know a lot of people who've done AIDS Rides in various cities, sometimes biking hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of miles and always using huge amounts of time and energy in the training. Nosily enough, I always want to ask them what their motivation is for that kind of committment and self-sacrifice. But with numbers like those, there's no need to ask why, is there.

"What we must sustain now is the political will. Life after Sept. 11 has made us all think more deeply about the kind of world we want for our children. It is the same world we wanted on Sept. 10 -- a world in which a child does not die of AIDS every minute."

-- Kofi Annan