Great Bridge Bridge

There is a town in Chesapeake called Great Bridge, a town that has existed and persevered since pre-Revolutionary times. The town is so named for a long-gone bridge that once crossed the southern branch of the Elizabeth River. This, as an engineer, excites me. In fact, there was a brief Revolutionary War battle fought at the bridge (appropriately remembered as the Battle of Great Bridge), and now the road whose origins trace to the highway that crossed the bridge is known as Battlefield Blvd. Cool stuff, right?

Well, it ends there. The Chesapeake-Albemarle Canal, which connects the Chesapeake Bay to the Albemarle Sound, was built as part of the Intracoastal Waterway, thus starving the southern Elizabeth River of its feedwater and negating the need for a "Great Bridge." However, they still needed a bridge to cross the narrow canal.

Currently, we have a beautiful Scherzer rolling lift bascule bridge crossing the canal. It is sleek, modern, and truly is the centerpiece of the little Chesapeake hamlet. Unfortunately, this bridge came after the town, so no one feels right calling it "the Great Bridge." It is awkwardly known as "the Great Bridge Bridge." So, whenever the city needs to work on the bridge, the announcements say "Great Bridge Bridge Closed." On electronic highway marquees, it looks like the sign developed a stutter. So this little town, gloriously named for a civil engineering feat that had its own glorious history, now somewhat ingloriously refers to its landmark with a repetitive term that leaves my spell checker begging to delete the extraneous bridges.

Still has a sense of humor

I typed "The Men Who Stare at Goats" into Google. Google then proceeded to read my mind and pulled up reviews for the film, which is exactly what I was looking for. At the bottom of the screen, just above the search bar and in clear view, was the following statement:

The selection and placement of reviews on this page were determined automatically by a computer program. No movie critics were harmed or even used in the making of this page.

That is the Google that, if Google so chose, could issue the command "jump" and we would all watch helplessly as our computers leapt from our desks and tumbled to the ground. The same Google with a net worth bigger than the GDPs of 138 of the world's nations. I love that they can still have a sense of humor.

Everything is so dramatic

It seems that every nation has its dramatic phase.

We went through our own teenage the-world-is-out-to-get-us phase back in the 1700s. Only a misunderstood teenager would wax poetic in a revolutionary document and change "property" to "the pursuit of happiness." Our parents back in England proposed a curfew of sorts and we got ourselves legally emancipated. Happens all the time.

France went through the same thing a decade later. Except they chose the nice-neighborhood-kid-who-is-actually-a-serial-killer avenue. Whatever works. I'm not here to judge.

And of course our own revolution was borne out of a centuries-long selfish stage in which all the colonial powers grabbed as much land as they could despite the glaring fact that the enterprise was economically and logistically unsustainable.

In the 1800s most of the colonial empires dissolved as colonies chafed under imperial rule and wanted to strike out on their own. Unfortunately, most of the colonies rebelled against their parents before graduating high school and now are stuck in a minimum-wage, third-world McDonald's type of existence.

Argentina hit its teenage years in the early 1900s and never really grew up.

The Bolsheviks eventually got what every impudent teenager needs...a swift kick in the pants and some strict discipline.

The Pacific side of WWII was precipitated by a Japanese tantrum, who, like many teenagers, had a false sense of immortality and moral correctness.

India's hunger strikes were going to bed without dinner taken to the extreme.

Tiananmen Square? You have one teenager standing in the street playing chicken with a tank driven by another teenager. Take that and multiply it by a billion to get China's little dramatic phase.

And now we have Venezuela, Iran and North Korea, who have the advantage of global media in their efforts to hurl childish taunts to their bigger neighbors. I know you are, but what am I?

The latest example is Afghanistan. The UN-sponsored election review found that Karzai's election commissioners were stuffing the ballot box. The UN interceded to ensure a runoff would be required. We spent untold millions and gave American and allied lives to get a fair runoff for the nation. But Karzai's challenger, Mr. Abdullah Abdullah (so nice, they named him twice!), with a flair for the dramatic, decided to boycott the runoff, effectively handing the presidency to Karzai and abrogating all the efforts expended on Abdullah's behalf. Dude, you don't quit in the middle of a pivotal election because you think its unfair. We know its unfair. The world knows its unfair. What are you proving by pouting?

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/11/02/afghanistan.election.runoff/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn

Stupid teenagers. In another century or so, we should be done with all these dramatic countries. In the Future of the World (According to Bryan), the world is full of nations that have grown past their teenage years and have settled into a jaded and cynical middle age where no one really gets excited about anything anymore. We will all get along, more or less, in a perpetual state of mutual skepticism and global apathy.