Boom. Yawn.

Lots or explosions yesterday- most of them obviously mortars, but there was one big one that rattled the trailer we work in. It was even audible inside the NOC, which is a concrete building.

General consensus: VBIED- Vehicle-borne improvised explosive device, or car bomb.

Nothing close though. The mortars were quite a ways off, and the car bomb, though it sounded close, had to be fairly far away, because we couldn't spot any damage from our rooftop anywhere in our area.

This morning on the way to work the smoke from garbage fires was horrible. I pretty much lost my appetite on the way to the chow hall, coughing and eyes watering. Another lovely morning in Baghdad. There's an argument, consistently disputed by bleeding heart liberals, that people don't care about their environmental quality until they make a certain minimum GDP- somewhere around (guesses vary slightly) $3500 per capita. Other factors just have a higher prioirty for severely limited budgets, and therefore the best way to improve the environment around the world is to increase their income through free markets to the point where they start voluntarily expending capital on environmental quality.

I firmly believe that, based on my own experience of travel.