Having just got home from travels in south-central Europe, I've not read every word in this thread. But at a quick glance, I could see only John Mackenzie bemoaning a certain lack of perspective.

Shortly after the bombs went off, I was tuning into English-language channels in the hope of finding news about an earthquake in China. But as far as UK, Canadian and US newscasters were concerned, there had been no such event. Their whole output, for more than two days, was limited to events in Boston in which three or four people got killed. Say maybe four per cent of America's daily murder quota.

OK, we were all amused to see the whole of Boston terrified into lockdown by a couple of lads armed to the teeth with... pressure-cookers(!), especially amused in Serbia, which is one of the dozens of countries US warplanes have bombed since WW2. And especially those of us who got on with life as normal when 1,000 bombs (many funded from Boston ironically) went off in Belfast between July 1972 and July 1973.

But the remorseless repetition does get tiresome when you're trying to find out about an earthquake and perhaps catch a glimpse of the English Premiership results.

We did admittedly have the further amusement of some law officer declaring that "this terrorist" would have the benefit of US justice. And there were TWO thrilling gun battles. The second was best. According to a police chief, it went on for an hour! It wasn't clear what the targets might have been, and apparently nothing was hit, but then the police chief had already explained that he wanted the suspect taken alive, so I suppose everyone was aiming to miss.

Marshalled against the police crackshots, armed to the teeth, and throwing in stun-grenades for good measure, was... a hapless 19-year-old kid in a flimsy, or at any rate less than armour-plated, boat. He was injured enough that a householder had found him by following his spilt blood, and he was harmless enough that the householder had been able to take a close look at him and yet live to tell the story. So... medals all round for those brave police heroes.

The gunfights were fun, in a farcical kind of way, but the icing on the cake was when the pressure-cookers became WMDs! This is the point at which Tom Lehrer would have had to give up on satire, if Kissinger hadn't already stopped him. No wonder WMDs were not found in Iraq - pressure-cookers simply don't feature in Arabic cuisine.

Oh, and I forgot to mention John Kerry, a Satan-believer apparently, declaring that America had "for this past week been confronting Evil" or words to that effect. That was quite funny too.