Hey, so what's goin' on with that government shutdown or something? Everyone's still blaming John Boehner and Republicans, a lot, and they also, unsurprisingly, are starting to warm up to the idea of affordable health care, the goodie bag that drove the GOP's Tea Party zealots into the depths of their self-immolating nihilism. I guess some of them Republicans are talking about a deal now—led by the exasperated Senate.

"Sooner or later, they will all come together," says a newly reasonable John McCain. "Sooner or later, we will not defund Obamacare. Sooner or later, the government will start functioning. And sooner or later, we will exceed the debt limit. It's a matter of when."

Hey, so what's goin' on with them truck drivers who hate everyone? Oh, what? They tried to shut down Washington DC roadways again and no one noticed?

Hey, so what's goin' on with them Nobel Prizes or something? They got one now for these people who make sure other people don't mess with chemical weapons. I guess this one group that won is going to take all the chemical weapons out of Syria.

Hey, so what's goin' on with them Syrians and that Syrian Civil War? Them rebels there have been accused by a human rights group of massacring a whole bunch of civilians.

Hey, so what's goin' on with that guy who kidnapped those ladies in Cleveland? Everyone thought he killed himself in prison. But prison guards made that up after finding Ariel Castro half-naked and dead thanks to a bit of auto-erotic asphyxiation that didn't work out like he wanted.

Hey, so what's goin' on with the man who got one over on the NSA by leaking their spy business? Way back a long time ago, back in 2009, the CIA got real, real worried about Edward Snowden and even wrote down why. But no one read it. Maybe I'm not as worried they know how often Americans look at naked pictures with celebrity heads photoshopped onto them.

Hey, so what's goin' on with this business about hospitals losing patients? It was a hospital in San Francisco. And no one thinks it was foul play or nothing. It was just that a woman on meds wandered out of bed, got locked into a stairway people only check every three months or so, and then died alone. Someone found her body 17 days later, well after the cops searched the city for her.

Hey, so what's goin' on with that one country in the Middle East named Iran? The maybe-nicer regime running things nowadays made a lot of people mad by canceling what's usually billed as the world's biggest anti-Zionism conference. But also? Some of the actually-still-awful religious types there arrested a bunch of fellas for dancing, saying they'd busted a "network of homosexuals and satanists."

One thing I don't know? Why American fundamentalists hate Iranian fundamentalists so much. It's like one could be tidy and the other one a slob, but they live together and like each other anyway and that always wins out in the end, right? DO NOT ADJUST THE TRACKING.