Iraq

The Iraq War is now half a decade old. In President Bush's speech Wednesday he defended the war and responded to calls for withdrawal by saying "we are not going to let this happen." So don't worry about having to get used to not having this old comfortable war around. It's not going anywhere.

But can you believe it's been five years already? Time sure flies. In a way, we've all grown up with this war. When this thing started we were just a bunch of kids, ready to take on the world with nothing more than a sense of possibility and a quickly vanishing budget surplus. And now? Well, what a long, strange trip it's been. Five years already seems like a long time, but when you think back to what was going on way back in March of 2003, you can hardly believe that was really us. It was a time when...

Serena became the dominant Williams sister and the Powerbook G4 only came with a laughable 40 gigabytes of memory.

That guy with the giant nose won Best Actor...remember him?

It was a year when we lost Buddy Hackett, and Paris Hilton was still just a hotel.

Families coast to coast gathered around their TV sets every week to hear a lovable tub named Ruben Stoddard become our American Idol.

Skinny jeans were just around the corner, and a strange new thing called "bluetooth" had just hit the market. People talking to themselves like idiots on street corners were still just a crazy fantasy.

We lost our innocence when we found out Rush Limbaugh was a drug addict, and regained it when a young kid by the name of Curtis James Jackson III, aka "50 Cent" changed rap forever.

And of course, who could forget when the Iraq war ended, after the president declared that "major combat operations" were over.

Ah, the memories...