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can say about Pol Pot and his evil horde is that they only lasted for four years. He died under house arrest, probably a suicide, in 1998. Today, Cambodia has its old name back, a thriving tourist economy and best of all, a young and healthy growing population.
    Especially young. Three-quarters of living Cambodians are too young to even remember Pol Pot.
    But they’ll have no trouble remembering the US bombings; it’s a gift that keeps on giving. Those millions of tons of bombs that were dropped did not all detonate. Some experts estimate that 30 percent of them still lie in the jungle waiting to explode.
    And they do, with deadly regularity. There are forty thousand amputees in Cambodia today, almost all of them victims of UXOs—unexploded ordnance. There will be many more amputees for decades to come.
    â€œHistory,” as Winston Churchill tartly observed, “is written by the victors.”
    How true. That’s why no memorial on the face of the earth marks the passing of Pol Pot.
    And Henry Kissinger, the architect of the Cambodian Secret War?
    Why, he won the Nobel Prize for Peace.

 
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    A Bellyful of Bad Guys
    N ot to be paranoid or anything, but don’t be surprised if someday soon you’re pulled aside by a couple of grim-looking dudes dressed in bad suits and dark glasses with curly wires coming out of their ears. As they shake you down they’ll probably identify themselves as agents with the Disease Control Unit or Alien Surveillance Command or some such.
    It’s legit. They suspect you of harbouring and giving sustenance to alien life forms and you know what—they’re right. You, my friend, are an enabler—a host. You are the front man for dangerous, possibly life-threatening creatures which are living and breeding, rent-free, at this very moment on your person.
    You’ve heard of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang? Well, this is the Hole-in-Your-Gut Gang. These nogoodniks are presently residing and conspiring in your belly button.
    Interesting piece of business, the belly button—or umbilicus, as it’s properly known. It’s our only souvenir of the feeding tube—the umbilical cord—that sustained us all for the nine months we spent in our mommas’ bellies.
    Nobody goes through or gets out of this life without one—except I suppose Adam and Eve if you subscribe to the Garden of Eden miniseries. All Gaia’s chillun—the placental ones anyway—got belly buttons, one to a customer. And for microscopic creepy-crawlies, what a perfectly swell condo-cum-cafeteria the average belly button is.
    â€œYour belly button is a great place to grow up if you’re a bacterium,” says Dr. Tom Kottke of Regions Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota. “It’s warm, dark and moist—a perfect home.”
    And that’s actually fortunate because not all bacteria are bad guys. Most of them, in fact, range from benign to positively healthy. Only a handful are what you’d call troublemakers, causing everything from leprosy, cholera and pneumonia all the way to ear and respiratory infections. Sounds ominous until you learn that researchers have identified more than twenty-three hundred types of human belly button bacteria so far—and most of them are as unthreatening as Anne of Green Gables at a strawberry social.
    Are you an Innie or an Outie? If it’s the latter, chances are the Men in Black will let you off with a stern warning. People with protruding belly buttons don’t offer as hospitable digs for bacteria to thrive on. The odds are, however, that you’re an Innie—90 percent of humans are. And 100 percent of belly button bacteria like that just fine.
    Belly button infections are not unheard of, but they’re relatively easily avoided. Simple soap and water usually does the trick.
    For more stubborn cases though, there’s always the military option. Bring out the big guns, I say. Warships, if necessary.