After a year of near-nuclear holocausts, tyrant-topplings across the Middle East and Egyptian deities popping up in testicular tumours, we're all asking the same question. Anything else? Surely, that's all the news there could possibly be. Can we go home now? But news is funny in a self-perpetuating sort of way. The daily barrage of newspaper headlines often give the impression that the news is a pitter-patter of isolated events -- suprising us daily with a flourish of drama that no one could have seen coming. And sometimes, the news really is that random. Who could have foreseen, for instance, the ravages of Slave Lake, Alberta -- a forest fire in May that reduced a third of the town to rubble, leaving some 2,000 people homeless.