When we mention routers these days, I guess we usually think of the kind made by Cisco/Linksys – the little valves in the tubes of the internets. But that’s not what I’m on about today. I refer to stone routers, used by artisans to inscribe text in the monuments of our cities of the living and cities of the dead. You see, they’re adding more names to the Vietnam Memorial wall in Washington DC. Forty years later, and that memorial isn’t finished yet. There are over 58,000 names on the wall … and counting.

When do you suppose they’ll start designing and building the memorial for casualties of the Iraq and Afghan Wars of the Bush Administrations? Would anyone care to venture an estimate of the number of names?