"Has gone barking mad" implies that the world was not barking mad at some previous point. Evidence of this, please?

BTW - Which world religion was it that did NOT go through a "put all unbelievers to the sword" phase? Buddhism, maybe? Sure as heck not the followers of either YHWH or JC.

My first inkling that something was wrong on 9/11 was hearing Howard Stern on WXRK saying something about a plane flying into a building. I was car pooling to work with a friend, though, and he had the radio on very low volume and didn't mention what had happened. By the time we got to the office, the news of the 2nd plane had come in. Work ground to a halt as we all stood around the doorway of the one guy who could get radio reception in our building. We heard them announce that the first tower collapsed. And then the 2nd. Then our bosses sent us home.

I spent the rest of the day with my family - my wife and 6 month old baby girl. Later we walked to my friend's house and watched the video on his TV. (He had cable, and we only had an antenna. When the twin towers fell,  most of the over-the-air TV channels in NY went dead. They were all broadcast from that one transmission tower.)

Miraculously, no one we knew personally was lost. The closest call was a friend of ours who had worried us by deciding to have her baby's birth induced a few days earlier. At the time we wondered if it was a wise choice, but had she not done it, she would likely have been walking out of the debris cloud and across the Brooklyn Bridge, nine months pregnant, instead of home with her husband and new child on that day.

• Jimdoria  ~@>@