Time Sink of Epic Proportions

One of the things I am doing with my vacation is indulging in of my favorite time sinks. Sitting on the couch with a tall glass of iced tea is still a pretty good bet, as is sitting on the couch with a tall glass of iced tea watching television, but sometimes I need a notch more intereaction. For this I generally find myself in front of another screen - the one attached to my computer. Solitaire is an easy way to throw away half an hour, but when I really need to dig deep and get rid of hours at a time, I turn to Civilization III (The Gold Edition).
If you are unfamiliar with this game, it allows you to begin at the dawn of history, inventing the wheel and an alphabet and follows your tribe wherever you take them, even if that means thermonuclear war. As you might suspect, it takes a good long time to build cities and direct commodities. After a playing the game a number of different times, bringing different cultures through the painful birth of nations, I have discovered a few things.
Starting wars drains resources. After an initial bump of popularity, the folks back home are generally anxious to have an end to the fighting so they can get back to their normal lives. They are not happy to have their money and food going to an enterprise that usually ends up with sons and daughters dying - even if they are merely figments of my CPU.
Extending yourself outside your borders with trade and defense agreements can be just as costly as an actual conflict. The Monroe Doctrine turns out to be pretty good advice, at least in the world inside my computer.
I have also learned the terrors and pleasure of communism, and the dangers of unlimited scientific progress. When you start the game, you have a choice of chieftain: Zulu, Ottoman, Mayan, Egyptian, Iroquois, Celtic, or even American. Here's the truth, at some point in every game I've played, I have the urge to do something crazy or aggressive of both. If nothing happens, the game gets boring. So why not send a bunch of cavalry across the border and raid the nearest town for their gold? If a city overthrows their governor and switches cultures, there's a great temptation to send the navy over and bomb them back to the stone age, just to teach them a lesson.
But the name of the game, after all, is Civilization. When I turn it off and return to the couch to watch the news, I wonder if I shouldn't send a copy out to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the next time our President has a few minutes to kill.