Caylee

The child's mother
The child's father
The child's brother
The child's nanny
The child's gra'mother
The child's car
The corpse sniffing dog
The sense that she is near
The child's nother

Helium flight

Not for children: Take a bic lighter. Grasp a party balloon helium tank between your thighs, and put a black garbage back over your lap, and thumb the nozzle open. Use only non-flammable helium or even plain "air." When the bag inflates, grasp the edges tightly with your outer feet and twist the top part into a Higgs funnel. Now make a small spout at the top for the air in the bag to escape and enter the vortex. Light the lighter and hold up to the "spout." The excess air will "burn upward" with the helium, creating a brief but intense upward drag all around the perimeter of the bag. Careful not to light the bag or anything else and let go the bag with your feet: It will rise with a force of about 75 psi. Anything attached to it will rip away, including light furniture or picnic supplies.

Personal VTOL reappears

Glenn Martin's "Jetpack" is actually a retread of a design bruited about in the 1990s called "SoloTrek," which reached the point of untethered brief hovers close to the ground, just as Martin's does. If Martin solved a significant problem afflicting SoloTrek, one does not discover this from the NYT piece,

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/29/science/29jetpack.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin#

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/29/us/29jetpack.600.jpg

To see the stalled Springtail (the Solotrek signature craft), which is obviously being hawked to the military, check out:

http://www.trekaero.com/Trek_VTOL_Springtail_EFV4B_Specifications.htm

Carolina Back Country

I have an ancestor who fought with Tarleton's Raiders, Loyalists who massacred women and children in their beds in the worst fighting of the Revolutionary War in those parts, stimulating American patriots to comb through the ruins screaming "Tarleton's quarter, Tarleton's quarter," killing. (I.e. no quarter at all.) It was Indian country and filled with outlaw militias so the killing came easier.

NBC Brian Williams interviews Ahmadinejad

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25884020/

(Cut and paste it in another window for Chrissakes)

Ahmadinejad says, in the teaser to Brian Williams' interview, "Did Nuclear weapons help Israel prevail in Lebanon? No. Did nuclear weapons prevent the Soviet Union from collapsing? No. For that matter, did nuclear weapons lead the United States to prevail inside Iraq? Or Afghanistan for that matter? No. Nuclear weapons are twentieth century, we are in a new century." (approx. quotation).

1. Israel did not prevail in Lebanon using nuclear weapons because Israel's existence was not threatened by Lebanon. Nuclear weapons are for giving your country impugnity to act more freely, for instance, in Lebanon.

2. Nuclear weapons permitted the Eastern Europeans Russians and others to free themselves of dictatorship without suffering invasion.

3. Nuclear weapons did not facilitate victory in Iraq because the United States invaded Iraq to liberate Iraqis from a dictator, but it is true that nukes could not help Americans bring peace or stability to the country.

Ahmadinejad's message is: nuclear weapons would permit Iran to withstand threats and internal division without being occupied, but would not allow Iran to successfully pacify or dominate its neighbors, so don't worry. Isn't that Ahmadinejad's real meaning?

So basically, "Yes, we want nukes"

Makapan's Cave

Can Bosman's short story be used in a History Course? That's not a question I usually ask since tenure, but the start of the story has to be seen as ironic (it is) in order not to be verboten: Oom Schalk Laurens, Bosman's (b. 1905) alter-ego old man character (born ca. 1850?) is about to reminisce about something that happened to his brother and him. He says something like, "All Kafirs are the same," and then that while the Hottentoten steals only the biltong, the kafir steals the biltong and the line it is hung on. But some kafirs, Oom Schalk says, are okay and it is wrong to shoot them, and so . . .

This is the highly deceptive, very well planned out beginning of an amazing story premised, ultimately, on grasping power and violence in a very intimate way. It is also set squarely within genuine political events (naming Paul Kruger and Piet Potgeiter) again in a subversive and believable way. It is kind of like a "Brokeback Mountain" told doubly ironically, where the reader and the teller are kept from full disclosure, and the emotional center is left intact, and explodes only in retrospect, when looking back over what's been read. It is a perfectly structured story, and it is as heartbreaking as Doris Lessing's in telling of the damage racism does to human relationships. The brutality of the story is like a slow burn. I love it.

But to use it I have to have all the class first hear me talk about it. Because many of them will not know what to make of it especially its beginning. They will not find it accessible to them. It would be like reading, with no warning, a story by a German 1930s author:

"Oh, I know the Jew," Old Hans began, knocking his pipe on his pantleg. "All the Jews are the same. They are all misers, cheapskates who will swindle you blind and must be shot." . . .

People compare Bosman to Twain, so perhaps that's where I'll have to find the angle in: Huck Finn and Jim on the Riverboat. Boy that scene has done a lot of work over the years!

Batman's mark as line of death 9/11

The Dark Knight was a great comic. I remember reading it in San Francisco in 1984, and thinking, "Well, this is new."

Now here is the Dark Knight in the "original" form, but there is Batman in front of an image we know as "the World Trade Center coming down in flames," with the Bat of Batman marking the flaming part, above which, we all know, are doomed management and trader people, about to die.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8a/Dark_Knight.jpg

The chaining of this knowledge to something else. The morbid fascination and excitement it causes in the Batman ad.

UPDATE, July 28th, 2008

This ad is now hard to find. Downplayed. Too "on the nose."

Now the papers are saying Dark Knight captures the current "national mood."

Or is it that Barack Obama is the Dark Knight?

More likely than either: the ad agency wanted to use the most powerful images in the national memory and did it by replacing the fire of the jet fusilages ripping through the mens' rooms and lounges and offices and cubicles and coffee rooms, with the sign of the Batman.

I want to live in another country sometimes.