(Magenta) pants optional.
Too many definite articles, but hey: Hulk blog. (Via Comixpedia.)
Things to remember:
Tiger Crouches at the Front Door; Boatman Rows a Skull; Paint a Red Dot Between the Eyebrows; Brush Dust in the Breeze; Dragonfly Skims the Water; Turn Around and Hang a Golden Bell; Pick Up Stars with an Unerring Hand; Black Dragon Stirs its Tail; Wasp Flies Through a Hole; Capture a Legendary Turtle in the Ocean Depths; White Snake Flicks its Tongue; Hold the Moon in Your Arms. —Names of maneuvers in classic Chinese swordplay. From a footnote in By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions.
Under pressure.
Got an email alert this morning letting me know that over 100,000 people had sent faxes to their congressional delegations in the past 48 hours, demanding a vote in favor of the Harkin amendment—the one that will block the Bush administration’s attempt to destroy overtime compensation for millions of workers.
So much for the 40-hour week; so much for the weekend. Onward, jobless recovery!
Anyway. I sent mine. Have you sent yours?
Moral equivalency.
I’ve never really linked to Instapundit. Never really read him much, despite his outsized impact in the Islets of Bloggerhans; you’ll encounter his spoor pretty much wherever you roam—though, admittedly, not so much on the sinistral side of the archipelago, these days. It’s become something of a trope, in fact, almost a cherished tradition: the blog entry from someone on the center-left that begins, “I used to link to Instapundit, but with increasing trepidation as he’s gotten more and more strident and reactionary. But today he crossed a line…”
Which is not to say Professor Reynolds hasn’t crossed something I’d consider a line many, many times before. Merely that I decided to open with this rhetorical trick, because the particular line crossed here is a doozy:
Reynolds approvingly cites an equivalency between Cruz Bustamante’s membership in a rambunctious Chicano advocacy group in college in the 1960s with everything Trent Lott ever did to support segregation, white supremacy, Strom Thurmond, and the pro-secessionist South.
As usual, when it comes to race and the Wurlitzer’s attempts to twist and distort the facts, David Neiwert has the detailed, point-by-point rebuttal. I also highly recommend this blistering smackdown from Ted Barlow at Crooked Timber. —These two posts are required reading on the subject; any attempt to continue the ridiculous meme of “MEChA is a racist organization that Bustamante must repudiate” that does not specifically reference them and address their points is intellectually dishonest, and not worth the pixels it’s printed on.
The kicker, from Barlow’s can of whupass: there’s the Voz de Aztlán, a genuinely racist organization whose stances all-too-conveniently get mixed up with MEChA’s; they are, in fact, the very thing principled conservatives who haven’t bothered to do their homework—or who think cough syrup is an acceptable excuse for slander—think they’re condemning with this nonsense. They are anti-Semitic; they are homophobic. And they are supporting Arnold Schwarzenegger in the California recall.
No on the recall. Yes on Bustamante. And Instapundit Reynolds is hereby consigned to the killfile of history.
Gloss!
So I warped through various Googlings attempting to recollect a word that turned out to be “chibi” I’d found by way of a vague, ill-remembered Google-stumble (Gumble?) a week or so ago. That one had bounced me all unlooked-for into the Urban Dictionary, which is thoroughly untrustworthy (since anyone can post any definition of any word they like, and there’s far more posters than people doling out whuffie to the good ones and picking the pockets of the bad, and so you’ve got everything from obvious ringers to inexplicable inside jokes to self-aggrandizing posts from the best! Quake! Player! Ever!) and logy and slow as molasses and yet—like any pile of fecal matter—incredibly fertile ground, full of oddball turns of phrase and bits of slang to be tumbled and spun (“quallo,” “decency timeline,” “mella ned,” as for instances). Handle with care, but do handle.
But the Urban Dictionary is much too unwieldy to reverse-engineer, so I finally tumbled to “chibi” at this glossary of fanfic terms, which I’ve promptly bookmarked: it’s a wide-ranging sampling from the more active, participatory end of fandom (what fandom? Any fandom), and it’s full of tantalizing snapshots and unexpected trends, and though learning that “babyfic” is a notable subgenre of the Mulder Scully Married school is perhaps a bit too much information, how can one resist such scintillating terms as “schmoop” and “Barbieshippers” and “plotbunnies” and “bifauxnen,” or how “uffish” takes on a sheen from “unnamed fiction” which in turn once slipped out sideways from the Reading Gaol? —Though it seems odd that the rather useful pairing of “seme” and “uke” have been left out; luckily, they’re found in this rather more specialized glossary of slash fiction terms.
On my way there, though, I stumbled into this tantalizing-seeming list of online dictionaries, glossaries, and encyclopedias. Unfortunately, it’s crippled by link rot; almost all the best-looking links have long since 404ed. But there’s still this handy glossary of rhetorical terms (apparently, it’s hendiadys I’m fond of), and the inexplicable frisson of getting a Skynet 404 when you go looking for an Anne of Green Gables Encyclopedia on a whim (maybe you had to be there), and this instantly bookmarked dictionary of terms in use in bookbinding and book conservation.
—Which, I’ve just discovered, has been available from Glossarist.com all along, which site I’ve had over yonder in the linchinography, and obviously have not spent enough time browsing.
Anyway. “Chibi.” What was it I needed that for, again?
(Why, yes. I am procrastinating something. However could you tell?)
President Firebug?
Here’s how this four-day-old article begins:
An emerging whodunit in Central Oregon hovers amid the smoke draping the east side of the Cascade Range.
Can it be pure coincidence, locals are asking, that two wildfires sprang up in view of the spot where President Bush planned to promote his plan to thin forests for wildfire prevention?
Here’s how it ends (after noting that lightning’s been ruled out):
The coincidences multiply considering the two fires erupted about 10 miles apart at almost the same time, although winds that whipped through the region might explain that. The Booth fire started near Round Lake, a camping spot next to the Mount Jefferson Wilderness, while the Bear Butte fire began in the wilderness, away from roads.
The Central Oregon Arson Task Force will investigate the blazes, but flames have kept officers from beginning their inquiry.
Lightning starts about 15 percent of wildfires, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
People start the rest.
What do you think? (Via Fred at the Oregon Blog.)
Ubu Roy.
In accordance with a couple of the various versions of the Second Commandment, a graven image, before which a small but ferocious number of Confederate-flag–waving Southerners (apparently quite telegenic) had bowed down themselves to, and served (with various proclamations and lamentations, that they might be seen of men; they have their reward), has been removed.
(Do I mock? Very well, then, I mock. A group of hotheads and disgruntled malcontents so eager to trample the Fourteenth Amendment that they willingly cast themselves as cartoon extras in the stage-managed aggrandizement of a third-rate political hack’s bid to become governor of a bargain-basement state too punch-drunk to drag its tax code into the 20th century—that’s eminently mock-worthy. That the media would poke and stoke the “story” for the sake of a few ratings points in the dog days of August is deplorable. That anyone takes Judge Roy Moore seriously—or thinks anyone else might, outside the Kleig-lit pucker of rabble and rouser—is self-evidently ludicrous. —If not, well: you’re free to consult the Google oracle for a sense of the actual role the Ten Commandments play in this great multicultural, secular nation of ours.
(Seriously. The whole God damned thing is a barrel-bottom Hollywood rip of Alfred Jarry.)
Early morning doubletake.
Ha ha. Read this, from Atrios’s coments section, citing a New York Times Letter from Europe:
This summer’s biggest scandal—the invasion and occupation of Iraq—has spawned endless speculation about who really wields power under President George W. Bush.
Everybody has a theory, but no one outside the White House really knows, and no one inside will say.
In the old days, observers of the White House—the press, they were called then—were granted access to various officials and important documents, with frequent news conferences from the President. Independent investigations led by Congress added to the scrutiny.
With all the setbacks the United States has suffered since 2000—disputed elections, stock market declines, a timid, Republican-friendly press and the curtailment of personal liberties—the exercise has changed. Whitehousology is here…
Then follow the link at the bottom to read more. (Courtesy of the Cunctator. —Which means now for some reason I’m reminded of the time that Art Buchwald took a chauffer-driven Cadillac into the then-Soviet Union to show them all what a capitalist looked like and proceeded to get drunk in [among other places] a Moscow dive where he bellowed, “My KGB guy can lick anybody else’s KGB guy in the house!”)
No man that warreth entangleth himself with the affairs of this life; that he may please him who hath chosen him to be a soldier.
That’s from the second letter Paul wrote to Timothy: 2 Timothy, chapter 2, verse 4. Nice to know that First Command, purveyor of life insurance to our men and women in uniform since 1958, and now (thanks to deregulation) a full-service bank that understands the challenges of the military lifestyle, has taken Scripture to heart. Check out the terms of a basic checking account where a private could stash her paycheck:
First Checking Account
- A basic transaction account with no minimum balance requirement.
- Non-interest bearing.
- Avoid the service charge by having their full pay direct deposited into their First Account.
- May write an unlimited number of checks; however, only the first 10 per statement cycle are free. Subsequent checks are $0.50 each.
- First 3 ATM withdrawals per statement cycle incur no charge from First Command Bank; subsequent withdrawals are $1.50 each. (May be subject to additional charge by ATM owner.)
- ATM Rebates limited to 3 transactions. See ATM card details for more information.
- Overdraft protection of $250 is automatically assigned.
- Opening deposit—$25.00
- Monthly service charge—$3.00 any month full pay is not direct deposited.
That’d be all of her paycheck, mind. Directly deposited. But hey: that’s pretty much standard issue for a cheap-ass, ground-level, screw the plebes who aren’t paying attention checking account; college students get to sign up for them every day. Nah, skimble has the goods on First Command’s real money-maker:
If you know anything about mutual funds, you may be familiar with the load, or sales charge, that you must pay for investing in the fund. Two to eight-and-a-half percent is a range of fairly common initial “front-end” loads. But military personnel are being slapped with loads of fifty percent on their savings for retirement…
Well, hey. It’s a variation on cheap-labor conservativism: if you find you can’t cut the rate you pay for labor when all is said and done, you can at least let a crony skim some of the fat. Right?
Credit where credit is due: when a veteran gets soaked by one of those publish-your-own-book deals, First Command will let him place a a Bedside Reading notice. To help move some units.
Looking forward to collecting what would be recollected later.
How could I have forgotten where to find that marginal note? Because I am a dolt, that’s how.
(I wonder, Van, why you are doing your best to transform our poetical and unique past into a dirty farce? Honestly, Van! Oh, I am honest, that’s how it went. I wasn’t sure of my ground, hence the sauciness and the simper. Ah, parlez pour vous: I, dear, can affirm that those famous fingertips up your Africa and to the edge of the world came considerably later when I knew the itinerary by heart. Sorry, no—if people remembered the same they would not be different people. That’s-how-it-went. But we are not “different”! Think and dream are the same in French. Think of the douceur, Van! Oh, I am thinking of it, of course, I am—it was all douceur, my child, my rhyme. That’s better, said Ada.)
Context is everything (“p. 120. parlez pour vous: speak for yourself,” offers Vivian Darkbloom). —Speaking of which, I shall now remedy the grave disservice of failing to note the delicious synchrony of wood s lot marking Diane di Prima’s birthday scant days after I picked up Memoirs of a Beatnik on a (prurient) whim. There’s frequent delicious synchronies to be found at wood s lot; this is but the latest, which leads us to di Prima’s website, and leads me to add One Too Like Thee to my list of Phantom Books to be Tripped Over Someday if I’m Lucky. (And one does get lucky: why, look! From a year-old number of the Nutmeg Point District Mail:
UNHISTORY AT LAST!
Tor Books will publish Adventures in Unhistory. The last book published during Avram Davidson’s lifetime will once again be available for the edification and pleasure of readers. Not a month goes by but your editor receives multiple inquries from would-be readers, collectors, librarians, and even booksellers seeking what has become a genuine rara avis among recently published books.
Further details, including publication date, will be announced as they become known.
(And though said details have yet to forthcome, this mere hint of an announcement is itself enough to kindle hope in a breast long since inured to stoney disappointment. My breath is yet bated, if not wholly held.)
So: to repair this divarication, I’ll return for a moment to Ada, or Ardor and note an instance of prior art, to be found on p. 86 (“strapontin: folding seat in front,” offers Darkbloom) of the Vintage International trade paperback edition:
Being unfamiliar with the itinerary of sun and shade in the clearing, he had left his bicycle to endure the blazing beams for at least three hours. Ada mounted it, uttered a yelp of pain, almost fell off, googled, recovered—and the rear tire burst with a comic bang.
Well. Okay. Maybe not. But still.
Live from Little Beirut.
Aaron, the Demented Lawyer, fights the good fight. Here’s his play-by-play of the President’s recent visit to Little Beirut: who got arrested, and how, and why. (Upshot? Precious few. Downside? Still brutal, still needless, still overly confrontational. Keep those feet on the sidewalk, citizen!) Emma Goldman has more, plus photos, and a link to the blog maintained by Shut Up O’Reilly’s old stomping grounds; she also tells you why it’s so cheesy to breeze into town for a $25K-a-plate fundraiser and stiff the 8% unemployed city with a $200,000 bill. (Do note the Democrat has paid up; the Republican has yet to return the city’s calls.) —The nut graf of it all, as it were:
I guess I don’t really know what to make of all this, except to say that—again—two thirds of the media told a story that didn’t happen to sell fear and anger for profit. This is a city in which something like 75% of the population voted for Gore (that stat comes from memory from The Emerging Democratic Majority). The folks at the protest were exercising their right to tell their president—their president—what they thought of his policies. They were overwhelmingly telling him his priorities were wrong and that he’d better serve the people better. But what do the local media show? The chilling tale of radicals barely kept in check while defiling the good name of the republic. Too bad we can’t vote them out of office.
If you wanted to put some money where it would do some good, you might think nationally, and consider MoveOn.org’s million dollars for democracy; you might think locally. Or you might decide to moon the people’s White House. Act accordingly.
I (sometimes) write like a girl!
or, Shameless self-promotion.
It’s a fun little tool, the Gender Genie. Rich (of Brain Squeezings) took the algorithm developed by by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict an author’s gender, and turned it into a webapp (available here, but also here). (The algorithm itself is almost embarrassingly simple.)
Results? When I write about webcomics and cartoonists, I’m a girl. When I reminisce about college (and not so much Robyn Hitchcock), I’m a girl. When I rant, though, about war or the aftereffects of war (as for instances), I’m a guy. Unless I’m ranting about Ann Coulter, in which case I’m (just barely) a girl. But my fiction—my art; the word games nearest and dearest my heart—well, I’m a guy. Pretty much astoundingly so.
The algorithm tries (simply) to calculate the “involvedness” and “informationalness” of a text. Women, you see, write involvedly—texts that show interaction between the speaker/writer and the listener/reader; men, on the other hand, tend to indicate or specify the things they write about. (I’m not entirely certain why that’s an other hand, but I’m summarizing a paper I’ve only just skimmed, and being cheeky to boot.) The basic flags are based on statistical analyses of texts drawn from the British National Corpus—texts from the BNC have already been labeled for genre, and each word is tagged as belonging to one of their recognized 76 parts of speech. 123 male documents—excuse me, texts generated by men—and 123 texts generated by women were used; these included 179 nonfiction pieces, drawn from the realms of natural science, applied science, social science, world affairs, commerce, the arts, belief/thought, and leisure. Average length was just above 42,000 words, for a total of 25 million words; no single author wrote more than six of the 246 texts.
[Ed. note— My summary of the number of documents chosen is staggeringly wrong, as anyone who paused and took up a calculator could easily see. Please open the comments thread for further discussion by those more numerate than myself. The theory that follows, then, does not obtain as a criticism of the assumptions underlying the algorithm, which nonetheless continues not to live up to projections. Ah, well.]
In other words, I don’t doubt the analysis Koppel and Argamon performed is an accurate enough description of 25 million words of British English as it was used in the 20th century—reflecting the broad usage patterns of male and female speakers and writers. —But you’d think maybe something a little less narrowly focussed might be studied before proclaiming it a universal prescriptor. Eh?
There’s also the fact that correlations seem to be ignored utterly. It’s gender that’s the determinant, not the intended audience, not the school of writing, not the function to which it will be put. As a for instance: presume that texts written in the fields of natural science, applied science and commerce all require a higher degree than average of specificity, indicativeness, informativity. (A safe enough presumption.) Further presume, as one notes that the texts are drawn from those written or spoken in British English in the 20th century, that the sometimes extreme gender prejudice of that benighted age has resulted in the majority of those more specific, indicative, informational texts having been written by men—because women were disproportionately denied opportunities to advance in the fields of natural science, applied science, or commerce; their informativity isn’t represented in the sample not because they were women, but because they were Shakespeare’s sisters. —It’s far from settled, but that no attempt is made to correct for this sort of bias makes the prescriptive power of the algorithm and its underlying assumptions highly suspect. When coupled with the relatively tiny, focussed sample, it’s pretty much useless.
After all, my pieces on webcomics are about groups and relationships and schools of cartoonists, and so, involved; the bit on college is a memoir, and so personal, and so vague and unspecific and relational; political rants need to be specific and, one would hope, full of informativity (unless, it seems, they’re about Ann Coulter); and my fiction—at least, the two pieces cited, which, though one is first person and one is third person, both try for a specific, declarative, one doesn’t want to say clear or lucid or limpid or muscular (gack) style, but—well. Fiction is fiction.
Or is what’s between our legs more important to the shapes our words might take than the purposes to which we intend to put them?
(Overall, the Gender Genie’s running 60/40 in favor of Bzzt! I’m sorry. Try again—though I hasten to point out it’s an unscientific, self-reporting survey. Additional data points: the Spouse writes like a girl—even when she’s writing about strippers. Hmm.)
Democracy in action.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four
In that light, then, marvel at the audacious beauty, the effrontery, the sheer, clueless chutzpah of the Quick Vote poll question on display as of 20.55 Pacific time, 19 August 2003, at The Official Re-election Site for President George W. Bush:
How many working families are benefiting from President Bush’s Jobs and Growth Act?
- 12 million
- 23 million
- 34 million
- 18 million
But! Take heart!
That’s why they can never hope to win. Chaos sneaks in every time. They can cover the world with cameras, but they can’t stop the guys in the monitor rooms from jerking off or playing the fifteenth sequel to Doom for the hundredth time. Total bloody chaos. Christ.
—Grant Morrison, The Invisibles
Because, at 20.56 Pacific Time, 19 August 2003, when you tried to vote (for 12 million) just to see what would happen, this is what you got.
(Holy crap! They’ve got W Stuff! And a GeorgeWBushStore.com! With Interstate W’04 stuff! All put together by The Spalding Group! Which is part of English Emprise! Who’ve been at this for a while! Who also supported our troops, all grass-roots like! Only I guess they don’t support him so much anymore! Chaos!)
Plus c’est la meme chose.
Gail Armstrong is seeking some little comfort. And so I went looking for that marginal note Ada makes to Van: “If we all remembered the same way, we would not be different people,” I think it goes, but I can’t find it, not tonight; it’s a terribly frustrating book, after all—appalling, heartbreaking, beautiful, vicious. This is what it offered up, tonight, instead:
An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless, simply “things” which formed the routine stuff of life; and “ghost things,” also called “fogs,” such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a “tower,” or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a “bridge.” “Real towers” and “real bridges” were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral “thing” might look or even actually become “real” or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid “fog.” When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with “ruined towers” and “broken bridges.”
See? Tedious. Pedantic. Ferocious. Utterly necessary. But ultimately useless. Damn!
So instead I pick up one of my recent obsessions, Diane di Prima’s Memoirs of a Beatnik, picked up at Powell’s for a song, and I flip to the passage that first caught my eye:
We lived through the horror of the 1956 election as we had lived through the horror of the Rosenberg executions and the Hungarian revolution: paranoid, glued to the radio, and talking endlessly of where we could possibly go into exile. Every inch of walls and floor in the apartment was covered with murals and wise sayings: “The unicorns shall inherit the earth.” “Sacrifice everything to the clean line.” “Think no twisty thoughts.” Etc., etc. Wilhelm Reich was in federal prison.
The first fallout terror had finally struck, and a group of people were buying land in Montana to construct a city under a lead dome. In New York, the beginnings of neo-fascist city planning were stirring, and the entire area north of our pad was slated for destruction, to make way for what was to become Lincoln Center. The house next door to us, which had been empty for twenty-eight years, and had functioned as our own private garbage dump for as long as we had lived there, was suddenly torn down, leaving a number of bums homeless and scattering thousands of rats—most of them into our walls.
Most of the more outrageous gay bars had been closed, and people cruised Central Park West more cautiously: there were many plainclothes busts. There were more and more drugs available: cocaine and opium, as well as the ubiquitous heroin, but the hallucinogens hadn’t hit the scene yet. The affluent post-Korean–war society was settling down to a grimmer, more long-term ugliness. At that moment, there really seemed to be no way out.
And it’s not that the disaffected we will always have with us, and it’s not that these grim ugly battles have always been fought and look! We’ve largely come out okay. Those are crap lessons, New Age pablum, mealy morals for people who don’t want to listen to older, colder fairy tales. —No, it’s the sharp shock of deja vu: I know this place, though I have never been here before. It’s a backstage pass; a Golden Ticket. It isn’t History, it’s a story you feel in your bones. The world sits up and opens its dead eyes and tells you something three times, and the hairs on your chin stand up. Diane di Prima’s glued to the radio, paranoid, listening as Eisenhower kicks Stevenson’s ass, and I’m on a futon in a second-floor bedroom of a ratty unheated house in Boston watching the bombs fall on Iraq for the first time, and maybe this doesn’t ring true for you at all, but that’s okay, because if we all remembered it the same way, we wouldn’t be different people. Would we?
Comfort. —We all need comfort, but suddenly I’m thinking of Ann, so very tired, who lay down in the Martian snow to die, and then Simon came up out of nowhere and kicked her helmet and turned her suit’s heater back on, dragging her back to the world as it was, as it is, and she kept asking him why, why he wouldn’t just leave her alone and all he could say was because, because, because. It’s not that sort of comfort, where you’re so tired of fighting you just lie down and wait till you stop shivering. (Though they do say freezing to death is a comfortable way to go. —They also say that about drowning.)
Where do we turn for comfort, then? Sometimes I turn to David Chess:
Last year I told y’all about how in my vanished youth I used to go square dancing every few weeks with a certain bunch of people, to a certain caller, and how that caller had had this great handsome house big enough for three or four squares, and I wondered if he still had it? Well over the weekend we went across the river and square danced with roughly those same people, to exactly that caller, in that same house.
A house where some of my fondest childhood memories were formed, and a house I hadn’t seen in thirty years. It was just the same, and completely different. Same woods, same rooms, same chairs and benches, same stairs down to the bedrooms downstairs, same livingroom big enough for two squares, and a posible third over in the alcove. But not as enormous as when I was little, not as mysterious, not as filled with that amazing unconscious kid-sense of being cupped in the warm palm of the universe, with everything being taken care of for you by other people, and nothing to do but dance and sing and run around shouting.
It was great fun, and (but) I was all melancholy all night after we got home.
What a world.
Because the trick of it, of course, is that you can’t just order up one of these moments, these bridges and towers, whenever you suddenly need one. You have to have built them out of the stuff you’ve got lying around, or picked up from what somebody else made once, or found, and told you about in a book or a conversation or a song, and so you tucked it away in your pocket and forgot about it until, and you have to have left them just scattered haphazardly across the floor of your memory, and you can’t ever stop; you never reach a moment when there’s finally enough. You have to keep building them and scattering them like bread crumbs, these booby traps benign and otherwise you stumble over when you least expect them but most need them, and suddenly oh, I see. Oh, I get it.
What a world.
How I got to be where I am at the moment.
¡Journalista! is a daily must-read during the week. Dirk Deppey regularly pulls together an entertaingly varied assortment of comics-industry and comics-related news items, with occasional flights into spot-on if cantankerous analysis; just the thing for someone too terribly lazy to keep himself on top of The Comics Journal boards and Comicon.com’s boards and the Pulse and Talkaboutcomics.com and Comixpedia and Sequential Tart and all the other sites I’m leaving out, God knows. (To say nothing of the ever-burgeoning comics blogosphere.) This morning, in addition to a great John Barber rant I’d missed the first time out, Dirk pointed out an article from my own backyard: the Portland Tribune profiled Craig Thompson, whose Blankets is not to be missed. In the profile, Thompson mentions in an off-hand fashion the three books his father has read: “a book by Jerry Falwell about the economy in the apocalypse; Rush Limbaugh’s autobiography, the first one; and the Promise Keepers manual.” Those last two didn’t really engage me—I mean, Rush, you know? And if you’ve seen one stadium full of men in Tommy Hellfighter T-shirts, you’ve seen them all. But the first: Jerry Falwell on economics during the Tribulation? Damn.That’s one of those must-haves for the library, you know?
Unfortunately, some desultory coffee-break Googling (and Amazoning, Powellsing, and aLibrising) failed to turn up a likely candidate. However: I did turn up this interesting-looking essay on the politics of Christian domination—to be dug into later; it seems to speak nicely to this post over at Body and Soul—and Frontline’s site for its show on apocalyptic belief in the Western world, which includes a page on Hal Lindsey and his coattail riders (among which is numbered, of course, good ol’ Jack Van Impe), as well as some much-need historical perspective: Cliff’s Notes backgrounders on the Millerites, the Great Disappointment, and John Darby’s dispensationalism—which features a scrummy-looking chart by Charles Larkin that bounced me through Making Light to the Planet Kolob, from which hasty retreat was beaten back to the Museum of Jurassic Technology—and would you look at the time? So I rounded it off with a dose of Apocamon, Patrick Farley’s manga-bright retelling of the Revelation of St. John the Devine. (Coming soon—Part 3: Attack of the Locusts.) Gotta get ’em all!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m feeling a little dizzy.
PROM-1 (AP bounding fragmentation mine, steel casing, former Yugoslavia).
GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE MINE
The PROM-1 is a circular AP bounding fragmentation mine with a body made of forged steel. There is a threaded fuze well in the centre on the top of the mine, in which the UPROM-1 external fuze is screwed into. The base of the mine is secured to the bottom of the mine body with five screws. The mine body is pre-fragmented inside. The main explosive charge is made of cast Trotil in earlier models and Hexolite in later models. The propelling charge is made of 3 g. of black powder and is filled into a metal tube located through the centre of the main charge. An internal fuze is located offset inside the mine body. It is initiated by a wire which is attached to the lower side of the fuze and secured to the base of the mine. The fuze is built into the mine at the factory and is not to be removed. The external UPROM-1 fuze is similar to the UPMR-3. The difference is that the UPMR-3 doesn’t have a built in initiation capsule while the UPROM-1 has. The PROM-1 is delivered with two rolls of trip wire, which are 16 m long and covered with polyvinyl-chloride plastic. A hook is fastened in each end of the trip wires for attachment to the fuze and anchor. Although the PROM-1 only comes with two trip wires, it can be set up with up to six trip wires. On the upper side of the UPROM-1 is a carrier on which the pressure star is located. On the top of the carrier is a split ring for connection to trip wires. Under the pressure star is a fuze carrier on which the safety clip is attached by means of a puller. When the puller is down the safety clip is locked and cannot be removed. When the puller is in the horizontal position the safety clip is free to be pulled out. The pressure star carrier is shaped like a rod and has a hole through the end to attach the trip wire split ring. The pressure star has four arms which are directed upwards. In the middle is a hole to insert the pressure star carrier. The mine is normally buried with only the pressure star and the star carrier exposed above the ground.
METHOD OF OPERATION
Required pull of the trip or pressure on the pressure star, pushes an internal cylinder in the fuze down until the retaining balls fall out, releasing the spring loaded striker which strikes the ignition capsule which in turn fires the propelling charge. This creates a pressure between the base and the mine body. The screws on the bottom of the mine breaks and the mine body is thrown upwards until it reaches the end of the anchor wire. The length of the anchor wire is 0,7-0,8 m on older versions and 0,2-0,3 m on newer versions. When the anchor wire becomes tight the spring loaded striker is released and fires the detonator which in turn fires the booster and the main charge.
NEUTRALISING
Trace both ends of the trip wire. Remove the trip wire clip from the mine or cut the wire. Insert safety clip with the puller in the horizontal position into the bed of the fuze. Lock it by lowing the puller down. If a safety clip is not available, a 2 mm wire or nail can be inserted into the hole of the safety clip carrier.
DISARMING
Neutralise the mine. Remove fuze from the mine body.
REMARKS
Lethal radius is 40 m and hazardous radius is 50 m.
Just in case, you know, you ever came across a dark steel cylinder 26 cm tall with some sharp spines on one end, attached to a couple of trip wires, and you were wondering how to keep it from killing you. You’re most likely to run into one in Angola (“the greatest concentration of landmines in the world,” says the BBC, citing some 15 million mines; other sources say anywhere from 6 million to 20 million; 145 of them went off last year, down from 339 in 2001. “Previous attempts at peace did not last, and crime is still widespread,” warns Lonely Planet Angola. “Kidnapping, car-jacking and robbery continue to put foreign travelers at risk. The UK, US and Australian governments are still warning against travel to this hopeful but volatile nation. Stay tuned”)—but the PROM-1’s a popular little number: they’re also found in Mozambique, Iraq, and of course throughout the former Yugoslavia, their country of origin. —The Landmines Database was found via Futurismic, whose permalinks aren’t working for the day in question; “If not for the subject matter, you’d think they were assembly instructions for a Target bookshelf,” says poster Jeremy Lyon. And what blog post on landmines from a Yank still peaceably sipping his morning coffee would be complete without the requisite list of our compatriots and fellow travellers?
