• Category Archives News of the Strange

  • Holy, Water. Bathman

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Winter                                              Waxing Cold Moon

    Namaste.  The restaurant.  Where we ate lunch and discussed Stealing the Mona Lisa, an impenetrable book most thought, a romp in psychoanalytical language cursed with the stodgy background of Freud rather than an expansive peyote fueled Jungian.  We entertained ourselves with a good two-hours of conversation on the nature of art, whether art exists when we don’t see it, whether any of us made art and bollocks.

    It’s always a good experience to be with these folks, some idea gets knocked loose and rattles around, sometimes settling down as a learning.  Next month the Walker.

    We’ve had snow, more of the nuisance variety than a real street and artery clogging invasion.  The temperature stays down though so we may continue to get snow for a while.  I hope so.

    Here’s a headline you don’t see every day.  In today’s Washington Post.

    117 Russians in hospital after

    drinking holy water


    Art and Culture Commentary on Religion News of the Strange Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • One-Hour Thanksgiving Meal

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    21  bar steady 30.04  0mph NNW  windchill 21  Samhain

    New Moon (Moon of the Long Nights)

    Kate produced a wonderful, one-hour Thanksgiving meal.  Cornbread stuffing, turkey breast with a chili-rub and an herbal seasoning under the skin, mashed potatoes, our own green beans (canned) and sweated mushroom gravy. She explained sweated, but it passed over my head.  I was already in to the green beans and the cornbread stuffing.

    Tomorrow she wants to watch the Macy’s Parade because of her home town of Nevada, Iowa will have a horse team in it, someone her sister, BJ, knows.  Pretty exciting.

    I’m going to try an earlier bedtime again.  Surely I can reset my body clock.

    Happy Thanksgiving to you all.


    Family Holidays News of the Strange Weather +Climate Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • Scientists closer to developing invisibility cloak

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    OK.  I gave you a link to the jetpack last week.  We have robots on Mars.  Voyageur is in the Oort cloud, beyond the solar system.  We get most of our communication via satellite links.  The best telescope in the world is not on the world, but above it. My destktop computer is more powerful than the big, room-sized computers of yesteryear.  Cameras no longer require film.  Movies and music come on frisbees.  People carry their telephone with them and have their own numbers.  There are many cars on the road that no longer run exclusively on internal combustion engines.

    Not to mention Booger and his mistress willing to ski down Everest nude with a carnation in her nose.

    We’re living in the future.

    WASHINGTON (AP) – Scientists say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people and objects invisible.

    Researchers have demonstrated for the first time they were able to cloak three-dimensional objects using artificially engineered materials that redirect light around the objects. Previously, they only have been able to cloak very thin two-dimensional objects.

    The findings, by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, led by Xiang Zhang, are to be released later this week in the journals Nature and Science.

    The new work moves scientists a step closer to hiding people and objects from visible light, which could have broad applications, including military ones.

    People can see objects because they scatter the light that strikes them, reflecting some of it back to the eye. Cloaking uses materials, known as metamaterials, to deflect radar, light or other waves around an object, like water flowing around a smooth rock in a stream.

    Metamaterials are mixtures of metal and circuit board materials such as ceramic, Teflon or fiber composite. They are designed to bend visible light in a way that ordinary materials don’t. Scientists are trying to use them to bend light around objects so they don’t create reflections or shadows.

    It differs from stealth technology, which does not make an aircraft invisible but reduces the cross-section available to radar, making it hard to track.


    GeekWorld News of the Strange 📎and tagged

  • Flames near Paradise, Calif.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

     Only in California  could Paradise go down in flames.

    AP “Thousands of people were ordered to get out of Paradise on Wednesday as an out-of-control wildfire threatened the Northern California city that also was devastated by flames just weeks ago.

    Authorities ordered residents of 3,200 Paradise homes to evacuate after the wind-stoked fire destroyed 40 homes and 10 structures Tuesday in the nearby rural community of Concow. Evacuation orders remained in effect for 1,000 residents of Concow and Yankee Hill, about 85 miles north of Sacramento.

    Officials said more than 3,800 homes were threatened by the flames Wednesday. Another wildfire destroyed 74 homes in Paradise last month.”


    News of the Strange

  • Hammer Head

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    70  bar falls 29.81 0mph ESE dew-point 52  Beltane, sunny and warm

                      First Quarter of the Flower Moon

    Check out the sophisticated medical  technology used in this strange story.

    “George Chandler said he feels fine, even though a nailgun fired a 2.5 inch nail into the top of his head on Friday. Chandler and a friend were doing a project in a backyard when the nailgun hose became tangled, causing the tool to fire one nail.

    Chandler said Monday he told his friend he didn’t know where the nail went, but he felt a sting on the top of his head.

    They discovered that the nail was driven deep into Chandler’s head, so they called an ambulance and he was rushed to a hospital.

    Chandler said a doctor used a common claw hammer to remove the nail.

    He said he feels “very lucky, very, very lucky” to have escaped serious injury.”


    News of the Strange

  • Exaflops, Zettaflops, Yottaflops and the Xeraflop

    Posted on by Charles 3 Comments

    72  bar steady 29.65 1mph SSW dew-point 53  Beltane, sunny and warm

                 First Quarter of the Flower Moon

    Sometimes the language surprises even those of who try to keep up with technological innovation.

    “An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

    The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States.

    “The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop…”


    GeekWorld News of the Strange 📎and tagged

  • Their Lawlessness Got out of Hand

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    57  bar steep fall 29.94  7mph  ENE dew-point 52  Beltane, cloudy and cool

                           Last Quarter of the Hare Moon

    Can this possibly mean what it says?  “While cities are hot spots for global warming, study finds people in them emit fewer gases.”  Washington Post, 5/29/2008   In this same vein I watched part of a National Geographic Program on an outlaw biker gang, the Mongols.  The narrator made this surprising statement, “Their lawlessness got out of hand.”  Hmmm.

    When I travel by car, I spend more time picking reading material, movies and audiobooks than I do clothing.  This will not surprise some of you who know my fashion sense, late sixties college student unregenerate, yet it always surprises me. 

    Each trip has a theme.  Don’t know when that started, but it helps me make decisions on the road and to deepen the experience.  This trip to Denver, in addition to the obvious theme of tribal initiation (the bris), nature writing and trees will occupy my time.  Not hard to figure out where this came from.

    My first nights stay is at the Arbor Day Foundation in Nebraska City, Nebraska.  I’m taking along a book I bought awhile back called Arboretum America.  It tells the story of trees in the history of the US.  Also a book of nature writing.


    News of the Strange 📎and tagged

  • The Things They Do

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    65  bar steady 29.95 0mph ESE dewpoint 30 Beltane, sunny

               Waxing Gibbous Hare Moon 

    “Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.” – E. B. White

    To underline the suspicion note in the EB White quote I gleaned articles from today’s news stories.  The ones who govern us on the basis of that 50% + 1 majority do some strange things.  And so do their spouses.

    “Cindy McCain, whose husband has been a critic of the violence in Sudan, sold off more than $2 million in mutual funds whose holdings include companies that do business in the African nation.

    The sale on Wednesday came after The Associated Press questioned the investments in light of calls by John McCain, the likely Republican presidential nominee, for international financial sanctions against the Sudanese leadership. ”

    “…woman accused of booking clients for a high-priced call girl ring pleaded guilty Wednesday to money laundering and promoting prostitution in the federal probe that brought down former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

    Temeka Rachelle Lewis, who worked as a booking agent for the Emperor’s Club VIP, is the first defendant to admit guilt in the case that led to Spitzer’s resignation.”

    “WASHINGTON (AP) – Hold on, NFL. Spygate isn’t over. Not if the “incensed” Pittsburgh Steelers fan in Congress has anything to do with it. Sen. Arlen Specter on Wednesday called for an independent investigation of the New England Patriots’ taping of opposing coaches’ signals, possibly similar to the high-profile Mitchell Report on performance enhancing drugs in baseball. “What is necessary is an objective investigation,” Specter said at a news conference in the Capitol. “And this one has not been objective.”

    The Pennsylvania Republican was unforgiving of his criticism of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, saying that Goodell has made “ridiculous” assertions that wouldn’t fly “in kindergarten.” The Senator said Goodell was caught in an “apparent conflict of interest” because the NFL doesn’t want the public to lose confidence in the league’s integrity.”

    “Can Bob Barr become the next Ron Paul?

    Mr. Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia who on Monday announced his candidacy for the Libertarian Party nomination, certainly hopes so. It is a prospect that could give Senator John McCain’s campaign fits, threatening to siphon critical Republican votes away from him in important battleground states.

    The situation is purely speculative. But Mr. Barr is keeping close to the script that has had Mr. Paul, a Texas congressman, drawing votes long after Mr. McCain became the presumed Republican presidential nominee.

    Mr. Barr is trying to tap into the fervent band of followers who were attracted to Mr. Paul online and donated generously to his campaign by hiring the same Internet firm that ran Mr. Paul’s Web site. And he is hoping to spread his message to those fans, by running online advertisements on their Web sites, proclaiming: “Advance liberty? Learn more about Bob Barr!””

    “The U.S. government has injected hundreds of foreigners it has deported with dangerous psychotropic drugs against their will to keep them sedated during the trip back to their home country, according to medical records, internal documents and interviews with people who have been drugged.

    The government’s forced use of antipsychotic drugs, in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of cases in which the “pre-flight cocktail,” as a document calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane.

    “Unsteady gait. Fell onto tarmac,” says a medical note on the deportation of a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee was “dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose,” according to an airline crew member’s written account. Repeatedly, documents describe immigration guards “taking down” a reluctant deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport.

    In a Chicago holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador, according to a nurse’s account in his deportation file. As they pinned him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted, “Nighty-night.”


    News of the Strange Politics 📎and tagged