Russell Whitaker (Survival Arts) reports:
Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ pioneering flight. On the same day that a hobb[yi]st at Kill Devil Hills was trying unsuccessfully to replicate that flight, the real news of the day went mostly unnoticed:
Today, a significant milestone was achieved by Scaled Composites: The first manned supersonic flight by an aircraft developed by a small company’s private, non-government effort.
“He was left-handed, but the gun was found in his right hand. This is no suicide!”
I turned to my One True Ex and said, “If I ever decide to kill myself and frame someone for it—”
“I’ll remind you to use your other hand.”
Spent an hour browsing at Grey Wolf Books in San Leandro, a great barn of a place. Bought a small heap of sf/fantasy paperbacks, concentrating on the top shelf that only we freaks can reach unassisted.
I also found a copy of Thomas’s Calculus and Analytic Geometry at a price low enough that I need no longer refer to my old purple one. (My sister had used it after me, returned it to me with the spine ruined, and got herself a fresh copy.) How many of you remember the purple book? How many still have it?
My most curious find was a dictionary of Latin medical terms – for Estonians. One has to wonder: do such things ever move, or did the shop’s buyer take a wild gamble? If the latter, at how much of a discount?
Riverbend posted in August on the Iraqi populace’s response to chaos:
For a while, the men in certain areas began arranging ‘lookouts’. They would gather, every 6 or 7 guys, in a street, armed with Klashnikovs, and watch out for the whole area. They would stop strange cars and ask them what family they were there to visit. Hundreds of looters were caught that way- we actually felt safe for a brief period. Then the American armored cars started patrolling the safer residential areas, ordering the men off the streets- telling them that if they were seen carrying a weapon, they would be treated as criminals.
Leonard Dickins (Unruled) comments:
This quote is almost too good to be true for an anarchist. Anarchy [initially] releases criminal elements (the unorganized political means). This is opposed by the armed people, which works: “we actually felt safe”. But the state interposes; it will not permit any challenge to its monopoly, regardless of the price that the peons pay.
Leonard Dickenson (Unruled) on Lockean claims in cleared parking spaces. Cited by Will Wilkinson (The Fly Bottle).
I don’t happen to agree that tTT (even extended) is the best movie ever, but wholeheartedly endorse the remainder of John Holbo’s remarks:
The extra two discs with the behind-the-scenes stuff are fantastic as well. All these geeks. They had the best. jobs. ever.
I was particularly struck by something that didn’t strike me. In Jurassic Park I was awestruck to see a stampede of struthiosaurs, but I didn’t even think to notice anything special about the Warg attack. The passing of nine years has raised our standards, obviously, but was I also distracted by the more dramatic context?
I was amused at how often I heard “this model was never meant to be seen in close-up” or “that sound-effect was never meant to go into the final.”
And where are those hundreds of swords now?
The only thing missing is disc five, containing nothing but two hours of Jackie Chan-style physical comedy outtakes. Uruks running into elves and falling down laughing. Elves knocking elves off the parapet. Aragorn poking Legolas in the eye. Saruman slipping and doing a face-plant in his palantir. Eowyn and Wormtongue flubbing their lines and doing a can-can. That stuff. As Sam would say, the ones you remember. The ones that meant something. You know they’ve got hours of the stuff. Why not show it?
This evening in Mill Valley, my way was briefly blocked by four deer. I don’t know when I’ve seen so many so close together. They very kindly jumped out of the street to let me pass.