drove my chevy to the levee

Our condolences and sympathies go out to the people of Poland.  It just takes one's breath away and it is impossible to really grasp the political and cultural magnitude of the loss they have sustained from the weekend.  Historically, Poland seems unduly beaten up as it is what with always being the first country invaded because of its lack of natural borders, stereotypes for the diaspora, and the fact that the regimental entourage were on the way to commemorate the anniversary of the Katyn Forest Massacre of Polish officers and academics by the Soviet Stalinist regime. 

I think that the intelligence agents of the world could benefit from a random conspiracy generator--just to pare down on a lot the immediate nonsense.  Like Buddy Holly's and Bea Arthur's Tsunami Factory, PLC, or Jimmi Hendrix' mail-order avian influenza and magic bullet emporium, or the banking consortium of Ponzi-Prime's collapsable building franchise opportunity.  Arthur Allen. Weather-control.  Celebrity baby photos.  Now is no time to play the pyramid.  I immediately repaired to speculation too--conspiracies are a way of retrieving some meaning from accidents and incomprehensible tragedies.  I thought a long the usual lines of the plot devices for conspiracies: Lech Kaczynski had an identical twin brother; his government had conceded to Bush's missile defense shield being based in Poland; the plan to link Germany to Russia via gas pipelines through Poland; possible relation to the Uni-Bomber; stance against corruption or gay-rights; EU accession; the fact that the entire envoy was loaded on one twenty-year-old Russian Tupolev as the Polish Air Force One and Kaczynski had a reputation of bullying his official pilots into sticking with his itinerary; Vladimir Putin's hasty charge to personally lead the accident investigation.  It is very sad and all too fresh or the leadership's line of succession.  I do not want to slander their memories and accomplishments, nor there to be a pall cast on Poland's continuance and future.

strangelove or loose nukes tour

Yesterday, Barack Hussein Obama III and Dmitry Anatolyevich Medvedev had a summit in Prague to renew their joint pledges for nuclear disarmament and to promote an environment free of household atomics.  Next, Obama turned his attention toward immergent but no longer classed rogue states on the cusps of going nuclear, significantly increasing the stakes with rhetoric of sanctions against Iran and Syria.  Though the physics and technological threshhold underpinning a nuclear reation is accessible to all-comers and no secret, esoteric knowledge or even priracy of anything proprietary, I believe the so-called nuclear club is a good measure of kiss-and-tell talk.

It turned out that Iraqi claims of menacing arsenals of weapons of mass destruction were just that.  Naturally the old guard of that country would want to appear as strong as possible to its aggressors who were escalating the matter in the first place by dictating that membership in the club was exclusive and had a grandfather-clause.  Baghdad's posteuring was a necessary deterant and probably a policy to match the Soviet's and the US' mutually assured destruction, had the US invasion and occupation not forced Iraq to show its hand.  Maybe Iran, Syria and all the rest are exaggerating their endowments too.

unikat

Friday afternoons are usually conducive to a bit of aimless browsing about.  Sometimes it seems that it takes people the whole work week to puzzle out a disaster of significant immediacy to spring from the end of the day on Friday.  Other times, especially during fairer weather, it seems those same dilemma-rousers can't be bothered for their keen sense of time.  While checking what was out-and-about for the weekend, I stumbled across this wonderful gallery of fashion, taken ad hoc on streets in Köln by a photographer very adept at capturing portraits of individual senses of style.  Yesterday, a coworker's husband, at a ceremony at the culmination of a big project, said that perhaps now with this over, we could enjoy a quiet and relaxed Friday.  I replied that we probably wouldn't recognize it if it came along.  Though it is a shame that one needs reminding--others seem to never forget--there is virtue in sometimes slacking off, confident that at least the immediate has been addressed and bedded.  It is a little like these expressive faces and unique costumes that don't seem so remarkable and photo-worthy in one's own eyes but brilliant through the eyes of another.  Sometimes, on a quiet afternoon, with the weather holding up, we are only tethered to our desks, passively on strike, to notice and celebrate such things.

billions and billions

While I am sure that some one could counter this with a statistical anomaly to explain this spate of occurences, it does seem that there have been quite a few earthquakes lately--or at least what's been deemed worthy for copy-cat reporting: Haiti, Chile, Turkey, Mexico and Indonesia.  I wonder if this uptick has any thing to do, as some would repute, with the CERN LHC coming back on-line and evaporating microscopic black holes destabilizing the earth's crust and mantle and magma being coaxed closer to the surface and causing seismic activity.

Carl Sagan, years ago, speculated that perhaps what accounts for the dearth of intelligent alien life, lack of encounters, is due to advancement to one critical point in technological progress, wherein the species either figures out how to safely harness the new power or ends up destroying itself with it.  Sagan thought that nuclear weapons were the dark test, but maybe it's in cellular phones and electro-smog or in courting the Higgs-Boson particle.

and tang was a spinoff from the space race

Egyptologists at universities in Switzerland and Germany (including my former home at the foot of the campus in the fair city of Würzburg) are finding a novel use for the latest reactionary technology meant to keep us safe: the full body scanner, surplus I suppose that officials are loath to install at European airport, are very adept at penetrating mummy wrappings.

The scanners can take good photographs of the mummified innards without being terribly invasive--at least the ancient Egyptians do not feel their privacy violated when they are being screened for contraband and fairy dust.

free-range or event-horizon

Enforcement of a recent decision to liberate the hens, banning the keeping of battery fowl, has meant that German is experiencing an Easter egg shortage that has caused the Easter Bunny and his accomplices to bring in imports.   The surplus eggs, I'm sure, are being supplied by strike-breakers still confined to cages, though.  The chickens should have unionized a long time ago.  The shortage did not stop H, however, from masterfully decorating the place for Easter.

In other developments, CERN's Large Hadron Collider (the German term for particle accelerator is Teilchen Abschleuniger, which is hard to puzzle out) is back on line and has crossed a new energetic record.  Power unleashed by the collisions approach conditions experienced during the Big Bang, and interestingly, the facility is also the coldest place in the universe: the magnetic coils are kept within a fraction of absolute zero in order to run effectively.  Researchers are underway to new discoveries about the cause of universal gravitation and supersymmetries.  Though the majority of the scientific community downplay or dismiss fears as unfounded, a vocal minority warns that these experiments could destroy the earth by creating mini-blackholes or anti-matter.  Angela Merkel, the Kanzlerin, has an advanced degree in Physics from the University of Leipzig, and I am sure would voice her warnings if she thought otherwise.  If she and others underestimated the consequences, I doubt an official apology would suffice.