...more recent posts
Not so unusual I guess, but I've been having bad dreams for the last several nights. Last night the government was doing a test explosion of a nuclear bomb in Manhattan. I guess so we could see what it would be like and be ready. Sounds dangerous (I thought so in the dream) but we were carefully covering all our windows with aluminum foil, and this was going to somehow keep us safe. Strange. The night before it was a slow motion mid air collision between two riding lawn mowers equipped with giant fans (like those hover boats in the Everglades.) Two fat white suburban type guys were driving these craft over the city at something like one half a mile an hour. One was bearing down on the other, bumped it from behind, causing it to suddenly fall very quickly to the ground. Everybody was running around in the street shouting "Call 911! Call 911!" And the night before that there was a helicopter hovering over the city, slowly lowering itself to the ground. It was pitched radically forward, so the front window was facing the ground (but still somehow hovering) and when it got very close to the ground someone reached up and handed the pilot a sandwhich. Then the helicopter began to ascend, and a little way off the ground the whole thing exploded in a massive fire ball.
One other thing about the flying lawn mower dream is that once again I realized I was dreaming. I had a 5 dollar bill in my hand at one point, but then the next time I looked it was a 1 dollar bill, and then I looked again and it was a 10. I thought "Hey, that's like what happens in a dream!" And then I thought "Oh, I'm dreaming right now." I guess I'm primed for that right now, because all week, while awake, I've been wondering if maybe I'm not. I keep thinking I'm going to wake up and look out the window and the towers will be right there where I expect them. Many times I've had to seriously ask myself "am I dreaming right now?"
We walked down south of Canal Street for the first time yesterday. This turned out, in my opinion, to be not such a good thing to do. They are busy down there, and while we weren't exactly in the way, we also weren't really helping the situation. A friend got us through the Canal Street check point, but the security is not really very tight. Once below Canal we made it all the way down to Chruch and Chambers, and then walked west to the river. If you don't know Manhattan, this is very close. Here's "the pile" (which is what all the workers call it) from a few blocks north. We ate dinner at a friends restaurant, and on the way back we walked past this truck loaded with an enormous steel beam. The beam itself had the smell. The officer pictured said he thought it would take a year to finish the clean up. I think they'll start going faster once they decide nobody could still be alive, but in any case, the amount of wreckage is incredible. Much more shocking than I guessed it would be.
[Original pictures of post impact WTC are here.]
Bizzare article in the Village Voice about Laili Helms, niece by marriage of former CIA director Richard Helms, and suburban Mom living in New Jersey, who is the unofficial Taliban representative in the U.S. (via scripting news)
Microsoft worms are running rampant on the web today. I've been experiencing mail problems on one of my servers. Anyone else seeing this? These sorts of things happen rather frequently, but now it just seems more ominous. In any case, DO NOT open attachments.
I don't know if he wants me throwing his theories around the internet, so I'll just say that my friend B., who seems to understand more about this stuff than anyone else I know, was scaring me again last night with his near future mid-east scenarios. He thinks Bin Laden is probably already hiding in Pakistan under very tight security, and that his big play will be to show up in Mecca where he will start preaching against the infidel. We cannot bomb Mecca. It will be exceedingly difficult to go in there and get him. And of course, the infidel is not just the west, and not just the jews. It will also be the moderate Islamic leaders. And what might his rallying cry be? How about: seize the oil fields.
Probably he would need us to strike the holy land a few times first to get people really upset or else the Saudi royal familly will be able to stop him themselves. This rubs up against the well circulated ideas of Mir Tamim Ansary
who thinks the U.S. is being led into a trap. And I think Bush's use of words like 'crusade' show that he is taking the bait.
(Here's a map of Saudi Arabia showing Mecca on the west coast by the Red Sea.)
Here's a directory of central Asian news sources.
I guess Steve and I weren't the only ones to think about dropping food and medicine on Afghanistan instead of bombs. Still, I know it won't happen. Plus, it wouldn't necessarily work. Still, if we are in a struggle with a trickster like enemy it seems very foolish to react the way we are expected to react. Or maybe people don't know much about trickster spirits.
David McCusker speculates they might shut down the internet.
I swear we heard Andrea Mitchel (sp?) start to break a story last night about an investigation into someone with a massive position shorting reinsurers (is that how you would say it?) One sentence into it (on MSNBC I believe) she was cut off without a word of explanation and they just went to some other story. I can't find anything about this on the web. Very strange. I guess it would be too scary for us to know if they are that sophisticated. (Selling short is basically making a bet that a stock will go down. It involves agreeing to deliver stock that you don't yet own at some point in the future at today's prices. If the price falls between the sale and delivery dates then you buy the stock at the new lower price and deliver it at the previous agreed upon higher price. Reinsurers are the companies that insure insurance companies and are sure to be hit by a massive disaster like this. At least I think I have this right.)
The Fray has a section for first hand stories from NYC and Washington D.C. In usual Fray style, you can add your own.