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This is not the Onion, this is from CNN:
Air Force chief: Test weapons on testy U.S. mobs"Testy US mobs?" Protesting, say, the Iraq war? Bad immigration bills? An Air Force that wants to cook US citizens for "good public relations"? Michael Wynne would be a great test subject. We could all laugh when he staggers to the ground, incapacitated by painful invisible rays.
POSTED: 7:56 p.m. EDT, September 12, 2006
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before being used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.
The object is basically public relations. Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions from others about possible safety considerations, said Secretary Michael Wynne.
"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," said Wynne. "(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."
The Air Force has paid for research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service is unlikely to spend more money on development until injury problems are reviewed by medical experts and resolved.
Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people if they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices.
Public sculpture that's actually good: Matthew Geller's Awash, which opened tonight in Collect Pond Park in Lower Manhattan, and will be installed through November 25. It's a "portable fountain" made of sidewalk scaffolding, Plexigas, and PVC pipe. As you sit in the swings, water flows over your head like rain sliding down a loft skylight, and is then recycled through the PVC ductwork and back up through a pump in the water tank. It's romantic, carefree, and absurd at the same time, and the materials are completely unassuming. Last year, Geller's piece Foggy Day--notable for its artificial fog bank in Chinatown's Cortlandt Alley--was criticized by no less than the New York Sun and Fox News as socially dubious "fog art." The site for this new, budgetarily conscious urban earthwork is Collect Pond Park, a bland but historically charged spot across from the Tombs (bounded by Franklin, Leonard, Centre and Lafayette). In Manhattan's early history this was once a beautiful lake called the Collect, which became putrescent with urbanization, was drained, and served as the boggy foundations for the Five Points slum, made famous in The Gangs of New York. Now the land's surrounded by courthouses and other government buildings, and is in bad need of being rescued by something as funky as this. (One thinks also of the World Trade Center kiddie pool memorial--but that wasn't supposed to be funky.)
Re: the twilight photo
Update: photo lightened and color-corrected from the original crepuscular blue; another photo moved to the comments that is still blue but shows the flowing water more clearly. Yes, I fell down in my role of NY art documentarian. I got lost in the Five Points government building maze and the hour was getting later and later...
Update: Here are some better pictures from the LMCC blog:
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Chris Ashley, Untitled, 20060906, HTML, 250 x 200 pixels
After a run of "auto-pixelated" media imagery combined with abstraction that I wasn't too wild about, Ashley is making pixel art-sized abstractions that are rather tasty. This is one. Minimalism is not dead, it just got smaller. You should peep the code on this one if you can, it goes on forever.Heh, on the Bloglines RSS reader, which consistently makes hash of this page, Ashley's piece reads as...invisible. The caption reads "Very Small Abstractions." Not that small. Bloglines, kindly eat me.
People magazine weighs in on stingrays, post-Irwin.