October 2003 Archives

Welcome to the Second Annual Spherewide Short Story Symposium! I know, it hardly seems like it's been a year since the first (uhhh...), but it's that time again. I solicited scary stories, but of course every story submitted has been included -- I'll just stick the scary ones on top. You know the system: links go back to the authors' sites, and you can leave your comments there. Please leave any comments about the S4 itself down below.

Without further ado:

"The Hidden City", by Chris Noble -- and he's first to submit a story for the second time in a row.

"Yazidis Needed?", by Andrew Ian Dodge -- be sure to click on the continued link to read the whole thing.

"Boo", by that Stupid Evil Bastard, Les Jenkins.

"Midnight Snack", by Lee Zanello.

"Water's Edge", and "Monster House", by Michael Williams.

An as-yet untitled set of (fictional?) journal entries, by Christina Casillas.

"Mainstreaming", by the curmudgeonly Francis W. Porretto.

Randy Swanson offers up a large collection of fiction for your perusal.

Thanks everyone! These stories are really great, and I'm sure you'll all enjoy them... or else! Mwahahahahaha!

Ahem.

It was a warm, wet night, in a late Los Angeles October. The afternoons still felt like summer, but once the time changed back to its dreary winter slumber the nights felt long and dark. The sun set, the air cooled, and thick fog rose up from the ocean and crept ashore like clockwork; by midnight the atmosphere was dank, and reminded Wes of his imagined Sleepy Hollow. There was no clip-clop behind him of a pursuing Headless Horseman, but each time a car raced past above on Pacific Coast Highway he flinched, and pulled his burden closer around his shoulders for shelter.

Wes didn't need light to find his way across these familiar sands -- he'd been here many times before. The beach was smooth, the summer's footprints worn away by autumn's neglect, except for the trail he sought. There it is! Wes sighed, forlorn. Every year he came, and every year he hoped beyond hope that he wouldn't find them. The tiny footprints ran east, parallel to the lapping surf he couldn't see through the fog; in his mind it was a hot, clear afternoon. He wasn't alone; families lounged around him, children laughed and played in the waves, and his beloved Beatrice walked beside him.

"We'll bring our children here someday," she said, snuggling close and whispering in his ear. Wes squeezed her hand in reply. The water sparkled, the sky was bright, and everything was right in the world. Beatrice pulled away and smiled. "Want to go swimming?"

Wes shook his head silently, and almost stumbled before shifting the weight on his shoulders and continuing his trudge along the empty beach. Empty, except for the memory of Beatrice and the footprints she had worn into the sand, so many years ago. He followed them into the dark fog, and caught his breath when they suddenly turned seaward.

There, in the sand, where he knew they'd be, but hoped they wouldn't… a white sun dress and a straw hat. She threw them off at his feet and danced into the water. He dropped to his knees and pushed his burden into the sand. Tears welled up in his eyes as Wes reached down and clutched the thin fabric. He took it up gingerly, slowly, and buried his face in the folds of cloth that still smelt like woman, like vanilla, like summer, like love.

Once his tears slowed, he left the dress in the sand; he knew he couldn't take it with him, and he couldn't bear the thought of not finding it next year, still fresh. He took the straw hat and inspected it closely; it had caught a few strands of her hair, and Wes pulled them gently free and shoved them in his pocket.

Then he looked up. The footprints turned towards the sea, and he sighed again. This was always the hardest part. Wes shook his head – he didn't want to go swimming, but he grabbed hold of his offering by the arm and stood up, trembling.

Slowly, he dragged himself alongside Beatrice's trail. In her footprints he could see her dancing steps, her twirls and leaps and she plunged into the grasping ocean. The water surged as he approached, but only reluctantly revealed itself through the mist. Wes looked at the sand beneath his feet, willing himself to the water's edge, but no farther.

"Beatrice!" he yelled, hoarse, and again, "Beatrice, my love!"

The waves fell back, and revealed a girl lying on the wet sand. As always, he shuddered, but held himself back. She was pale, and cold, but when she turned her eyes up towards him there was still a certain fire that beckoned him into her embrace. How he longed to feel her arms around him once again! But no.

Beatrice pushed herself to her feet and approached. "My darling," she whispered. "How I miss you, I'm so lonely. My heart aches without you."

Wes shook his head and looked away. "No, dear Beatrice."

"Come with me," she sighed. "Come into the water." She stood now at the very boundary of the world, the thin line of damp sand that separated land and sea, life and eternity.

"No."

Her eyes darkened, even as her outstretched hand faltered. "Then why have you come, my love? Only to torment me?"

Wes shook his head, and pulled his burden forward. With a grunt he hefted the slumbering man into his arms and held him out. "For you."

Her eyes shifted again. "My dear Wesley, it's you I long for."

"I can't, Beatrice, I can't," Wes replied. "Take him, please."

The pale figure of a woman pursed her lips and held out her arms. "When will it be our time?" she asked, and she accepted the offering.

Wes jerked his hand back as he brushed against the cold, wet flesh of his beloved.

"Am I that hideous to you?" she asked quietly.

"No," he said, and stepped back from the edge. "I'll be back."

"I know you will," she whispered, turning towards the water, weighed down but gliding over the sand, leaving no trace of her passage other than the prints left long ago.

"I love you!" Wes cried out over the ocean, as fog fell into the void of Beatrice's wake; the only reply was a mighty, crashing wave that lunged up onto the sand as if to swallow him, but he quickly made his escape.

I know everyone is eager to see some pictures of the haunted house I've been working on, and I'm happy to oblige. Posting may be sparse tomorrow because I'll be busy doing last-minute decorations, but the S4 should keep you occupied.

Here are two shots from the front -- that's my friend Rob standing by the light pole, and his daughter Marley running in the background.

The main structure is built around three EZ-Up awnings, and the walls are made from black plastic tarp and PVC pipe. There's lots of staples, tape, rope, and pipe holding the contraption together. We've got the entire building wired for electricity for our lights, music, and fog machines. It may look like a bum's mansion in the daylight, but once all the effects are going it's really pretty awesome. While we were working on it yesterday, some teenagers walked past and I overheard them saying, "That's the scariest haunted house I've ever been in; I'm not going in this year, no way."

I love the special pictures Google puts up on the holidays. Here's their Halloween offering:

a while back I posted a link to an article in the NYT about Farm subsidies and their effect on the production of food in this country. The important points, for this post, are:

1) Before the mid-1930's, farm economics meant that, for farmers, if the price of corn went down, they would grow more instead of less in order to individually be able to make as much money as they would have at the original price/quantity. As this excess quantity was difficult to transport or sell in its normal form, it was converted to whiskey, and after a while we had, I would say, a serious alcohol problem here.

2) Between the mid-30's and 1972, farm production was kept at a lower level through a system of farm loans and a government operated "ever normal granary"

3) After 1972, due to food riots, the Nixon administration ended the ever normal granary, and instituted straight farm subsidies. Since then, food production has increased just as it did in the past, but now instead of whiskey it the excess is largely converted into things like high-fructose corn syrup. We produce 500 calories more per person per day, and we consume 300 of them ourselves.

I bring this up again because, if this is really the way farm economics is going to work for us, there is someplace else for this excess corn to go: ethanol. We're already growing too much, and farmers are just going to grow as much as they can at whatever price, unless it goes to 0. If what they're turning it into isn't helping (as I drink my third Vernors of the day), then maybe it can/will eventually be used for something arguably much more useful. Maybe this is old news, or uninteresting, but it would be interesting to me to see us go to a third age of corn, from liquor to sugar to fuel.

I posted a bunch of links to space elevator information many months ago, and I'm quite a fan of the idea. SDB tries to rain on my parade, but I've read some papers that address his main concern.

So you got your elevator crawling up the kevlar ribbon, and like the elevator in the building, it is not only forcing itself and its passengers "up", but also "sideways". To reach the classic geosynchronous orbital altitude, you not only have to pick up a lot of altitude, but also several kilometers per second of lateral velocity. ...

The lateral force on the lower end of the ribbon is a design problem for those who design the anchorage, but it's not really too bad. They can deal with it. The anchorage will be designed to transmit that force into the earth itself, where it can be ignored.

Unfortunately, the lateral force this applies to the counterweight is a pernicious problem which is not so easily solved. Remember our weight hanging from a string? Try pushing slightly on the string. The weight starts swinging, right? That's what's going to happen here.

Yes, but there are ways to deal with that problem. I'm not a rocket scientist, but I play one on TV, and my buddy Robert Cassanova (sounds like a soap opera name, doesn't it?) assures me that the physics is a-ok.

"Technically it's feasible," said Robert Cassanova, director of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. "There's nothing wrong with the physics."

In fact, the biggest problem is most peoples' minds isn't balancing the counter-weight, it's building the cable, as SDB mentions near the end of his post.

Which is all well and good, except that I've given it a lot of thought, and I can't see how you could even get one ribbon connected. I can't figure out any way you can actually build this system.

You can build an anchorage. You can put the counterweight into space. How do you connect the ribbon between them?

In the next article I'll explain why that's a tough problem.

I look forward to reading his analysis, but I've seen plans that sound plausible to me. He may shred these ideas tomorrow, but I may as well tell you what I've seen so far.

The cable won't be made from kevlar; the material-of-choice will be carbon-fiber nanotubes. The cable won't be strung (or hung?) all at once, but will be laid incrementally.

Getting the first space elevator off the ground, factually, would use two space shuttle flights. Twenty tons of cable and reel would be kicked up to geosynchronous altitude by an upper stage motor. The cable is then snaked to Earth and attached to an ocean-based anchor station, situated within the equatorial Pacific. That platform would be similar to the structure used for the Sea Launch expendable rocket program.

Once secure, a platform-based free-electron laser system is used to beam energy to photocell-laden "climbers". These are automated devices that ride the initial ribbon skyward. Each climber adds more and more ribbon to the first, thereby increasing the cable's overall strength. Some two-and-a-half years later, and using nearly 300 climbers, a first space elevator capable of supporting over 20-tons (20,000-kilograms) is ready for service.

"If budget estimates are correct, we could do it for under $10 billion. The first cable could launch multi-ton payloads every 3 days. Cargo hoisted by laser-powered climbers, be it fragile payloads such as radio dishes, complex planetary probes, solar power satellites, or human-carrying modules could be dropped off in geosynchronous orbit in a week's travel time," Edwards said.

Using a laser beam to boost the climbers into space is doable, said Harold Bennett, president of Bennett Optical Research, Inc. of Ridgecrest, California. "If you do it right, you can take out 96 percent of the effect of the atmosphere on the laser beam through adaptive optics," he said. The strength of the pulsed laser beam is less than the intensity of the Sun, so birds, airplanes, or human eyes wouldn't be affected, he said.

A lot of great (kooky?) minds have worked on this concept, and so I'm hopeful that SDB's skepticism is misplaced. Wikipedia has more.

Bill Hobbs has a good summation of the current spurt of economic growth that'll leave the lefties singing "Springtime for George Bush, and America!" The GDP grew at an astounding 7.2% annual rate in the 3rd quarter of 2003, the strongest showing in a doublepluslong time.

Want to know what's going to be in the LA Times on Wednesday? Just listen to talk radio on Tuesday morning. Apparently, the reports that Davis turned away federal help while peoples' homes burned is true.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine), whose home was destroyed by fire Monday, said federal legislation that would smooth the way for the military to use its helicopters to fight fire on public and private land is being stymied by private companies that lease firefighting planes to state governments.

Throughout San Diego County, in the early phase of the most destructive fire in its history, homeowners had looked skyward for tankers and helicopters but didn't see any.

"The only chance to stop the fire was aerial tankers early on Sunday morning, backed by bulldozers, and that's what didn't happen," said Richard Carson, an economics professor at UC San Diego and an expert on public policies involving disaster response, including large-scale brush fires. ...

San Diego-based Navy helicopters, routinely used to fight fires on military property, were prepared to battle the Cedar fire on Sunday but remained grounded because state officials said the Navy pilots did not have appropriate training. The helicopters were flown to the Ramona airport, but pilots were denied permission to drop water as the fire began its march south and west.

The firefighters insist that Davis didn't cause any delays, but their union was one of Davis' most fervent supporters in the recent recall election.

"It's one thing to get the plane," she said. "It's another thing to get them ready to fly in California airspace…. As we develop the specific chronology, we will be able to show that there was no delay in the process. We think the facts will support that all efforts were taken."

I'm no firefighting-pilot, but I play one on TV; everyone wants the pilots to be safe, but is it really such a challenge to get into the planes/helicopters, fly over the fires, and drop water? Apparently, these military assets are used to fight fires on federal land (in California!), so why aren't they qualified to fight fires on adjacent state land? We all want our firefighters to be safe, but when there's a huge emergency sometimes greater risks need to be taken.

But Hunter said the "firefighting bureaucracy" tends to be slow to act and that officials are reluctant to criticize other fire officials.

Hunter said other members of Congress from Western states have been frustrated when asking state officials to request aerial tankers and helicopters from the U.S. military.

"There's a reluctance among the firefighting bureaucracy at the state and federal levels to use military assets until they exhaust the last of private companies," Hunter said.

He said he has teamed with a congressman from Colorado to seek a change in federal law that would speed the process of getting military craft to fight fires. The private companies that lease and operate aerial tankers are opposed to such a move, Hunter said.

Oh, maybe that's the problem -- Davis owes some buddies some favors. He wants to land a cushy consulting job once he's ousted from government, and he can't (ahem) burn all his bridges just because he's on his way out. It's a pity about the thousands of homes and dozens of lives, but c'mon people, get some perspective!

Overheard in the halls:

"I wish they'd put out those fires. I'm kinda losing interest, and I want to wash my car."

If you've ever read a checkout-line magazine, you already know all the dating tips in existence. There's only 5 or 6, then they start repeating themselves. Nevertheless, every one of us knows that as soon as the words "Dating Tips For ..." pass before our eyes, we're hooked. Like a train wreck, or a car crash, or a dozen midgets tied spread-eagle to the hubcaps of a tractor-trailer, you just can't turn away. Maybe this list will have a new secret that'll hook me up!

Maybe!

- Dating Tips for Men, by a man.
- Dating Tips for Women, by a man.
- Dating Tips for Women, by a woman.
- Someone send me dating tips for men, by a woman, and we'll be done.

I'm sure that Saddam's generals have just started coordinating with al Qaeda in recent months, and that there wasn't any such contact until America invaded.

WASHINGTON — A senior member of Saddam Hussein (search)'s ousted government is believed to be helping coordinate attacks on American forces with members of an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group, a senior defense official said Wednesday.

Two captured members of Ansar al-Islam (search) have said Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri is helping to coordinate their attacks, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. ...

Al-Douri is No. 6 on the most-wanted list of 55 Iraqis and was vice chairman of Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council. He was one of Saddam's few longtime confidants and his daughter was married to Saddam's son, Uday (search), who was killed in a raid by U.S. forces in July.

Of course, the US government has taken every report of possible Saddam-al Qaeda ties and blown them way out of proportion.

Kurdish officials have long alleged that Saddam's government helped Ansar, but U.S. officials have said they haven't yet found definitive proof of that.

Oh.

I recently wrote, "We love the truth because our parents' generation is perpetually obsessed with style over substance, and most of the time they tell us that there is no real truth." Here's a perfect example.

WASHINGTON — A new left-wing think tank — the Center for American Progress (search) — unveiled itself Tuesday as the Democratic vaccine to what center supporters say is a plague of conservatism now dominating America.

"We think the debate has been unbalanced in the country," center president John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Clinton, told Fox News. ...

"The conservative movement has really built up an infrastructure of not just ideas, but the ability to kind of get out there and do the kind of hard communications work to sell to the American public," he added. ...

Podesta insists that conservative institutions like the Heritage Foundation don't have better ideas, but are merely better at marketing. He said he is confident his center can take over the marketplace of ideas with notable innovations such as a big media staff that will push the center's thoughts onto the Internet, television and radio.

I think his perception of reality is incorrect, and many people seem to agree with me. The difficulty they're facing isn't that people don't know the their ideas, it's that people don't like their ideas. The Democrats tried this spin in 2000, 2002, and 2003, all to no avail.

Many Americans say they believe the media are already skewing left of center, and Washington doesn't suffer a shortage of liberal-leaning thinkers perched inside established halls of research.

The real challenge for liberals and Democrats, then, may not be getting their voices heard, but getting control of the White House and Congress, which most frequently frame the discussions.

As long as Republicans control both, Democrats say, few places exist in Washington for their ideas or marketing strategy to take hold.

Yeah. Al Gore's new cable news channel is built around the same theory, and I think both of these ideas will fizzle because of their shaky foundation.

Update:
Eugene Volokh has more along the same lines with regard to a proposed liberal radio show hoping to compete against Rush and Sean Hannity.

Nice framing: It's not that lots of American people choose to listen to conservative talk show hosts -- it's that the conservative message is being jammed down their throats. Vivid metaphor; too bad it doesn't quite match the reality.

Of course, "jammed down their throats" is a metaphor. But metaphors are used for a reason; while the speaker expects that readers realize the statement is figurative, the speaker's hope is that the reader accepts the underlying premise behind the figure of speech. When we say someone is a wolf in sheep's clothing, we don't literally mean that he's a large land mammal related to a dog, wearing wool. But we do mean that he's a figurative wolf (i.e., someone dangerous) wearing the clothes of a figurative sheep (i.e., someone unthreatening). "Jammed down their throats" figuratively means "forced onto people who aren't really willing to hear it." And that is nearly the opposite of how radio actually works -- people who really believe that this is how right-wing talk show hosts have gotten their influence are just deluding themselves.

Someone named Dikran Armouchian has been arrested for setting a fire in the Angeles National Forest (thanks, SDB's reader). Google doesn't turn up a hit for his name, and there's not much more information available at this point.

Can anyone place the origin or nationality of the name?

Update:
In the comments, Francis W. Porretto says the name is Armenian, and this page of Armenian names lists "Dikran" as a good first name for an Armenian baby boy.

Along similar lines as my previous post about college kids becoming more conservative, my mom passes along a US News article titled "The good-news generation" (beware of pop-ups!). John Leo discusses some of the qualities of Generation Y (the Millennials) -- members of the cohort born between 1977 and 1994, which I am proud to belong to.

Now the focus is almost entirely on millennials, 78 million strong and the largest birth cohort in American history. Speaking at the American Magazine Conference last week in the Palm Springs, Calif., area, Clurman described millennials this way: They are family oriented, viscerally pluralistic, deeply committed to authenticity and truth-telling, heavily stressed, and living in a no-boundaries world where they make short-term decisions and expect paradoxical outcomes. (The sense of paradox means that every choice results in some good consequences, some bad: Air bags save lives but kill people, too.) ...

Yankelovich and other researchers have been picking up a renewed emphasis on family for years. The yearning for a good marriage is a dominant value among millennials, Clurman says, and 30 percent of those surveyed say they want three or more children. Indeed, one research company, Packaged Facts and Silver Stork, recently predicted a 17 percent increase in the U.S. birthrate over the next 10 years. ...

Millennials are apt to trust parents, teachers, and police. Apparently they are likely to trust presidents, too. A Harvard poll released last week reported that President Bush has a 61 percent favorability rate among American college students. This may not mean much. The millennials are not a very politically active generation. But they are clearly able to resist programming by their professors, 90 percent of whom seem convinced that Bush is either Hitler or a moron.

I agree with all of Mr. Leo's conclusions, but he doesn't mention one thing that's particularly obvious (to me): Millennials are they way we are largely due to rebellion against our Boomer parents' approach to life. We love 'em, but we don't want to be like them in a lot of ways.

To many in my generation, the Boomers seem terribly unserious and preoccupied with fantasy rather than reality. There's a reason why the peace-nik protests of 2003 looked a lot like those from the 1960s: they were the same people. We yearn for strong marriages because far more than half of us have seen our parents divorce. We want kids and families of our own because we think we can do it right. We love the truth because our parents' generation is perpetually obsessed with style over substance, and most of the time they tell us there is no real truth.

Mr. Leo paints an encouraging picture, and I'm excited to find out whether he's right or not.

In response to this post about adults getting more involved in Halloween, my friend Craig passes on a Time Magazine article titled "Boo, Humbug! Call me a Scrooge, but why can't adults leave Halloween to the kids?" by Michael Elliott. Mr. Elliott writes a lot I disagree with (and some I don't), and I don't think he gets Halloween, any more than he gets the reasons behind the current wave of Francophobia sweeping the America. But anyway, let's take a look at what he says.

Still, if companies want to sell even more masks, lanterns, witch hats and the like, good luck to them. It's the gullible consumers who fall for the pitch whom I detest — the employees who insist on decorating sensible cubicles with orange and black streamers and littering the office with bowls of candy, the folk who dress up and throw pumpkin parties at country clubs, the hundreds of thousands who will come to work next week in costume. Chris Riddle is the Halloween trend spotter at card-and-decorations giant American Greetings, which estimates that 25% of the American work force will observe Halloween in some fashion this year. "It's a release," Riddle says of the way people deck out their suburban yards, "a way to say, 'I can still act like a kid.'"

That's my problem. Halloween, for me, is the gaudiest example of the infantilization of American culture. It's up there with other classics like McDonald's Happy Meals or Hollywood's post — Star Wars decision to concentrate on making kids' films for grownups. These aren't just the mutterings of an old curmudgeon. I like parties as much as the next guy (so would you if you'd grown up in a house where the Messiah was considered light entertainment), though I've never quite seen why you needed a specific date on the calendar as an excuse to let your hair down. There's a larger point. In time, infantile societies become degraded, unable to meet the realities that face them.

However, in the article I linked to in my previous post, York University history professor Nick Rogers points out that, "The notion that Halloween is simply for kids is a misconception based on the centrality of trick-or-treating in the 1950s, when there was an attempt to take the mischief out of Halloween and 'infantilize' it." So perhaps Mr. Elliott should be rejoicing that adults are de-infantilizing the holiday? After all, if his main objection is that the holiday is too childish, then one of the best things he can hope for is that Halloween will return to its more historical role as a community-wide harvest festival. Of course, most communities don't actually harvest anything anymore, so it's only reasonable that the holiday take on a different focus. I hate to break it to him, but adults have worn masks and dressed up in costumes for thousands of years, all around the world and in every culture, and such behavior is not generally seen as uniquely childish. That perception appears to be the product of late 20th-century America, more than anything else.

Further, I fail to see the connection between Happy Meals, "Star Wars", and the infantilization of culture. Happy Meals provide parents a cheap and easy way to feed their kids, and give the kids a fun toy; the food may not be healthy, but that has nothing to do with infantilization. Would he rather that kids be forced to eat gruel from a burlap sack with a shard of glass for a spoon?

"Star Wars" is a great movie, and nearly everyone in my generation loves it (even Europeans I talked to while traveling) -- so what's his point? Does he object to "Star Wars" and similar films because he thinks they cause his so-called infantilization, or because they cater to it by entertaining people without *gasp* literature?

How did cultural infantilization creep up on us? In The Disappearance of Childhood, a wonderful little book first published in 1982, Neil Postman, a New York University professor who died this month, identified a shift from a culture based on literature — on reading — to one based on the image. In a preliterate world, there's no distinction between children and adults. Look at a Bruegel painting, and you see adults eating, drinking, groping, necking, together with their children. Literacy changed all that. Reading has to be learned; it separates the world of the child from that of the adult. But children can absorb images — from TV, say — just as easily as their elders. Postman worried that a postliterate culture would be one in which barriers that protected children from the perils and temptations of the outside world would be torn down.

Oh brother. So, Halloween is connected to Happy Meals and "Star Wars", which in turn keep people from reading, which leads to illiteracy, and the infantilization of the culture. Ok, got it.

Halloween shows that the process works in reverse. We now have to be worried not just about children acting like adults but about adults behaving like children. That doesn't mean adults have to be serious all the time. It does mean that they should recognize when it's time — and what it means — to grow up and let the kids run their own holiday.

Sorry, in my world the kids don't get to run their own anything, because they're kids. I think it's important to separate the roles of children and adults, and I think that adults should be in charge of everything -- and I'm surprised that Mr. Elliott thinks otherwise. Even if adults don't dress up, who do you think is buying all the costumes and candy? Who's going to build the haunted houses for the kids to creep through? Who's going to walk the little ones door-to-door collecting treats?

Do I really need to expound on the bizarrely out-of-context Bible quote at the end of his article?

When it comes to the infantilization of culture and adults acting like children, I think there are far better targets than Halloween. Mr. Elliott briefly mentions TV, but doesn't mention the vast quantity of nonsense that inhabits most of our airwaves -- of course, New York intellectuals have railed against TV for years, so maybe he wanted to try something new. Or maybe that position is just wearing thin, considering that there are some truly great shows on TV these days. Similarly, there are a lot of terrible movies, but there are also some great ones. Oh yeah, there are some pretty awful books too, and some are even considered "classics".

If one wants to discuss the infantilization of culture, why not mention professional sports? Why not mention the sensationalism that runs rampant through our news organizations? Why not mention the grocery workers who are striking because they think putting boxes on shelves entitles them to $40,000 a year and free health care? Why not take the whiny, self-righteous Bush-haters aside and explain to them that there's more at stake right now than the next Presidential election? Why not condemn the welfare state that exists solely to create a childish constituency who will vote in favor of its own expansion?

Mr. Elliott may just not like Halloween -- and that's fine -- but he shouldn't try dress up his personal opinion as high moral virtue built on care and concern for our collapsing civilization.

Two guys walk into a bar. The second one says to the first one, "Oh, you didn't see it either?"

Top that!

Here's a page with a nifty diagram explaining how forest fires spread.

Fire's spread looks fractal (no surprise).

Finally, here's a page with lots of forest fire information, and even some simulations! [Update: the simulations are lame!]

I haven't really seen anyone else discuss this (surprisingly), but if terrorists wanted to attack Southern California setting forest fires would be one of the easiest and most effective methods. Even if our current blazes were set purposefully, I doubt it was done by Islamic terrorists though, because no one has come forward to claim credit.

Furthermore, it just doesn't seem like such an attack would fit the "style" of Islamofascist death-cultists. A lot of damage has been done, and the fires are a major disruption to California's economy, but there have been fairly few deaths. As such, the threat of arson just doesn't create the type of "terror" that Bin Laden and his cronies go for. Setting forest fires isn't a direct attack on the economy or on symbols of the economic system, doesn't target democracy or democratic institutions, doesn't make people afraid to leave their homes; in general, fires don't have the sort of widespread emotional impact that the terrorists long to foment.

Nevertheless, these fires will still cause property damage on the same order-of-magnitude as the 9/11 attacks, though with far fewer deaths.

Over the decades, the United States has developed dozens of different types of nuclear warheads, for many different uses. Some are dropped as bombs, some are fitted to inter-continental ballistic missiles, some are designed for artillery shells, and some are even used on air-to-air rockets. For a (complete?) listing, check out "Designations Of U.S. Nuclear Weapons" and "UNITED STATES: Nuclear warheads and applications".

Donald Sensing has some interesting speculation on how the world might be different if Germany had one the Battle of the Marne in 1914.

All of these effects, reverberating to this very day, may be argued to have resulted from the allied victory at the Battle of the Marne. Had the allies lost that battle, I think one may make a good case that none of the following would have occurred:
- The rise fascism in Italy and of Nazism in Germany,
- The rise of a communist Soviet Union, although the Czar would likely have been deposed eventually (more likely, would have become a figurehead monarch along the lines of Britain’s)
- World War II in Europe, and probably not in Asia. Japan would still have had imperial ambitions, but they would not have brought the world into conflict, and perhaps not the US.
- Hence, no Cold War and none of its attendant ravages
- A much less powerful United States, but one still secure and free
- No communist China
- No Vietnam War
- No Korean War
- No free and democratic Japan
- No Holocaust
- Hence, no establishment of the state of Israel
- Hence, no history of war, conflict and terrorism in the Middle East
- No Iranian Islamic revolution,
- Hence, no rise of modern radical Islamism
- Hence no 9/11/01 attacks.

Of course I expect that this short list is neither exhaustive nor non-debatable. This is a thought experiment, after all. Add that science and technology would have progressed in wildly different ways and pace, as well, so perhaps no space race or moon landings (yet) nor medical MRIs nor even perhaps any personal computers (again, yet).

Particularly with regard to Nazis, the Holocaust, and the existence of Israel I think Rev. Sensing is probably correct; and the specific wars he mentions (Vietnam and Korea) would not have happened without the USSR.

Rev. Sensing is far more knowledgable about history than I am, but European land wars had been going on for centuries; there's no reason to think that yet another wouldn't have followed WW1 if Germany had been victorious rather than France. Furthermore, without the peace enforced by the United States as a result WW2, it's virtually certain that in the 90 years since WW1 there would have been 2 or 3 more wars fought between the European powers.

Marxism and communism got a big boost from the USSR, b