A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Ugh. I can't believe this is an AP headline.

"MIT coed with fake bomb 'art' arrested"

Problems here:

• Co-ed is an outmoded term. I am pretty sure that the AP style guide explicitly stated this when I studied it over a decade ago. Do they make an exception for headlines? If so, what difference does it make what gender the person was?


• There was no fake bomb. It was a sweatshirt modified to have a light-up message, and by all accounts one that the person frequently wore. But every other headline is saying the same thing, and such was the best general knowledge in the first few moments after the arrest, so I can give this a reluctant pass. I'll be pissed if it sez this in tomorrow's print newspapers, though.


• I know that putting 'art' in quotes is ostensibly the headline writer saying that someone in the story is quoted as calling it art, but it ends up just sounding really snotty, as in my two year old kid could do that or whatever.

So where's the ban on driving an SUV to the airport, already? I wanna see some action

Crazy Al-Qaeda-lovin' dude about to be literally charged for treason for talkin' smack, the first time that's happened since the WWII era. Here we go.

Mostly what I remember is posting on a local friend's mailing list about how I was rather looking forward to seeing our special ops troops in action in the mountains of Afghanistan, describing them as terrifying cyborg commandos who would show the bad guys real fear and get the job done. I certainly didn't feel that, a few months into the operation, they'd get their resources yanked and rerouted.

Another of my friends, at the time, blogged that it reminded him of the climax of Watchmen, and I knew what he meant and I kind of hoped so too, that this would be a catalyst to a new sort of international unity. For a while it really felt like it could happen.

"Day off" today, though I ended up spending some time putting out fires in the game finder... which, mind you, I set myself.

I saw "Syriana" and liked it a lot. Not surprised that it's been out for well over a month, maybe two, and is still commanding a full house at the Harvard Square Loew's. Buncha commies. I would recommend this movie to anyone. I want to go back and see "Traffic" now, from the same creators.

Some disconnected thoughts about it:

* Some parts are quite brutal and hard to watch, but was made more uncomfortable by a stranger sitting next to me who was literally whimpering during those scenes, and later started whimpering more as the story's overall tension came to a head and you knew that very large awful things were going to happen. I do not say "whimpering" lightly here. As the whimpering occurred, I thought: oh my gosh, this is real full-scale whimpering. I squirmed to see another adult in such distress, or anyway to hear it, since I never actually looked at her. So this weird discomfort chain going on between me, her, and the movie-people.

* I find it interesting that there are at least three more-or-less mainstream movies in theatres now that feature terrorism not in the more comfortable Tom Clancy/Die Hard way, but as an attempt to take a deeper look at real-life terrorism. There's this movie, "Munich", and the smaller one about Palestinian suicide bombers whose title I cannot recall. "Syriana" isn't primarily about terrorism but one of its sub-threads does look at it dead-on. I think that the path that character took seemed rather rushed, but they may have been trying to tell his story in shorthand... I know enough about the culture portrayed to understand what was being represented there.

I reflected how differently the portrayal of these characters in the film is from their popular portrayal in American conventional wisdom, that these are one and all freedom-haters whose primary drive is lust for their 72 virgins. The rejection of this caricature is probably a central reason why (my own mental caricature of) neo-conservatives probably hate this movie.

* I am not great at recognizing actors, and didn't catch any of the big names in this one, not knowing who they were going in. I must have subconsciously recognized Matt Damon, but totally missed George Clooney, despite his being probably the most interesting character in the picture.

* The people in the movie (both in speech and in subtitles) referred to the primary language of Iran as "Farsi". Never once did a busybody pop up to say Arrggh NOOO in English the language is called "Persian" you ignorant fools, proving that the movie was not the Internet.

Please tell me that was some shitheads kicking off a ballgame and not a terrorist attack.

(By "shitheads" I refer to those who would order pilots to scare the fuck out of an entire city just to open a hot dog stand, not the pilots themselves. Of course.)

OK, discussion on davis_square seems to point to shitheads.

Dear shitheads: Why not save jet fuel and just ramp right up to fucking air-raid sirens next time? For Christ's sake?

In case it wasn't clear before today, the userbase of Little Green Footballs is nothing but a bunch of racist fuckwads.

(Except you. You're all right.)

Update Reading about LGF on WP, I see that (a) this has been known for some time, and (b) the site used to be about all kinds of things but, like lileks.com, took a sharp right turn and became generally unreadable as a result of 9/11. Interesting and sad.

So Mr. Reid is universally identified as being "the accused shoe bomber" in news stories, and that's all anyone needs to know who is being referred to.

The first five mental images that phrase brings to my mind are nonetheless all very silly. I'm glad the whole thing happened in such a way that we can laugh about it a little easier.