ADAMANT

Ye Arts & Pirates Daily

Avast ye Literary Lascaradoes ! Being of a mutinous Difposition,Ye Editor hath hoift thif Blogges true Colours to ye royal-top , to get the weather Gage of ye Burgee of Bones  for tis Talk Like A Pirate Day , and here bee

  

                                        

Arts         Letters    0f Marque If the Kayak Corsairess Mifstress Palin's raid on the Potomac mifcarries, will she run for  Governor of the Spanish Main like a born- again Joan Bonney, or end up pleading her belly in   Execution Dock to please pro-life palaeo-pyrates? The quarterdeck of Obama Reis begala is abuzz with scuttlebutt of sinning badly.. more»  In Prince-Towne up the Delaware, where Richard Rorty  did avast himself a “syncretist hack.” the scurvy scrivner caulked a  philosophical mosaic  fair and bye... more» Robert Trivers loves the logic o' evolution.That dead men tell no tales be bilge- Philosopher's Mate Darwin o'ye barque Beagle dead reckoned a geometry o' time yar as the geometry o' space that lubber Newton or that Leghorno Bos'n Galileo ..Aaaarrh! more>>  Should local folk rebuild N'Orleans as she was? By Cap’n Lafitte’s bones, No!   Probably it be not a bad idea, says Carlin Romano. (Aaarrhhh, me parrot!)   Quite possibly, it be a catastrophic one... (Bilge!)    Academic anthropology be in   crisis, says Dan Sperber, who be not alarmed. (Yarrr, into the futtock   shrouds ) “It deserves t' be in crisis. (Weigh anchor!) It deserves t'   explode, let it do so”... (Bloody privateers!) more»           “The semicolon be   ugly, ugly as a tick on a dog’s belly, I pinch 'em out o' me prose,” says   Donald Barthelme. (Blimey!) Other writers disagree...  more»           What they’re readin' at the   kitchen table. (Gangway!) Home-schoolers o' all stripes find common   ground in superb but nearly forgotten books... (Sink me!)         Piracy has a long 'n brutal ahoystory. (Bilge!) How it has   been treated in law makes a useful precedent for terrorism... (Prepare to   dance the hempen jig, matey!)   Translate the Bible, but don’t try t' “explain” it with yer   translation: you’ll just trivialize its grand solemnity 'n epic sweep...T’is   mostly fit for a Black Spot (Aaarrrrhhh!) more»                           Ye  &Pyrates    New-Captured .......Logs......... A  warmin' earth ? We be for it! The fig of Spain for all the monsoon, mega-drought, n' malaria scuttlebutt-  if it be mild as the Bight O’Benin, make after them polar bears through the  Northwest Passage, and  plunder the China Trade ! more>   Till the 18th century,   Scots, like other Europeans, saw distilled spirits as medicine. (Shiver me   timbers!) Then a few Jockoes started t'drink whisky for fun... (Pass the Demerara, mate)       From Voltaire 'n David Hume   t' Rob Ingersoll 'n Clarence Darrow, atheism used t' be on the march,   religion on the aft foot. (Blimey!) Times change...  more»         Th’doxy  was dazzled by Sartre’s brilliance as a   philosopher. (Blimey!) For Simone de Beauvoir, terms like “essence” or   “contin'ency” worked like a chest O’gold pistoles'... (Aaarrhhh, )       Belay yer blubbering of hurricanoes,New Orleens! that City o' floods, graceful Venice has survived such calamities as fires, plagues 'n  Keelhauling of its poxy gondoliers: Nay U.S city has ever had t' endure the like... “Can somethin' be achieved  upstream O Hormuz worthy o' the sacrifice ? ” George Packer badly   wants that the Iraq answer will turn out t' be yes...  (Prepare to gybe)?   Hilde Kschessinska: prima ballerina   assoluta, mistress o' Czar Nicholas II – a poppet o' vast skill, massive   energy, 'n implacable willfulness... (Dead men tell no tales.)  If we ever   find out that a basic tenet o' Buddhism be shown false by science, we simply   must give it up. Who said it? The Dalai Lama... The kirtled   lubber. more»   Don’t be shocked at the sad   fate o' the Big Easy. (Be ye ready to walk the plank?) history be littered   with “eternal” cities brought low by flood, plague, or   man-made disaster... (Weigh anchor!)   Christopher Hitchens be a man whose passion outruns 'is reason.   (Blimey!) He can be fun t' read 'n t' argue with, but.smart as paint? Sink   me! more»     Søren Kierkegaard , The scurvy quacksalver,rebuked the Christianity   o' 'is day: rather than get rid o' the whorehouse, it preferred t' baptize   it... (Arrgh!) more»   The FDA bans absinthe, as it be  adulterated” with wormwood. (Arr!) Still, customs agents will typically ignore a   bottle or two in yer suitcase... (Yarrr, more grog, wench!) (Aaaarrrhhh!!!)  Most Utopias are   odorless, antiseptic futures, intolerably streamlined 'n sensible, with   splendid plumbin'... (Bilge!) more» However baggywrinkle 'is   private life,Arthur Koestlerport behind an absorbin' body o' work   for anyone who enjoys the battle o' ideas...      Editin' be a bloody trade.   (Arrgh!) But knives aren’t the exclusive property o' butchers. (Aaarrrrhhh!)   Surgeons use 'em too. (Yo-ho-ho!)Blake Morrisondefends editors   wi’rusty cutlasses... (Aarhh!) more»  Sure, it’s naive t' think   that all moral beliefs be universal. (The chase is making full sail, matey!)   But thar may be an innate “moral sense” across cultures... (Damn me   eyes.) If Michel Houellebecq   calls Islam “the stupidest religion in the world,” well, aft all, he was   drunk. (Yaaarrrr!) It’s when he writes 'bout sex... (Yo-ho-ho!)  Should local folk rebuild N'Orleans as she was? By Cap’n Lafitte’s bones, No!   Probably it be not a bad idea, says Carlin Romano. (Aaarrhhh, me parrot!)   Quite possibly, it be a catastrophic one... (Bilge!)  Curst be the Bones o’the scurvy  dog who reprinteth this but as by the Articles of ye  ALD’s  permission for  editin be thirsty work requiring of   costly Zacapa rum   So stand ye  Readers, and by the Code, deliver doubloons  to ye  Paypal account of Mnestheus@aol.com Copyright MMVII         Daily     Essays  and   Affadavys Be quotation marks the new boldface? Arrh,'tis as  a grog shop sign hailing “FINE FOOD”? Aye , but don’t expect such usage to overhaul Bristol fashion English... more»  How can yer Arab left openly embrace  Muslims listing far to starboard? , says  Hussein Ibish, (By the Black Spot, A Salee Cap'n sure) such matey gestures  be never returned except by a  poxy kiss o'Davey Jones ... more» Al-Qaeda's hard aground  upstream o'Basra, so the lascars be moving the jihad to Europe... more»... Turn Turk, Osama says, and  the Grand Porte will discount its scurvy  port dues dockside !! Antarctica be a red state. March o' the Penguins ‘affirms    norms O The Code like monogamy   sacrifice'n child rearin'” says a critic. But some o' those penguins be   gay... (Bilge!)   “Nay iron can pierce the   heart with such force as a period put just at the starboard place” Raymond   Carver above all loved precise writin'... (Aaaarrrhhh!!!) more»           Thar be genuine intensity   in the sufferin' o' Frida Kahlo. Yet thar be somethin' vaguely repulsive in the adulation she receives.   Victimhood, aft all, be not beatitude... (Bloody landlubber!) more»           “Booty doesn’t   buy happiness.” Oh, aye? (Yaaarrrr!) A strong correlation exists between   the wealth o' a country 'n its general level o' happiness. (Gangway!) But as   Aristotle. (Bloody Turkadoe !) knew... more» Democracy? (The chase is  making full sail, matey!) Good governance can include many components besides   democratic participation, says Francis Fukuyama. (Bloody landlubber!)   Consider the case o' Sin'apore ,  ye   Lascar dogs!)       God looks after bilge rats, drunks, children, 'n the USA.  Did  God shanghai Palm Beach voters in 2000, in order t' push a neocon   agenda aloft into the riggin ? more»   “I have felt it meself,” Freeman Dyson said.   (Aaaarrrhhh!!!) “The glitter o' nuclear weapons. (Aaarrrrhhh!) It be   irresistible if ye come t' 'em as a scientist: an illusion o' illimitable   power.”...  more»

 

Krak's Back

Anak Krakatau, the "Child Of Krakatoa" born from the depths of the caldera left in the seabed by the catastrophic eruption of 1886 seems to be entering its lusty adolescence . I have a Krakatau Number of 3, having talked to Luis Alvarez about the eruption in 1984. He got an eyewitness account from his sometime  WWII boss, Norden, of the eponymous bombsight, who was born in Batavia ( now Jakarta) a dozen years before the big bang.

Baptized In The Fountain Of Youth

PZ  Myers is finds it alarming that "Donna Callaway, a member of the Florida Board of Education" whose  recent  editorial he thinks delusional is alarmed at one of the recently passed  Florida eucational  standards: "Diversity and Evolution of Living Organisms. A. Evolution is the fundamental concept underlying all of biology.".

If he thinks she's trying to win  Ben Stein's koolaid  harder than her neighbors, then PZ  needs to spend more quality time wresting alligators - here is what her brethren, who  have strong opinions about Expelled,  have to say in The American Spectator :

MARS ATTACKS TAKI

And my new column fights back feebly

Viking Funeral

Baffin Island and The Big Chill

After four mild  centuries, Greenland's climate turned grim in 1280 -- too cold for Norsemen to venture out to to farm, let alone rape, pillage, loot, or burn. Had Viking vices included climate modeling, King Magnus Law-Mender might have sent a long ship south to ask the Sultan of Solo throw  some extra virgins in volcanoes, for evidence from the ice caps of Baffin Island, Geophysical Research Letters reports, focuses blame for the end of the Medieval Warm period on  tropical eruptions.

The paper by Professor Gifford Miller of the University of Colorado Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research uses radiocarbon dating of  plant remains emerging from beneath the receding ice to show it has shrunk  50 % since 1950 due to warming temperatures, and  may  vanish by midcentury. The Baffin Island ice caps are now smaller in area than at any time in  the last 1,600 years, "Even with no additional warming, our study indicates these ice caps will be gone in 50 years or less," he said.

The study also showed two distinct ice cap growth bursts  around 1280 A.D. and 1450 A.D., matching ice core records of stratospheric aerosols. Miller take this to imply that  major tropical volcanic eruptions caused the  Little Ice Age  that wiped out  the Viking colonies in Greenland.

Most of Baffin's 196,000 square miles lie above the Arctic Circle.The research incorporates a half century of satellite data and aerial photos to document the shrinkage of the more than 20 ice caps on the island's northern plateau. Up to four miles long and  generally less than 100 yards thick, and frozen to their beds,Miller says their "ice is so cold and thin that it doesn't flow, so the ancient landscape on which they formed is preserved pretty much intact"

In addition to carbon-dating plant material from the ice edges, the researchers extracted and analyzed carbon 14 that formed inside the Baffin Island rocks as a result of ongoing cosmic radiation bombardment, revealing the amount of time the rocks have been exposed,. Carbon 14 in quartz  indicates that  several thousand years ago the island had more extensive ice cover, which Miller thinks was caused by decreasing summer sun as a result of precession of the  Earth's axis. "This makes the recent ice cap reduction on Baffin Island even more striking."

Funded by the NSF, the study is remarkable for its novel use of radiocarbon samples from rocks for dating ice  advance and retreat.  Carbon 14 is formed by cosmic ray neutrons interacting with nitrogen, which comprises most of the atmosphere. There are traces of nitrogen in quartz as well, and recent advances in accelerator mass spectroscopy enable the traces of 14C formed in quartz  to be counted in some cases literally one atom at a time, to date how long it has been exposed to the sky or shielded by ice-- 10 meters of water, liquid or solid, roughly approximates the shielding effect of the atmosphere.

The Gnarly Science

Paul Mc Hugh
Has a fine piece in the NYTimes  outlining a course in
Surfing Oceanography 101:
How Not To Die.

Indiana Steyn And The Sultan Of Swat

Much gets  lost in cultural translation along  the  border separating Canada from the wild hill tribes of New Hampshire. Our "most immediate interest " in Pakistan, says pundit Mark Steyn, who monitors the restive natives of Lyme, "is in preventing the country’s tribal lands from becoming this decade’s Afghanistan– a huge Camp Osama...That ship, if it hasn’t already sailed, has certainly cast off ...Something called “the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan”...is formally recognized by the Pakistan government." Where has the Greatest Living Neocan been since Kipling wrote Kim?

Sir Aurel Stein found Waziristan full of hostile "Talibs" fired up by Wahabi preachers back when Teddy Roosevelt was running on the Bull Moose ticket. On maps in both explorer's portfolios, it was a part of a million square mile expanse of poison green demarcated " The Independent Khanates Of Chinese Turkestan." Czar Alexander bit off the first  before the Fenians invaded New Brunswick in 1865, and the Evil Empire choked to death on the same grisly dish six generations later.

Stein is not to Steyn's taste in fireside reading-  he prefers Winston Churchill's account of his Durand Line days, and would feel better if only Pakistan were better Raj-ified:

"It’s worth noting that Muslims next door in India are antipathetic to jihad. Yet they are ethnically and religiously indistinguishable from the fellows in Islamabad wiring up... suicide bombers...The only reason...is because of where some British cartographer decided to draw the line in 1947."

If only it were so, Dudley Doright could bring in Osama Bin Laden with a lasso and a snowmobile. The Waziri's drove the British Army out of the capital, Wana, in 1919. The Empire came back, of course, but in 1936, when the Sultan Of Swat mostly meant Babe Ruth Esq. , the  Faqir of Ipi   the Sufi mini-Mahdi still locally regarded as OBL's role model, drove them out again, inflicting over a thousand casualties in the process.

It took two years of RAF bombing to put the British Political Agent back in his bungalow  Every word sometime Vermont resident Kipling penned about the Pashtuns late in Victoria's reign remains a fireside joy to read, but here in the 21st century, it is hazardous to forget the unsubtle distinction between  where India's 18th century Afghan conquerers ended up, and whence they came.

They remain in business to this day on the far side of the Indus, their Western border shared not with Europe, or Russia , but  Persia. Times have changed since The Shah was our principle bulwark against Islamic fundamentalism, and Pinky Bhutto's Radclife chaperone was our former Ambassador to India .

O Little Death Star Of Bethelehem

The grinches at NASA have aimed their instruments at a jet-producing  giant black hole  that is fortunately light years removed from the Holy Land, to snap the mother of all Debbie Downer Xmas cards using the Chandra X-ray telescope

The galactic center black hole , invisible in the dust lane at the top of the lower galaxy, is beaming gamma rays bright as sunlight at a companion , turning it into a Christmas tree ornament  of  x-ray fluorescence, as it ionizes the bejesus out of the dusty  interstellar medium. The blue streak is of radio noise as it blasts clear out the other side.

The glad tidings are that this 2.5 million parsec distant death star will run out of steam in another million years or so , before it can carve a wider swathe of destruction through the hapless galaxy. Meanwhile, wise men will give it a wide berth. The place is as hot as it looks.The artist's rendition is clearer than the messy reality--

Second Hand Cannibalism

Another Milestone In  Cuisine Post-Creole

Fijian chief  Ratu Filimoni Nawawabalavu joined the villagers of Nubutautau last month in a weeping  apology to 11 Australian descendants of a British missionary killed and eaten by the Ni Nubutautau 140 years ago ,after a perceived slight to the sacred person of the Ratu's Great-great great great grandfather.

Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase and members of Fiji's  Great Council of Chiefs attended a feast and a complex ritual reconciliation ritual known as ai sorotabu intended to lift the curse on the isolated village arising from the unfortunate Victorian's demise.

After a cow was slaughtered, in an expiatory exercise in  cannibalism once removed, the late reverend Thomas Baker's relatives  were kissed by the Ratu, whose predecessor as chief was the chef who boiled the Reverend Baker,  together with the local vegetable  Bele --Hibiscus manihot-- also known as slippery cabbage, and his leather boots, which Nubutautau villagers had unsuccessfully tried to eat raw after Baker and eight Fijian followers were clubbed to death on a cliff in nearby  Navatusila.

At the ceremonies conclusion the Baker descendants, who were earlier presented with 100 rare and tapu  sperm whale teeth as compensation, were given the missionary's bible, comb and the soles of his boots, which still inedible despite 1.2 million hours of sporadic cooking attempts, will be displayed in a museum in Suva.

As of this writing, Nubutautau has no Guide Michellin entry.

GeoNeoCons ?

With geoengineering being floated as an alternative to conscripting the world into the Party Of Carbon Taxation, how apposite of George Will to note :

It is a pity that TR built the Panama Canal. If he had not, "national greatness" and "heroic" conservatives could invest their overflowing energies and vaulting ambitions into building it, and other conservatives -- call them mere realists -- could continue seeking limited government, grounded in cognizance of government's limited competences.

Fortunately, many an isthmus remains undivided, and many an insular polity connected to the mainland.

Heroic Neocon Geostrategists may wish to dust off the modest Victorian proposal to outflank Suez by digging North from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea and on to  Galilee.

A turn thence to Tyre would transform the Jordan's West Bank into a new Levantine Eastern Shore, and with enough shovels, cutting down from the headwaters of the Euphrates to the armpit of Anatolia  could do away with Mesopotamia entirely.

Not A Maya Lin

At a time when MIT is suing Frank Gehry over the sculpted titanium facade of a $300,000,000 post-modern building prone to shed lethal icicles in winter and leak like a sieve each spring, it's pleasant to see how much more art far less money can buy.

The Business School of Guatemala's Universidad Francisco Marroquin is newly graced by  Atlas Libertas , a monumental sculpture of the Titan shrugging  off a universe of epicyclic gears, wrought  in brazen relief 15 feet high.

Artist  Walter Peter Brenner. born in Guatemala to a family of Swiss origin in 1965, studied architecture at the same university, and sculpture at the School of Fine Arts in Zürich, winning first prize for Guatemala in a Lausanne competition sponsored by the International Olympic Committee. Retro-minded MIT alumni may wish to acquaint their alma mater with his work.

Fly Me To The Moon

One of the most astounding failures of the imagination of  Sputnik era science fiction was the absence in all those  First Men On The Moon stories of live television coverage of the momentous first landing. When the great day came in reality, the only reality TV was a staticky black and white image that looked like a hallway camera on the fritz.

It will be a while before we get IMAX views of Mars, but Japan has provided a nice trailer - their new lunar orbiter has an HDTV camera aboard, and it is providing white-knuckle views of the lunar landscape rushing by underfoot-

Very Like A Whale

They T-Boned Moby Dick, But Nobody Noticed

Donning 100% recycled Timberland Earthkeeper Boots, Peter Matthiessen marches from  Uruk  to Muktuk in The New York Review Of Books:

"As in Iraq...this last clean wilderness will be fatally filthied and contaminated and lost forever to... black effluvia of crude petroleum and drilling mud and chemical pollutants...poisoning great stretches of Arctic coast with a viscous excrescence...fouling the pristine habitat .. of the white beluga... whales... For the Inupiat... the fundamental basis of their diet and...spiritual well-being ..."The Government says they talk to us...They just turn our questions back at us, until finally we're yelling, 'Just answer the question!"

" I gather berries," said Aggie Aniqsuaq. "Last year there were no salmon-berries... Maybe that is from that seismic testing, too."...Inupiat hunters were predicting that the coal-mine explosions near Omalik would scare the whales further offshore, but...the whales on the island glow as white as a row of immense mozzarella cheeses... "My mouth is watering for beluga meat," said a rascally-looking gap-toothed whale captain from Kotzebue..."

Meanwhile , it was a  bad sushi day for this former blue whale, struck amidriff in the Pacific west of Seattle. by the Container Vessel Kauai, traveling at 22 knots. The late whale slid off the fatal bow bulb transition when the vessel reversed. Owing to the absence of polar bear cubs , no Admiralty hearing was held. Greenpeace shrugged ,The Matson Line walked, and Peter Matthiessen declined comment.

My Name Is Ozymandias, King Of Mars

I met a traveler in the freezing sands :

Hello Neighbor

20 Years Ago, And Not Very Far Away,

Some light reflected off a planet, and into deep space to face eventual interception by a more or less intelligent life form on another world.  Ours.

If the newly discovered globe of Gliese 581C circled the sun instead of a Spectral Type M star  20 light years away in the constellation Libra , it would be toast. But Gliese 581 is only half as hot as the sun, 3,000 versus 6,000 Kelvins, so its  radiant energy peaks in the near infrared. This leaves the 12,000 mile diameter planet circling just six million miles distant from the diminutive red star basking in sunlight of  Earthly intensity, and endowing  its surface with temperatures that are nothing less than temperate,  some 30 to 100 Fahrenheit.

In short, the solar system has a habitable neighbor.

The discovery was made decades ago by Gliese 581C standards-- its year is only 13 earth days long.

That was this spring here in Cambridge, and fall to the European Southern Observatory team who added it to the stars first two planets using a telescope at La Silla Chile.

However you reckon the discovery's timing, they

"wouldn't be surprised if there is life on this planet,"

says Stephane Udry, a project  astronomer based at the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland" according to Britain's Guardian.

Though it's not cold outside, whether there's no kind of atmosphere on the third rock from the distant red dwarf remains unknown. But location is everything --it's never too early for realtors to join the campaign to expedite space telescope development.

or for those confidently predicting a technological singularity leading to near-immortality to give themselves something to do in their extended prime of life . The sooner we dispatch a slow robotic  space probe in  Gleise 581's direction, accelerating all the way,  the earlier it might return news of a fit destination for future human exploration.

   

Warning : Tangled Web

...   .Use Gentle Spin Cycle

In a lawsuit instigated by the anti-Tory  New Party calling for classroom  ban on Al Gore's opus, a Scottish judge ruled that the DVD's of An Inconvenient Truth flung like freebie Frisbies into the post box of every teacher in Britain may  be shown pupils in class , but ought to be presented as an example of political advocacy rather than science .

On Planet Gore CEI's Iain Murray gets his sporran in a knot attempting to present this Scots verdict as the dispatch of global warming to the guillotine after High Court condemnation, but The Guardian's David Adam's take maintains M'lud heartily endorsed the IPCC report in the process of warning against Al's hyperbole.  Adam's seems ahead on direct quotations , but Murray gets some points for creative ellipsis.  You better read both for yourself, as the judge sounds too bloody judicious to  ever make the grade on Fox or NPR.

Burma Shave

Reason's Kerry Holey relates  The state-controlled New Light of Myanmar response street protests--" a long, creatively grammatical "supplication" from the Minister of Religion" .

The root cause of the above-mentioned problems is the perpetration of internal and external destructionists, who are jealous of national development and stability, to harm all the government's endeavours through various methods.

Internal and external destructionists do not even spare the religion if it is in their interest. They dare instigate young monks... Included in their agitated words were even exaggerating the government's minor weaknesses by describing themselves as saviours of the troubled people. In some cases, the agitators ployed various wicked means such as painting pictures of torturing the monks, acting themselves for the torture and posting the news events on the Internet

Wonder where Yangon gets the goons who write this stuff ?
    Maybe they held another contest like this one

One Cheer For The Dear Leader

The  government of North Korean  dictator Kim Jung-Il  has shut down karaoke bars

on the grounds that they constitute a threat to society , like rabbit smugglers

If It Worked For CBS...

In 'Crucifying Apes on a Cross of Green', Neoconservationist  Iain Murray  laments:

The short-sighted idiocy of ... demand for biodiesel, which is being met in large part by the clearing of rainforests in Indonesia. The Daily Telegraph in the UK has the story of how these clearances involve the slaughter of the greatest of the Great Apes,the Orang-Utan:

"As jungles are rapidly replaced by palm oil plantations, the great apes starve...At a rehabilitation centre run by the charity Borneo Orang-utan Survival, there are more than 600, mostly orphaned babies.

The unspeakable truth is that this would not be happening...were it not for ...“green” fuels demand... It is sheer insanity "

                           What can be done to save them?

What Greener solution than giving the great apes Green Cards, and In-Sourcing them to the Potomac fever swamps to take jobs think tank denizens refuse?  Adding 600 Orangutans and the odd Bonobo to the gene pool of the Beltway's pundits , fact-checkers, science editors and talking heads would rank as an evolutionary milestone.

  Fred Smith                                                                                                           Fred Muggs

Dr. Jim Hansen  of Nasa's GISS has escalated the monkey business,  replying to CEI's Fatal Flaw du jour campaign with : The Real Deal: Usufruct And The Gorilla. It  begins  "Fox, Washington Times and their like have gone  bananas..."   Peel the whole stem here.                                  Planet Gore Of The Apes

While you wait for CEI's response to Nature Reports : Climate Change     

 

The Clash Of Civil Libations

A new wave of American Exceptionalism!

While Sam Huntington and Pobert Putnam" hunker down in the presence of diversity" and  Francis Fukuyama worries about " migrants who are more sure of who they are challenging  enlightenment values, " those bowling alone may encounter :

The Schwyz Guys
These descendants of Depression era arrivals from Tirol seek a quota of Hollywood roles to make up for The Untouchables slighting  of Italian Swiss Colony bootleggers.   

The Wyoming Dutch
Their forebears settled Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley, only to be scalped by Delawares during the French and Indian War; now they demand the extradition of the responsible tribe from its hideout on the Cheney ranch.

The Indomitable Snowdens
Descendants of Welsh countertenors indentured to Francis Scott Key. They claim performance copyright on the National Anthem and  demand reparations for centuries of skipped high notes.

Sami Get Your Gun
These Lapland clubbing and skinning folk emigrated en masse when told Americans consumed millions of Christmas seals. Their shamans demand the right to fire flintlocks up chimneys on Christmas Eve to ward off Saint Nicholas' reindeer.

Never Judge An Afghan By His Hat

Bad Mistake if he turns out to be a Baloch
Like 24-year-old Abdulmalik Rigi , who despite headgear of a  sort calculated to make   Russians and  Talibanis shudder , is not  a Pashtun.

The Baloch ethnic minority straddles an area across southeast Iran, southwest Pakistan and south Afghanistan. In February, the Iranian city of Zahedan was hit by a bomb—for which Rigi claimed responsibility—that killed 11 Revolutionary Guards, and placed Rigi at the top of Tehran’s hitlist. An article in the current issue of Prospect links Rigi’s guerilla attacks to a wider US-sponsored covert war against Iran.

The Perplexing Saturn Hex

Following a MIT lecture surveying collective phenomena in everything from Atomic nuclei to stellar inteiors, Hans Bethe  once remarked that there was no real difference between the crystallization of neutrons under the strong force in degenerate  stellar cores, and the assembly of floating silica micro-spheres  by electrostatic repulsion into what become the colorful flashes of optical Bragg diffraction we see in opals.

Couls Saturn 's symmetrical polar feature fit somewhere in the middle of Bethe's grand tour of order arising from competing  physical forces?  120 degree intersections are dictated by least energy considerations in a wide spectrum of systems.  Discrete-particle molecular dynamics simulations  generate six sided  patterns when used to model three-dimensional Rayleigh-Bénard convection- a phenomenon often clearly visible in a quietly heated soup pot !

A model reported by Rappaport in a 2006 Physical Review paper (Hexagonal convection patterns in atomistic simulated fluids D. C. Rapaport 14 February 2006) produces  an almost perfect array of hexagonally shaped convection rolls over a broad ranger of inputs, and under a narrower range of conditions , the model  forms a set of linear rolls. The nature of the flow within the convection cells , and quantitative development of the hexagonal pattern arises from realistic algorithims of  automated polygon subdivision . Despite the microscopic scale of the modeled interactions , the six sided patterns persist in  relatively large simulations with several million particles over a broad scale of  integration time steps

The big difference between this model microcosm and a big planet like Saturn is the enormous density and temperature  contrast from the visible surface down into the gas giants interior- it makes the Earths crust-mantle core arrangement look very simple indeed , as there ate may different phases with differing ranges of liquidity and viscosity , and several horizons corresponding to the critical points of the various components. Some, like hydrogen, only condense at great pressures. others , like ammonia and methane, may exhibit chemical interactions of mineralogical complexity- continent sized rafts of slushy mixed solids  afloat in Saturn's nether regions could greatly alter the simple picture of hexagonal convection cells in an earthly stock-pot. Saturn's supercritical gas atmosphere supports gradients of  density as great as pressures are high, and particles and aerosols may be vertically sorted, each different phase , liquid or solid , sinking to the altitude at which it is neutrally buoyant-- most frozen gases are dense than ice. Molecular weight may  accordingly play a major role in  how solids stack up in gas giant atmospheres in motion.

The matter is further complicated by the wild electrical storm activity near Saturn's poles - the planet's strong magnetic field rives rise to circumpolar bombardment of charged solar wind particles  in a manner akin to the Aurora Borealis ,and electrostatic charging effects on cloud particle may give rise via Debye screening to coulomb repulsion, size and charge segregation, and Saturnine natural history could even have a place for electrostatic crystalization of suspended particles into opal-like domains.

Live Earth's Heavy Metal Overlord

Methyl Mercury is the stuff of environmental  nightmares.

It's infamous from the syndrome called Minamata Disease, in which marine  microbes and algae convert  tiny traces of mercury into powerfully toxic compounds that concentrate in marine food chains to wreak neurological havoc on those consuming anything from tuna to tilefish. Mercury's chemical cousin  cadmium also forms  lethal  methylcadmium compounds, and is carcinogenic to boot. Little wonder the editorial page of  The New York Times obsesses over mercury  released by  distant coal burning and cadmium entering the Hudson watershed. Passions run high on the issue, Witness what one Live Earth speaker said :

"Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies,"

Pronounced Robert F Kennedy Jr. president of Waterkeeper Alliance ,somewhat  hoarse from shouting:

"This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors."

 

Yet  despite the Times passionate anti- heavy metals  campaign, its op-ed page magnanimously gives space to  the scientific wit and wisdom of the owner of the nation's only 'primary producer of Cadmium' . Before this Live Earth impresario could mention the heavy metal holdings in his Green portfolio, Primatologist Jane Goodall chimed in with a greeting in chimpanzee language, the reunited Smashing Pumpkins did "Tarantula." and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters offered an inflatable pig as a children's choir sang Another Brick in the Wall." 

To be fair, the upstaged political rock star never sought to become a Superfund site owner. His Pasminco  mine  royalties stemmed from a sweetheart deal  his daddy did with a bona fide Russian robber baron who worked for Big Oil. Occidental Petroleum president Armand Hammer leased the mine from Albert Gore Senior before Al Junior inherited his senate seat and his position as an A-list  toxic heavy metal magnate. Young Al  got his last check from the now dormant mine beneath his property in 2003.

Be Kind To Our Friends in The Swamp

This Sunday , all good Greens , and countless greenflies , will celebrate the centennial of Rachel Carson's birth. The numbers attending this year's festivities will of course be lower than they might, for if The World Health Organization is to be credited , there are between 300 and 500 million cases of malaria annually, a million of them fatal.

Never fear- Green funding will not suffer. The deceased are largely Third World infants without a credit card to their name. Why cavil that tens of millions of them would be alive but for the ban on applying DDT to their thatched hovels, when their absence has scarcely trimmed the fuse on the population bomb ?  Had they lived to drive the rising spiral of Greenhouse gases , the inconvenient truth is that arctic meltdown would have accelerated , thawing ever more tundra into an ideal mosquito habitat, and creating a vicious circle of insect borne disease.

Give thanks instead for the living. The tropical DDT ban has so far killed scarcely one child per square kilometer , while saving literally thousands of mosquitoes per square meter--sixty of the peaceable creatures share a square yard of pesticide-free organic swamp. To do the math is to discover one of the wonders of post-modern creation. Over the half century since Silent Spring, mother Earth has been graced by tens of billions of extra mosquitoes per absent child , yet not a single polar bear cub has perished of malaria.

We owe it to Rachel Carson's memory to sustain our winged allies in the war on terrifying population growth by promoting the ecological recovery of the nation's capital. So write Former Next President Gore before the 4th of July , and demand a District Of Columbia-wide ban on insect repellents during his LiveEarth concert. The Tree  Of  Life cannot flourish unless watered with the blood of patriots.

A Warm Day On Planet Harvard

“We are getting our first good look at a completely alien world,” says Heather Knutson a graduate student here at Harvard  who’s the lead author of a paper featuring the first map of an extrasolar planet , in the last issue of Nature.

“We felt a little like Galileo “  said she.  More like Giordano Bruno burnt at the stake if the data are to be believed. It's a trifle warm on HD1897333b , as the Jupiter -sized planet orbits its fairly sun-like star at a distance of only 3 million miles, its sunshine is a thousand times more intense than Earth's

60 light-years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula ,  HD1897333b's  '" year " is only 2.2 days long. It is the closest known planet transiting between its star and the Earth.33 hours of observations by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, using the cold-mirror Spitzer Space Telescope' collected a quarter-million data sets at a wavelength of 8 microns.  Although Spitzer's 32x32 pixel platinum silicide infrared detector array could not resolve the planet into a disk  , a simple longitudinal map was made by  measuring the rotating planet's  brightness in pole-to-pole strips to assemble into a single picture.

And a pretty scary picture it is. This artist's impression of the square pixel map features a “hot spot” dwarfing the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. While Jupiter's Red Spot is only 30 degrees warmer than its frigid surroundings , HD 189733b's crimson hot spot is literally incandescent--973 K ,  which equals a scorching 1,700 degrees F.

There’s also a windburn problem. “ While Earth’s jet stream blows at around 200 miles per hour"  says co-author David Charbonneau ," the jet stream on HD 189733b may blow as fast as 6,000 miles per hour.”  He notes that  models indicate that without the high Mach number winds , the planet's dark side would freeze. The Spitzer radiometer instead recorded  a maximum temperature difference of about 500 degrees F , so temperatures on the night side linger in the balmy 1,200's. This is positively tepid compared to a planet being published in the latest issue of Nature.

Mad dogs and Englishmen would simply vaporize if they went out in the noonday sun on HD 149026b.  At 4,000 Fahrenheit , only refractory oxide particles like TiO and molten silicate aerosols are thought to comprise the clouds in its hellish sky.

CREEPING CRINOIDS !

If you think you'd : "rather be a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas..." you may have company.

Most who remember Crinoids,  AKA 'Sea Lillies' , from Biology 101, recall them as stalky fossils no more animated than corals or stromatolites. Like horseshoe crabs, they're still around , but until recent years have been dismissed as static throwbacks photographed standing idly on the seabed , like Neocrinus decorus here , or trawled up stone-dead from the depths where they've been waiting out evolution for ages.

No longer.The spry 400 million year old species have been caught on videotape  scooting about the abyss on their petal-tips like the Addams Family's handy pet heirloom  , Hand.  Henceforth, gals receiving flowers with cards from J.Alfred Prufrock had better think twice before opening the box. And watch where you walk your  lobster , too.

Shaken, Not Stirred

In Geochemistry Geophysics & Geosystems 8, Q03017 (2007) Australian National University researchers Jinshui Huang and Geoffrey Davies describe three-dimensional modeling of melting and mixing in the  Earth's  deep mantle . Their results jibe with the surviving  ground truth visible at the Earth's surface -- only about 3% of the mantle has been spared melting at some point in the past. But that does not mean the whole ball of wax has been homogenized.

Upwelling solid mantle melts at mid-ocean ridges to form new crust, which eventually sinks back into the mantle at deep ocean trenches . But the brew is not well stirred-despite convective mixing 

Their computer model  shows how chemical patchiness in the mantle survives for about 2 billion years in spite of the surface turnover

Billionaire With Strong Back Wanted

To Wrestle Monster Minerals Into Museum 
No wonder the Aztecs believed in a magical underworld called Xibalba.

Once upon a time in Mexico, it was 136 degrees in the shady interior of this cathedral sized crystal cavern. As eons passed , the submerged pool of  calcium sulfate brine sprouted anhydrite and gypsum crystals the size of the columns of the   Parthenon. 

While Central America and Mexico abound  with  Lost mines , the region's caves are usually filled with dull calcite stalactites.

Not  those beneath Las Delicias in Chihuahua's mining district - the spectacular find is already a major tourist attraction  But don't drink the water-it's anything but delicious , still supercharged with  calcium salts.

This riot of Plaster of Paris on steroids came to light as the Naica zinc mining company dewatered new levels to uncover more  ore.  Work stopped  out of sheer awe of the fearful symmetry emerging as the cavern drained. Yet though fit to make Superman feel homesick , these crystals are not the largest on Earth

Six sided beryl  'logs' twice the size of the Las Delicias crystals are found in coarse-grained silicate  rock formations called pegmatites in Russia. But they are enclosed , while these perfect anhydrite prisms are free-standing and mighty enough to relegate the gypsum blades found  years ago in the nearby 'Cave of Swords' to toothpick status.

Stone Me A Toad

Don't toss it on the barbie--it may have eaten a crow AP/PA Photo

Since cane toads were introduced to Australia in 1935, they have colonized 1.2 million square kilometres of that country . They might just be getting started, says ecologist Mark Urban of the University of California, Santa Barbara in Proceedings of the Royal Society B

"The untapped habitat lies in temperate, coastal regions of western and southern Australia - around Perth and Adelaide, for example. That may seem a long way from where they are now, but the toads could get there,...They have an uncanny ability to hide out in trucks and airplanes." 

They have also been evolving longer , stronger legs since their arrival , witness this buffed two pound specimen of Bufo Marinus caught, appropriately enough, in Darwin

Live from Mars , Sort Of

Here's  Mars in motion- a Rover's eye view of a jaunt though the Columbia Hills

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070312/multimedia/070312-5b.mov

And a run along the brink of Victoria Crater ,courtesy of Hollywood's best photoanimation software ,

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070312/multimedia/070312-5.mov

Details of how it was done at : http://www.nature.com/news/index.html

Ents Beware !

New Zealand's photogenic forests made it a natural for filming The Lord Of The Rings, but it takes more than an occasional blockbuster to make a dent in the isolated nation's energy bills. Last year, says The Economist , its forest industry exported 290 million dollars worth of lumber, but its imported fossil fuel bill came to 4.5 billion.

So taking a page from  biotech wizard Saruman's diversification into Orc exports , the Kiwis are contemplating turning to woodland molecular biology to make up the difference. There is no lack of termites in the Southern hemisphere, and researchers down under are combing the insects stomach enzymes for clues as to how to efficiently digest and ferment cellulose into fuel ethanol. Instead of quaffing   Green Dragon ale , Forest Rangers are hard at work investigating which fast growing trees can best turn lands too poor for pasture into a rich source of renewable biomass fit for fermentation.

So while sheep may safely graze , trees had better be on the lookout for  agribusiness merger and acquisition men.Two New Zealand Crown Research Institutes, Scion and AgResearch are partnering with Diversa to investigate the feasibility of producing enough "Treethanol" to fuel all the vehicles in New Zealand.

Auckland's  BioJoule start-up is planning a pilot plant to produce ethanol from willows coppiced (cut back annually ) to yield chips to be turned into ethanol. This would produce two valuable by-products: unsulphonated lignin, a polymer, and xylose, the wood sugar used in dyeing and diet foods. Selling them  should enable  ethanol production for a direct cost of $ 1.13 per gallon , cheaper than  American corn ($1.44) and only a quarter a gallon more than Brazilian sugar-cane alcohol.

HOT ICE

American politicians visiting Antarctica flock to the erstwhile South Pole to be photographed standing on their heads, but Chinese scientific tourists have lately favored an even more remote locale- Ice Dome Argus , a thousand kilometers to the East, and by virtue of its 4,063 meter elevation , probably the coldest place in the world.

Unsurprisingly , it stands atop some of the thickest . and hopefully oldest ice on the planet, and will be the scene of an heroic core drilling project as the International Polar Year program proceeds. The ice record may far exceed the present limit of  800,000  year-old cores , affording insight into the possible role of CO2 in the ancient  transition between Ice Ages spaced  41,000 years or so apart , and the last few, which have come at roughly 100,000 year intervals .

The reason these hardy  Chinese scientists look so cheerful may not be The East Is Red blaring in the background , but that they are about to leave the Deep South.  Fall is in the air in Antarctica , and Dome Argus is  no place to spend the winter, even if it promises to outstrip Greenland or the old Soviet Vostok Antarctic station as a treasure trove of buried palaeoclimate data .

Lest We Forget

The Afghan Taliban has just overrun Musa Qala in Helmand Province,and al rayeh, the Black Flag of Al Qaeda has replaced the NATO ensign and the Union Jack.Grit your teeth and read the Kiplingesque Peshawar Frontier Post for more. Click map to make it interactive   

In Kazakhstan did Borat's Khan...

A stately pleasure dome decree.........
Dearer than Dearest Leader Nursultan Nazarbayev moved  Kazakhstan's capital  from Almaty to Astana a decade ago, but more grandiose plans are afoot

Kazakhstan has unveiled a new architectural project for its capital Astana -- a giant transparent tent that will contain an indoor city.

The 150m-high (500ft) dome, designed by UK architect Norman Foster, will be built in just over a year.The tent is being made from special material that absorbs sunlight to create the effect of summer inside....

Underneath, in an area larger than 10 football stadiums, will be a city with squares and cobbled streets, canals, shopping centres and golf courses. The idea is to recreate summer, so that when the outside temperature is -30C, the residents of the Kazakh capital can play outdoor tennis..."  Thanks to Things for bringing  Xanadu up to date

 

Eric The Green ?

The Scythe is mightier than the Hockey Stick when it comes to getting the attention  of those disposed to deny that climate is warming. Greenland's reapers , The Economist (7 September 2006) reports , have little to be grim about . They have brought in the first barley harvest in 600 years. The icy isle was colonized in the comparatively balmy centuries around the turn of the Millennium, when vacationing Vikings introduced if not Martha's Vineyard, at least Newfoundland ,to that noble Scandinavian custom, the keg party , which transformed American politics by  paving the way for Senator Kennedy's amphibious assault on Chappaquiddick.

Viking interest in exploring New England may have been cut short when Long Ship's crews simultaneously ran out of beer and discovered poison ivy.  One hopes palynologists can illuminate this historical question by assaying bogs between Newfoundland and Newport to see if shifting medieval levels  of  urushirol ( the evil active ingredient in Poison Ivy) may shed light on that fearsome vegetables northern migration.

In any event, Greenland's salad days rolled downhill into the Little Ice Age,and by 1400, its European  immigrants had all perished of starvation, unable to eke a living as the growing season contracted and the ice fields grew.  Now there's crispy Chinese cabbage , barley, and to teach warming enthusiasts a lesson in scientific humility, a truly alarming surplus of iceberg lettuce.

                   That Ain't Hay

If Greenpeace gets wind of what's growing in Greenland ,  we will never hear the end of it.

Where barley already grows, frost-proof  GM rye  will follow.Ersatz Icelandic vodka now made from Bulgarian grain may give way to the native spirit of Greenland, flowing south from Qaqortoq to become a Green fashion statement in the hemp-clad end of the Hamptons.                                                                      

So brace yourselves , Martha's Vinlanders , for  politically loaded Low-carb Greenland beer ads featuring the wooden visages of  Alegore the Grim and Hiljari the Horrible.  The runes cast by the Finnish focus group wizards foretell fossil ice hawkers planting glacier-proof GM tomatoes, and the wind blows fair for an invasion of extra-virgin Danish olive oil , and Labrador chardonnay watery enough to stand up to Ice Age ice.  But go easy on the Siberian Champagne-  too many CO2 bubbles can ruin a carbon neutral cocktail party.

Women and Children First

Nobody surfs a tsunami

  A few of the extremists who ride Hawaii’s greatest waves were on the  scene when the December 26 2004 Indian Ocean monster  killed 300,000 dwelling on its shores , but if any tried to ride it, none has lived to tell  .Yet many surfers the tsunami caught sleeping on the beach, escaped drowning, reminding  us that in many places the tragedy’s magnitude was amplified by  cultural as well as  natural causes . Tsunamis strike as waves, but transform into floods as they roll miles inland. That is where a large and  unnecessary fraction of the victims perished. Not from trauma, or being washed out to sea , but simply because they never learned to swim a stroke.  

The reason they should have still abides. Thousands of fathoms beneath the Andamn Sea's halcyon surface, where along an arc of darkness called the Sunda Trench, seismic strain energy  is accumulating once again. The Indian Ocean can expect a repeat of the black  Boxing Day 2004 when  a release of  energy rivaling a string of atom bombs tore the seabed asunder, throwing up submarine cliffs in seconds, and launching landslides fit to fill  the Grand Canyon along a rift a thousand kilometers long. The trillions of tons of water set in motion by 200 megatons of rolling tectonic thunder inflicted a death toll that dwarfed Hiroshima .

Within hours, the wave cast  millions unskilled in swimming into a nightmare wipeout of waters opaque with lethal debris. Board and body surfers ride the oceans wind-driven surface, but a tsunami’s mass and momentum lurk like an iceberg’s far below. Even before the wall of  liquid death tore inland, it began  wreaking havoc on the living coral in the sea. Thousands of miles of  fringe reefs were utterly smashed. Reef biologists view this is an unmitigated catastrophe, but  warm-water surfers look on the underwater devastation with different eyes. Coral is their natural enemy,

The Great White Swan

BEAKS

Soon after Peter Benchley and Steven Spielberg launched the hydraulic shark  that set the stage for  Ted Kennedy’s moonlight swim, Martha’s Vineyard, aka Amity  Island  faced a hostile takeover by real monsters. Their predatory  reach rivaled a Velociraptor, with attitude and table manners to match. Having killed off many native animals ,they turned to terrorizing small children, breaking the bones of one.

Within a few years they owned the place. At the invasion’s peak, they formed salt pond flotillas outweighing  a T.Rex. Nothing escaped the contempt of  those dreadnaught English swans .The alpha males grabbed mallards by the head, and with a serpentine flick , whipped the feckless ducks clear out of the water.

They chased Canadian geese honking down island onto lawns and manicured golf courses where the refugee’s failure to seek rest rooms did not pass un-noticed.

Avian flu was unheard of in 1979, but local game wardens decided to roll out the unwelcome mat anyway. It was informally agreed that uninvited swan deserved honorary vermin status once the summer people departed along with the Secret Service. For each fall, the Vineyard reverts to what it was when Mathew Gosnold discovered the Wampanoag vacationing there in 1602: a happy hunting ground.

What drove Euroswans flocking across The Pond and into a hail of ought-four shot a generation ago? Some strange resonance with the simultaneous Eurotrash migration? No matter- 10-Guage goose guns convinced most to get out of Dodge and head for the Hamptons pronto. It wasn’t pretty.  Thank God for Harry Worthington Cheney was not loaded for swan. As worn by its original owner, a swan’s down vest sheds quail shot like Kevlar, yet few hunters bother to reload. Grain-fed, the great white birds were a medieval delicacy. But you are what you eat.  Gosnold soon discovered that feral swans favorite fare is the bottom of a pond, and they taste accordingly.

The invaders took a licking, but repeated inoculation with birdshot failed to stem the plague. Thick as bricks and dumb as their dinosaur forebears,Euroswans soon swarmed  Edgartown harbor and Menemsha Pond  like sailboats on the 4th of July, to beget a new generation of dual citizenship cygnets to be  indelibly imprinted with America as the next stop after Iceland and Goose Bay. Come next  Memorial Day, they’ll be back-with unwanted baggage.

This year we dodged Asia's lethal avian flu. Only one of th sick birds that alighted Thames-side in January delivered its swan song in Minnesota this August.  Not one was seen on the East Coast , but next year , once again  thousands of vacationers, human and canine, will come to swan around  shores shores that  have already spread Lyme disease coast to coast with returning pets as the vectorsand many a PETA member among the victims. But why worry when doomed pet starfish and golden retrievers don’t carry avian flu, and cygnets are hard to get through airport security?

Dream on-swans don’t go home on Labor Day, they just move south . Whether the Vineyard , Texas, or Maryland’s Eastern Shore shooting is a contact sport for men and dogs alike.  So is fishing. Bits of mechanical shark, pyrotechnic souvenirs of Spielberg’s many takes, still decorate swan nests in the Menemsha reeds, along with uncountable salt water wet flies and rods chucked by liability shy Robert Redford  wannabes fearful of catching an eyeball in a casting frenzy.

The horrifying reality of Vineyard  marine biology is that you are likelier to be swallowed like Jonah than land a legal striped bass in a week of  plug casting at the nearest beach. Surfers likewise worry mostly about submerged boulders. Apart from a  diminutive baby sand shark  taking an unseemly interest in the author’s big toe as he waded awaiting a ferry, his only real shock from a triangular fin in  Vineyard waters was 200 volts from a pizza-pan sized torpedo disturbed at dead low tide in Menemsha.

He has a lady witness to that electrifying fish story. Unlike the hydraulic monster that rules the nation’s collective nightmares, the  electric ray was real as the great white  waterfowl gliding in the background  After many a summer dies the swan, but Peter  Benchley did not make it through last winter.   He knew more than he let on about natural history. Seeing a vee of white winging into Menemsha next spring, even a scary movie writer might be very afraid.

copyight 2006 Russell Seitz