Soldiers, Against Nature
Source: nerminehammam.com
…A man got into the carriage and began to play on a fiddle made apparently of an old blacking-box, and though I am quite unmusical the sounds filled me with the strangest emotions. I seemed to hear a voice of lamentation out of the Golden Age. It told me that we are imperfect, incomplete, and no more like a beautiful woven web, but like a bundle of cords knotted together and flung into a corner. It said that the world was once all perfect and kindly, and that still the kindly and perfect world existed, but buried like a mass of roses under many spadefuls of earth….It said that with us the beautiful are not clever and the clever are not beautiful, and that the best of our moments are marred by a little vulgarity, or by a needle-prick out of sad recollection, and that the fiddle must ever lament about it all. It said that if only they who live in the Golden Age could die we might be happy, for the sad voices would be still; but they must sing and we must weep until the eternal gates swing open.
It’s burst into flames! It’s burst into flames and it’s falling it’s crashing! Watch it; watch it! Get out of the way; Get out of the way! Get this, Charlie; get this, Charlie! It’s fire… and it’s crashing! It’s crashing terrible! Oh, my! Get out of the way, please! It’s burning and bursting into flames and the… and it’s falling on the mooring mast. And all the folks agree that this is terrible; this is the one of the worst catastrophes in the world. [indecipherable] its flames… Crashing, oh! Four- or five-hundred feet into the sky and it… it’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It’s smoke, and it’s in flames now; and the frame is crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity! And all the passengers screaming around here. I told you; it—I can’t even talk to people, their friends are out there! Ah! It’s… it… it’s a… ah! I… I can’t talk, ladies and gentlemen. Honest: it’s just laying there, mass of smoking wreckage. Ah! And everybody can hardly breathe and talk and the screaming. 0000000, I… I… I’m sorry. Honest: I… I can hardly breathe. I… I’m going to step inside, where I cannot see it. Charlie, that’s terrible.
When you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.
The latest from Pogo, from his trip to Bhutan.
While a picture is worth a thousand words, a sound is worth a thousand pictures.
Autopsy of a Pentium III processor
“Leviathan was made in two discrete locations: off the coast of Phuket in Thailand and in the Hudson River off the island of Manhattan. The buckled fuselage of the US Airways disaster is hoisted by cranes from the ice floes surrounding New York in winter. Meanwhile, at the other side of the world, the wreck of an old U.S. bomber is lowered beneathe the tropical waves. These remnants of the Vietnam War are being sunk onto the seabed in order to restimulate Phuket’s lucrative dive tourism industry affected by the recent Tsunami’s destruction of the indigenous coral reef environment.”
Many more worthy videos from Mosse here: http://richardmosse.com/video.php
Infra-red photography from Africa. http://richardmosse.com/photography.php?pid=1
Back when television stations would actually go off the air
