No disrespect to Halloween Jack, the Goddess of Minutiae, and the Goddess-in-Training, but for now I gotta swap Crazy Apple Rumors in for As the Apple Turns. For perfectly good reasons, AtAT has been updating irregularly and sparsely for the last several months. Jack turned out reams of marvelous stuff every single week-day for years, a pace that would have killed an ordinary mortal. Visit the archives of the site to see what I mean. He's taking a well-deserved break.

I hope someday to restore AtAT to its prominent spot on the blogroll. In the meantime, the care and feeding of the little bundle of Anyatude is much more important.

5:15:32 PM      

I'm sorry, but on the face of it this plan sounds like the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Can someone with some physics background back me up here?

A scientist in Oklahoma is planning to build giant, anti-comet airbags that can be sent into space and inflated to deflect the course of world-threating lumps of celestial rock.

Far better to send up a space ship equipped with a massive airbag that could be inflated to several miles wide and used to gently buffet the invading solar body away from a collision course with earth.

"It seems a safe, simple and realistic idea," Burchard told the magazine's latest edition.

The magazine in question is the New Scientist.

[Boing Boing, by way of Dave ]

2:08:57 PM      

We'll see more and more topical items appearing in the news, and spreading throughout Blogaria. Here are a few items I found interesting.

Fear. A poem by C. K. Williams. [New York Times]

Michiko Kakutani writes about how The Information Age Processes a Tragedy without mentioning weblogs. [New York Times]

A review of Among the Heroes, also in the New York Times:

What you end up thinking most about is what it might have felt like that day ~ and what it has felt like at less dramatic moments in our own lives ~ to be faced with a moment of such profound and clear requirements to act for the good of others. It is almost a necessary feature of placid and prosperous lives that moments of such supreme moral clarity are kept to a minimum. And while all of us want peace and prosperity, we still long for such moments; we need them, in order to learn in the deepest sense who we are and what our relatively brief time on the planet might actually be intended to accomplish. The heroes of Flight 93 at least were given the answer to those questions.

Sometimes we have to hear from individual people to appreciate the magnitude of a tragedy. September 11: An Oral History" [New York Times]

People I knew died on September 11. With ties to Boston (where three of the planes originated) and New York as well as DC, I suspect that I was in a prime demographic to be affected. Many people I know suffered devasting losses. We are not done with the accounting.

I've just signed up for another jewelry class which begins on September 11 (in the evening). I haven't decided yet whether I'll attend the first class, or go to a memorial service being held at my church. I'd like to keep living my life... but I also know it will never be the same.

3:04:41 AM