Monday, October 28, 2002

[Colin Glassey 1 PM] There is a an obituary for a heroic woman in today's New York Times. Alina Pienkowska was a Polish Nurse who worked with the Gdansk dockyard workers. Widowed at an early age with a small child she is not a typical hero. But that is what she was when she grabbed a megaphone to rebuke Lech Walesa and the rest of the strike committee for accepting a pay raise that would have helped only the dock workers in Gdansk. She was persuasive and after a few hours, the strike continued in solidarity with the other strikers throughout Poland. Dead at 50 from cancer. R.I.P. 12:54:00 PM     [Colin Glassey 11:50 AM] My comment on the Chechen terrorists being killed (along with 110+ of the hostages) thanks to Russian use of an unknown gas: This was a typical secretive Russian operation. I think the idea behind the operation was correct, a standard special forces assault on the theater would have been a disaster. But the right way to carry out this operation is to tell the hospitals in Moscow as soon as the operation starts what they are doing and how to save the hostages. Instead, in a typically Soviet style, the Special Forces told no one in the medical community what they were doing and told them nothing about how to save the lives of the hostages. As a result some 110 people are dead. Even now, two days later, the gas that was used has not been revealed. Doubtless because the Russians hope to use the gas again the next time hostages are taken. I'm sorry but this is the sort of trick that only works once in the modern world. They want to hide the details, but the information will come out. Still, so long as they saved more than 70% of the hostages, it is a success. On a related note, the Islamic religion took some additonal blows this last week. On the same day we have John Allen Muhammad arrested for murdering 10 people in the D.C. area, we have Islamic Chechen terrorists threatening to kill 800+ civilians in Moscow and their martyrdom tapes show up on Al Jazzira TV station. Sure sounds like a religion of peace to me. 12:01:18 PM     [Colin Glassey 11:40 AM] A good essay on the evolution of Halloween in the United States from Salon.com. Summary: like Christmass in the United States, Halloween is a fairly modern invention with some very old but distant roots. The direct antecedent seems to be Scotish traditions of gathering together on Halloween to try and fortell the future. The relation to Samhain is clear to me, in that Samhain was the time when the spirit world was closest to the world of the living. Here is a longer quote from the essay: The jack-o'-lantern, now an indispensable Halloween motif, didn't emerge until the first decade of the 20th century, although the Scots had a folk tradition of carving lanterns out of turnips -- a much harder job with a much smaller vegetable. Those lanterns were linked to a legendary figure named Jack who was so incorrigible that neither Heaven nor Hell would have him, and so he was condemned to walk the earth until Judgment Day, toting his turnip lamp. Like the Will-o-the-Wisp (aka marsh gas) he liked to use his lantern to lure passersby to their doom in swamps and bogs. He wasn't particularly linked to Halloween until the dawn of the 20th century, and no one seems to know how pumpkins came to replace turnips. It seems obvious to me why pumpkins came to replace turnips, they are much better than turnips by every standard: bigger and more scary (i.e. orange). 11:45:04 AM

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