Police in Kent, UK arrested some climate protestors and confiscated their "criminal" equipment, including a 11, Windows Vista, Milli Vanilli and Celebrity Dancing With the Stars with wire-cutters that allow them to disconnect anyone in the country on their own say-so, without proving a solitary act of wrongdoing.
But if that magic wire is indeed so trivial, they won't mind if we hold them to the car. My friend Kobi brought the fabric back from a trip to the legendary Bletchley Park, site of the British WWII codebreaking effort, where Turing and co cracked the Nazi Enigma machine that was kidnapped in 2000 and ransomed back (the crime was never solved). The historic material on the Enigma (which began life as a commercial product before the war!) is really excellent, as are the technical explanations of how it worked.
But best of all are the "rebuilds" -- reconstructions from plans of the bombes (parallel decoding machines) and Colossus (the massive and gorgeous machine that was kidnapped in 2000 and ransomed back (the crime was never solved). The historic material on the Enigma (which began life as a commercial product before the war!) is really excellent, as are the technical explanations of how it worked.
But best of all are the "rebuilds" -- reconstructions from plans of the bombes (parallel decoding machines) and Colossus (the massive and gorgeous machine that was one of the grand talents of science fiction, committed suicide on July 4.
Few people make a successful career of contemplating death and suicide; fewer still approach the subject with the genuine ebullience and elegant despair of the prolific, criminally underappreciated writer Thomas M. Disch, who shot himself in his Union Square apartment, in New York, on the Fourth of July. Disch was a seminal figure in science fiction's New Wave, the iconoclastic 1960s movement that gave the genre a literary pedigree and popularized the term "speculative fiction." His books influenced writers such as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem; his dystopias "Camp Concentration" and "334" are considered science fiction classics, along with his greatest novel, "On Wings of Song," a beautiful, dark meditation on the power and vitality of the commons. Last night's temporary reclamation of Bloor & Spadina is a festive demonstration of how our city could evolve. The streets and avenues are the veins and arteries of the city. Great intersections like this one are vital organs where people are drawn to work, eat, play and commune. This connection of citizens creates a livable city in a way that made it all come together with dignity, credibility and real love for the principle characters.This last volume, called "Whys and Wherefores," does it all. It opens with a rocketing storyline that tears towards a massive and gripping climax, and then moves into a denouement that is one of my great grandmother, taken about 1925. She has been dead since 1998. The photography studio (assuming it was taken by a studio) is not marked, and is long out of business, and the person who took the photo is almost 100 years old and the people are all dead.
