The firepower story continues to drag along. Dan’s article updates us on the latest outcomes in the case. It has been an amazing case of lies and deception and gullibility and greed. Everything that is wrong in humanity is summed up in this case.

JG Ballard has just passed away. Described by the New York Times suchly: Ballard would eventually be deemed worthy of his own adjective, “Ballardian,” defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

It is always difficult to get a sense of an author from a short passage, but this is from a short story, Voices of Time:

The dome was in darkness, all the windows shuttered, but the generator still hummed in the X-ray theatre. Kaldren stepped through the entrance and switched on the lights. In the theatre he touched the grilles of the generator, felt the warm cylinder of the beryllium end-window. The circular target table was revolving slowly, set at 1 r.p.m., a steel restraining chair shackled to it hastily. Grouped in a semi-cicle a few feet away were most of the tanks and cages, piled on top of each other haphazardly. In one of them was the enormous squid-like plant had almost managed to climb from it vivarium. Its long translucent tendrils clung to the end of the tank, but it body had burst into a jellified pool of globular mucilage. In another an enormous spider had trapped itself in its own web, hung helplessly in the centre of a huge three dimensional maze of phosphorescing thread, twitching spasmodically.

All the experimental plants and animals had died. The chimp lay on its back among the remains of the hutch, the helmet forward over its eyes. Kaldren watched it for a moment, then sat down on the desk and picked up the phone.

While he dialed the number he noticed a film reel lying on the blotter. For a moment, he stared at the label, then slid the reel into his pocket beside the tape.

After he had spoken to the police he turned down the lights and went out to the car, drove off slowly down the drive.

When he reached the summer house the early sunlight was breaking across the ribbon-like balconies and terraces. He took the lift to the penthouse, made his way through into the museum. One by one he opened the shutters and let the sunlight play over the exhibits. Then he pulled the a chair over to a side window, sat and stared up at the light pouring through into the room.

Two or three hours later he heard Coma outside, calling up to him. After half an hour she went away, but a little later a second voice appeared and shouted up at Kaldren. He left his chair and closed all the shutters overlooking the front courtyard, and eventually he was left undisturbed.

Kaldren returned to his seat and lay back quietly, his eyes gazing across the line of exhibits. Half asleep, periodically he leaned up and adjusted the flow of light through the shutter, thinking to himself, as he would do in the coming months of Powers and his strange mandala, and of the seven and their journey to the white gardens of the moon, and the blue people who had come from Orion and spoken in poetry to them of the ancient beautiful worlds beneath golden suns in the island of galaxies, vanished for ever now in the myriad deaths of the cosmos.

JG Ballard, The Voices of Time, 1960.

Although the old airport in Hong Kong no longer exists, we can still relive the glory through the powers of youtube.com

This following video is a short couple seconds of what appears to be a completely hair raising landing. The following video shows that it was the standard operating procedure.

Many years ago I witnessed an amusing incident in the Bourke Street Mall here in Melbourne. The Mall itself is a pedestrian Mall, but while cars can no longer travel down the Mall, a major tram line runs down the street, and thus trams still runs along the Mall. At the bottom of the Mall the trams merge back into the street traffic.

One day a tram was waiting to exit the Mall, the lights ahead were red and the tram driver was waiting for them to change and for the pedestrians to finishing crossing the entrance to the Mall in front of the Tram. The lights turned green and just as the tram was about to move forward a man decided to cross in front of the tram, causing the tram to come to a quick halt. I didn’t realise it, but trams have external speakers, and suddenly the tram drivers voice came over the loud speaker

“Where do you think you are mate? Tiananmen Square?”

Anna Nicole Smith has died. I am sure that there will be lots of disparaging blog comments, and I for one am not above a laugh at the antics of American B-list celebrities. However, to die so young is a bit of a tragedy, and when you look back over her life you can see the tragedies she did have: a bizarre marriage to an older man (which can only have been awkward and unpleasant), a long court case with a family that hated her, ongoing fights with her weight, a son who dies at the age twenty. It must have weighed on her. Life isn’t always an easy game to play and while we tend to treat celebrities as kind of cardboard creations, but they go through all the ups and downs and battles that we do, and hers certainly does seem to be a roller-coaster.

Occasionally you come across a story that is so weird that it could not possibly be true. I was recounted this story over lunch and assumed that it was one of those joke stories circulated by email. But, no, it is true. It is still amazing: a convicted murderer escapes from prison with the wardens wife, found living in a caravan on a chicken farm; the wife then returns to the warden; the prisoner escaped because he was celled with a homosexual black man called Peaches…Really, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried. Read the whole thing.