Boing Boing reader Kumar Corcoran did this sweet Photoshop of a well-armed Lord Jesus. I blogged a crappy, low-res copy found on a third-hand image hosting website months ago, and he kindly rooted around in old hard drives out in the garage and found the original, along with some other 'shopped delights I'll save for future posts. Thanks, Kumar.
Susannah Breslin has posted a new story to The War Project website, her independent online project featuring first-person stories of veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Every as-told-to story is based on an in-person interview Susannah conducted with the veteran, and a photo portrait she took of the veteran. About today's story:
Sgt. George Zubaty, whose father was a Vietnam War veteran, grew up in a small southern town and was deployed as an Army infantryman to Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003. In his story, he talks about being among the first to enter Baghdad, what Iraq and Cormac McCarthy's The Road have in common, and why some soldiers have more problems than others.
'Every single vehicle we come by is shot up, burnt, tank tread down the center of it. I mean, you're looking in a car, and there'll be mom, dad, kids, everything's burnt, everything's torn up. Remember, it's 2003. At that point, Army units, they were training to do a general movement warfare type action. The whole point of our training was, just kill people. It wasn't soft and nice. It was, you've been shot at, you shoot back until the firing stops.'
You can follow The War Project on Twitter.
I love this shot of Survival Research Laboratories founder Mark Pauline operating the 'Big Arm,' which is about to pick up the 'Running Machine' in its mecha-maw, then slam it back down to the ground. Lots more images and archived video here.
On August 18th, an expedition team will be heading out to the Titanic site to create a 3D map of the wreckage 2.5 miles beneath the sea. 1,522 people died in the Titanic shipwreck in 1912; oceanographer Robert Ballard discovered the remains in 1985, and since then a bunch of different expeditions have headed out there in an attempt to salvage artifacts or take photos. But this one appears to be by far the most technologically intensive and expensive mission.
The 'dream team' of archaeologists, oceanographers and other scientists want to get the best assessment yet on the two main sections of the ship, which have been subjected to fierce deep-ocean currents, salt water and intense pressure.
...The expedition will use imaging technology and sonar devices that never have been used before on the Titanic wreck and to probe nearly a century of sediment in the debris field to seek a full inventory of the ship's artifacts.
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'The Lost Children of Hamelin'
...Folklore has assimilated the figure of the Pied Piper with that of a rat-catcher. The first surviving reference to rodents appears in the 16th-century Zimmern Chronicle (c.1559–65), followed by Weyer’s aforementioned Delusions of the Devil, both written almost three centuries after the tragedy.
If the rats were most likely a later addition rather than an original element of the Hamelin episode, they gave depth to the tale and resonated in the popular imagination thanks to a play of macabre symbolic associations. The image of a rat-infested mediæval town instantly brings to mind thoughts of the plague. Plagues and epidemics have had a continuous impact on the collective imagination, taking us back to the Ten Plagues of Egypt in Exodus: biblical plagues were a punishment from God. The Piper, able to defy the curse with the power of his music, is thus invested with supernatural abilities.
In mediæval representations, Death presented himself as a skeleton wearing a colourful pied attire, a jester who always laughs last (perhaps the reportedly widespread fear of clowns – see FT226:34–41 – might even derive from this image). The Pied Piper thus becomes the lord of the rats, the Black Death (known at the time as the Great Death or simply the Pestilence) personified, and the one responsible for taking the lives of the 130 children of Hamelin.
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