That’s what happens when an Antonov-12 runs right off the runway, engines churning, and hits a parked Boeing 727. But that isn’t the interesting bit. The 727 was 9L-LEF; and what it was doing in Pointe Noire, Congo-Brazzaville, when it’s meant to be with Iraqi Airways is a very good question indeed. Like all the…
Read More Crunch!The story that Israeli satellite TV viewers have been experiencing constant interference for several weeks is an interesting one. As has been pointed out, it can’t be the jamming presumably employed during the Deir ez-Zor raid, which would have been over weeks ago. According to the Israeli government it’s all the fault of the Germans!…
Read More The jamming signal increases its humThere’s something about this, that I’m not sure if I find intensely cool or deeply disturbing; that is, of course, a neat definition of anything worth writing about. (It’s certainly the sci-fi project; thrilling wonder and uncanny menace.) So, a ski resort is short of snow due to the gradually warming winters; they make snow,…
Read More Making electricity to make snow and not make more CO2I would like to understand the current controversy going on over at many more-read blogs than this one regarding “orthodox” and “heterodox” economics. At least, I’d like to understand it better. I’m sympathetic to a general critique of what we’re apparently obliged to describe as “orthodox” economics – unrealistic standard assumptions, unrealistic views of rationality,…
Read More Heterecon BlegIn any given period of history, the proportion of irony to available cases tends towards 1. The last people in the world who seriously consider that there might be weapons of mass destruction in Iraq are working for the United Nations, and it’s Russia that wants to keep them on the job, and the US…
Read More The maximum irony generation principleAn interesting story from Pacific Magazine on the Bougainville fraudster king we covered back in October, 2004.
Read More Nonexistent state updateSneaking through the barrio, I came on a bleakly lighted doorway, that bore the mark of the cult… The place called itself a “Poulperia”, which I took to mean it specialised in squid.
Read More I am the god of hellfire and I bring you squidApparently, the Red Army in Afghanistan called the kind of raid it calls a “zachistka” in Chechnya a “prichyoska” or haircut. “An unnecessarily brutal cordon-and-search operation, sir, and something for the weekend?”
Read More A close shaveThis is the kind of story journalists are meant to dream of. But just how would you headline a tale that involves a knife- and pepper-spray wielding female astronaut, an apparently fantasised love triangle, a 900-mile drive, adult nappies, and a freakout confrontation in an airport carpark? So J.G. Ballard. Fortunately it happened in the…
Read More Enter headline hereNot a song-title title, and not really a jet – an Antonov-26 instead. Via AllAfrica.com, we learn that a plane hitherto thought to have been stolen has been seized in Beni, Province Orientale, DRC on the instructions of Interpol. Le Phare of Kinshasa reports that the aircraft was operated by an ex-Soviet crew led by…
Read More Interpol and a Mystery Jet