The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by veejane:

Cholera happened to strike several cities in the spring of 1849, including St. Louis. As a result, several of the wagon-trains heading westward over the Plains -- and thanks to the California gold rush there were massive numbers that year -- carried cholera with them, and buried people one by one along the trails.

George Bent, who was about ten at the time, later wrote in detail about how cholera came to the Cheyenne, and scared the everliving crap out of them (so to speak) because it was such a fast-moving disease with such violent symptoms. Families fled in all directions, bands broke up, a lot of traditions got shorted in all the mess and terror. The contemporary estimates were that when the epidemic was over the southern Cheyenne had lost half their population -- not just due to disease, but the dispersal afterwards, vulnerability to enemies, starvation when parties couldn't be organized to hunt.

If not for cholera, the 1849 exodus might have been very different: the southern Plains "Indian wars" of the 1860s might have happened a decade earlier, and one of the parties to that war might have been a lot more robust.

Some newsie chased down the registrar who accepted Vermin Supreme's application to run for president. Apparently, Vermin Supreme is his legal name, and when he showed up with his list of signatures and $1000 application fee, he showed up with a Wellington boot on his head.

#10: the general issue of how to change your mind gracefully.

As Eric Van has been quoted as saying, "This is what in politics is called 'flip-flopping,' but is more familiarly known as 'learning.'"

Cars should not do pirouettes. A teenaged boy should not take off his seatbelt in the back of a moving car when he decides to stretch out for a nap. A teenaged boy who has the permanent reminder of the exact shape of a Civic's rear window cut into his face (as he was thrown "clear") has a lot of family very happy that it was two inches thataway, and only a flap of skin, rather than two inches that other way, and his brains spewed onto the highway.

(If he'd been wearing his seatbelt, he would have been unharmed, as were the other two people in the car. As it was, he was thrown into a grassy median, and bruised up a bit, and the leaving-the-car injury was the worst that happened to him. But the whole brains spewed onto the highway possibility is the sort of thing that one dwells on, shuddering, for quite some time afterwards.)

And thus are several more people reminded daily, just looking at his face, that seatbelts are our friends.

Uh, to quote, "Highways, bridges and a section of the Charles River were shut down Wednesday"

I don't know about the Charles River -- although the train-and-cars bridge opposite MIT campus was functioning normally -- but with the original incident occurring at Sullivan Square, there was, in fact, one highway (partially) shut down. Possibly there were some brief shutdowns in other locations, due to the other doohickeys, but the big one was the 93 overpass.

As I hope this map makes clear, the Sullivan Sq. T stop and bus station are pretty much directly under the US 93 overpass. So, if you have a security incident at Sullivan, involving the overpass, yeah, 93 is going to be partially closed.

Now, is it a problem that 93 is THE main artery into the city from the north? And that even if you could get off the burgeoning traffic jam on 93, you'd get completely lost on the surface streets of Somerville/Charlestown? And that backups on 93 inevitably cause every single highway and bridge in the woefully rickety system to get backed up too, because we're a bunch of morons who don't know how to drive?

Note to terrorists: no need for bombs. Jackknife a truck packed with live chickens on the Tobin Bridge, and we will be laid low.

Our city and state officials have a flair for the dramatic, sure, but what pugnaciously self-aggrandizing city doesn't? That is what the copious (and large) grains of salt all over the streets are for.

To justify the complete idiocy of shutting down a city for a day

they'd have to explain why the city was shut down

To be a stickler for facts: Ummm? City didn't shut down? Workers already in city by 9am didn't hear a thing about it till much later in the day? Personally, I was at home and saw the news, and hopped on the T so I could get to work before delays got out of hand. But they never did, except on the affected Orange line. Yes, the rest of the T was running normally at 10am, with no announcements or extra security guards on trains, no searches that I saw, no nothing. (I mean, I was carrying a towel-wrapped lasagna in my arms, so I walked toward the T thinking of funny things to say to any nervous MBTA cop who might ask me whether I meant to blow up a building with my scary scary noodles. But nobody noticed or cared, and the work potluck came off without incident.)

I told my coworkers about the Sullivan Square non-story, and they all shrugged and went about their business. The evening commute was unremarkable. It was really, just -- not that big a deal in our day-to-day lives, except for the CNN punchline. The city was never shut down.

How this escalated over several hours without getting resolved is beyond me.

FWIW, my count of the timing is that the police response escalated over about an hour and a half, after which it was all over but the untangling and the irritation. The initial report was a little before 9am, I'd wager; the response was on-scene at 9:15, when the Fox 25 traffic helicopter started wondering what was up; it was on TV at 9:20; and it was resolved and reported to be resolved by the time I got to work: 10:30.

There was a lot of untangling, as jumbled reports went around and more of the things were found; there was fixing the traffic snarl that the Sullivan Square location inevitably caused; and there was a lot of residual panic and anger as everyone realized they'd basically participated in an unintentional joke. But -- hour and a half?

I think that's pretty good, for a lumbering arm of government, to go from OMGWTFTerrorism all the way to Those damn kids get them offa my lawn in an hour and a half. Government doesn't exactly stop on a dime.

Now, the NEWS people escalated it for the rest of the day; and I'm sure some headless chickens in the business district did continue to freak out throughout the evening commute; but, yeah. I could report to my coworkers that nothing was actually going on at 10:30am. (They'd all been at work on time, and hadn't heard a thing about it anyway.)

Charlie: "a video of Kim Jong-Il foaming at the mouth or biting the heads off a live cobra"

I just had to make sure that posterity sees the above, so that future generations may think of Kim Jong Il and Ozzy Osbourne in the same sentence, and make themselves cry with laughter as hard as I am doing.

(Whether the Fearless Leader always uses two-headed cobras, or will occasionally settle for a single-headed cobra, I leave up to your imagination.)

I don't know many corporations that are eager to be sued by the RIAA. Personally, I'd go for it, but they never seem to put me in charge.

it's fairly clearly a copy of a British publication: it refers to the 'late Peninsular Wars'. So book copyrights are a bit later than that, at least in the US.

The US wasn't all that great about enforcing international copyright for a long, long time. I seem to recall it being an issue as late as the 50s, when Tolkien/Allen & Unwin went to publish The Lord of the Rings in the US and found ripoff reprints of the first (British) edition already here.

I hesitate to call it a conspiracy -- there are no secret meetings in underground parking lots here. It's just a concerted campaign of misinformation, in spite of and sticking its tongue out at reality, official and public data, and the general public it pretends to inform.

This administration is based on the success of the tactic, so far.

We might call it a "shoutdown" against the American public, but part of the problem is the American public's willingness to be bamboozled.

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