Why hasn’t Radio Free Afghanistan been discussed before now? Military action breaks bodies but hardens minds, there needs to be a psychological assault as well. The mountains called Hindu Kush literally translate as “Slaughter of the Hindus” and The Khyber Pass is bloodstained throughout history, the first recorded passage was in 326 B.C. by Alexander the Great.

The guardian UK published a vivid description of what a western military force would be facing in these mountains. Their first supposition that Afghanistan had not been conquered since Alexander the Great is an unfortunate falsehood in an otherwise excellent article.

A guy named Sam runs a site called exploding dog. He draws pictures from titles people send him. Yesterday he posted this one, titled I didn’t understand until I got out of the woods. Someday I want to buy him lunch.

The ISP handling our email is getting hammered by the Nimda worm. I haven’t been able to send or receive mail today, supposedly they are working on it. More reason to host on Apache.

For anyone bothered by the Nostradamus hoax that’s been floating around the internet since the World Trade Center attack, I suggest reading this article.

The much-forwarded quatrain is completely bogus. It originated as a fictional example in a Canadian college student’s essay A Critical Analysis of Nostradomus, [sic] the author created the quatrain to illustrate how easy it is to fake prophesy through vague terms. I’d love to hear what he thinks about his theories and fake prophesy being proved completely effective.

Whoever started emailing this didn’t even get the dates right. The quatrain has been credited to Nostradamus in the year 1654. Nostradamus died in 1566. I suppose that could have been a typo, but I prefer to consider it stupidity.

“This prophecy is truly the Mr. Potato Head of predictions.”

The Webdings/Wingdings “NYC” correlation is troubling, but just an unfortunate coincidence.

Among the other troubling but basically absurd things people are freaking out about, two images of smoke which look like a bad cartoon version of the devil. I don’t think people spend enough time looking at clouds anymore. (I’m not linking to any images because I think this is ridiculous.)

Who ya gonna call?

After dinner Horacio took this photo:

click to enlarge

Of all the horror I saw this past week, this is the image which finally got to me. These people, my friends, this family. Breaking bread and sharing wine. Life is beautiful, life goes on.

Amazon’s Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund has slowed down at $5.6 million. Only 149,000 people have contributed so far. This could be much higher.

I went to the Javits Center today to see about volunteering. The first image I had of the Javits Center was of a sea of hard hats. Construction workers from everywhere have arrived to help. There were also rescue workers from all over, one group had uniforms labeled in French, my guess is they came down from Montreal. Even though there were at least a half dozen camera crews there, I haven’t seen anything reported about this turnout. There were mountains of food and water with a dozens of people offering snacks to those waiting in line. I overheard one worker say he’d been waiting four hours.

While I’m thankful and encouraged by this astounding show of unity and support, I regret that I have some feelings of resentment. These guys are stronger than I am, and able to do physical work longer and better than I could. But I live here. I want to help. And I can’t. I need to get over that quick.

A state marshal said they had all the volunteers they needed before 11:00, the news is reporting that no additional volunteers are needed at all. So I guess I won’t be helping for a little while but I will try again sometime next week. The cleanup will be going on for a long time, so maybe there will be an opportunity for me to help in the future. I saw many streets near the WTC site have been cleared already. In 1992, I regretted not helping sweep up after the LA riots. Now I’m trying to figure out other ways to help.

Tonight a large group of friends are gathering for dinner. It’s turning into something of an early thanksgiving, which seems altogether appropriate.