Quartz City

Apparently, the new Superman movie has a Superkid sub-plot with the apparent offspring of Clark Kent and Lois Lane. The “wacky kid” sequel cliché is irritating enough but I’m reminded of the classic Larry Niven essay “Man Of Steel, Woman Of Kleenex.” Sure enough, it’s online…

Granted that the poor oaf is not entirely sane. How could he be? He is an orphan, a refugee, and an alien. His homeland no longer exists in any form, save for gigatons upon gigatons of dangerous, prettily colored rocks.

As a child and young adult, Kal-El must have been hard put to find an adequate father-figure. What human could control his antisocial behavior? What human would dare try to punish him? His actual, highly social behavior during this period indicates an inhuman self-restraint.

What wonder if Superman drifted gradually into schizophrenia? Torn between his human and kryptonian identities, he chose to be both, keeping his split personalities rigidly separate. A psychotic desperation is evident in his defense of his “secret identity.”

But Superman’s sex problems are strictly physiological, and quite real.

The purpose of this article is to point out some medical drawbacks to being a kryptonian among human beings, and to suggest possible solutions. The kryptonian humanoid must not be allowed to go the way of the pterodactyl and the passenger pigeon.

UPDATE: Boing Boing was reminded of this essay too.

HavenCo hasn’t updated their web site since 2003 so maybe they aren’t doing as well as earlier thought. Meanwhile, the Sealand government is taking PayPal donations to help them rebuild.

E Mare Libertas, a documentary film about Sealand and it’s eccentric history just premiered too. A small teaser for it is available.

Aww, this makes me sad… And they were doing so well awhile back.

A security guard has been airlifted to hospital after a fire broke out on an old sea fort in the North Sea.

The blaze on Friday has badly damaged Sealand, an inhabited former military platform, about eight miles east off the coast of Essex and Suffolk.

A coastguard spokesman said it was believed a generator caught fire. The one person on board was airlifted to Ipswich Hospital.

The so-called “independent state” of Sealand is home to an internet firm.

The Sealand Royal Family promises to rebuild.

I’m happy to see that Nicholas is back to blogging again and his latest post on weathering the remaining years of the Administration is cheerfully acerbic. Welcome back.

Should you feel tempted to despair, remember, Leningrad held out for 900 days, never capitulating, with a lifeline consisting of nothing more than a bridge across a frozen lake. Truly inspiring. Of course, about a million people died of infectious disease and sheer starvation, and by 1944 there wasn’t a dog, cat, squirrel, chipmunk or rat anywhere to be seen.

My sister leaves tomorrow for a two month trek down the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in the northern part of Spain. Internet access permitting, she’s blogging the walk at pamsbigwalk.blogspot.com

Following up on the post from a couple days ago, I ran across this on UFO Reflections…

Well, might we have a solution for the Heflin photo case? According to an anonymous post to UFO Updates, the object is in fact a model train wheel, and the smoke ring in the final Heflin image is from an airshow. Let’s take a look, shall we?

First, here’s a comparison of model train wheels with two of the Heflin photos… and then a comparison of the final Heflin image and an airshow photo (including the aircraft which created the ring).

Not conclusive, but mighty compelling justification for a re-evaluation, wouldn’t you say?

It’s been awhile since I’ve seen some good optical illusions and boy is this one is a doozy.

Best of all (and to be expected, since I believe that 2006 is the zeitgeist of Make Magazine), there are instructions on how to make your own.

Along with every other ten-year-old, red-blooded sci-fi kid in the mid-1970s, I studied up on UFO sightings until I could reel off sighting details and photo analysis the way other kids tracked sports statistics. Since my crappy eyesight wasn’t going to get me a ticket off the planet via NASA, I figured that my best bet was to hitch a ride on an alien spaceship.

I was particularly fascinated by the famous set of saucer photos taken in Santa Ana in August 1965 by an O.C. highway worker. Most of the famous UFO photos were taken somewhere far away like Brazil, Spain, or Oregon (when you’re 10, everything is far away), but here was one taken a couple towns over on Myford Rd. in Santa Ana (Irvine now). Hell, I’d ridden my bike over that same patch of road. All I’d have to do was hang out a bit and stick my thumb out for a ride.

Assuming that the whole thing wasn’t a hoax of course…

I hadn’t thought about those pictures, or even UFOs in awhile until recently so I figured I’d poke around some sites and see what folks were talking about. And if you’ve been reading so far, take a wild guess…

The Society for Scientific Exploration has a 40 page report on the photos along with some details I didn’t know. After the photos got some media attention, photographer Rex Heflin was approached by some NORAD personnel who asked him for the photos and warned him to not discuss the sighting any further. Heflin obliged, and to no one’s surprise now, the photos disappeared. That is until 1993, when they mysteriously reappeared in Heflin’s mailbox.

Honestly, the whole thing smells like fish with claims of hoax, brief legitimacy, and counter-hoax but I still love the photos as some local pop culture.

By the way, there’s a lot of words expended in those links on the “dust cloud” below the saucer in photo 1. It’s not a dust cloud, but a cluster of weeds growing next to a water canister used in the irrigation for that field. You used to see these canisters adjacent to the roads all over south county but they’re gone along with the fields. Hell, even Myford Rd. is gone now - it’s old alignment (as seen in the photo) is now part of the Jamboree / CA-261 interchange.

I’ve been interested in numbers stations for awhile now (and yes I still listen to the Conet Project set), but the whole numbers/spy station saga has taken an unusual, but perhaps not unexpected direction.

A numbers station has been found, only by telephone. Quoting from this thread on the Spooks list…

Anyway, what I found sounds like a numbers station, only it’s by phone. I ran across it on craigslist of all places (actually, a friend of mine found it and passed it on to me). Can anyone verify what this is? The post in question is at
http://newyork.craigslist.org/mnh/mis/158815074.html ; I’ll reproduce the text below in case it gets pulled.

Subject: For mein fraulein

Message: Mein Fraulein, I haven’t heard from you in a while. Won’t you
call me? 212 //// 796 //// 0735

The message at that number runs for around seven minutes and I’m at work so can’t grab audio of it; it starts and ends with music and reads off a bunch of numbers in groups. The voices reading the numbers sound like - well, imagine the stereotypical ransom note cut out from letters in the newspaper glued together. Anyway, if someone could check it out and let me know what they think (or point me to somewhere to ask the question) I’d appreciate it.

Later on in the thread, a poster caught the entire message.

Grp 415, male, non-accented english, recorded

01305 60510 17079 04606 50100
93000 08203 90130 94069 01207
81080 17028 07906 90220 73038
01401 70150 15073 00402 00680
12013 12510 00540 04091 01401
30150 86022 09608 10660 02082
05507 00020 00000 02208 30290
08022 01200 40710 13065 02709
40190 29014 02200 80020 11083
07300 30260 19000 00700 00000
86 86

Same lead-in music, both as an intro and out-tro

Would be interesting to watch the number for a series of days and see if the message changes any…

One thing I notice in the message is that every 5FG has a zero in it…

A mp3 of the call can be found here and here. Like Homeland Stupidity, I was tipped off to the number via 2600’s Off The Hook and the resulting army of telco hackers and phreakers tracked down the number to a pre-paid VoIP account from RNK Telecom (which has now been drained). The hacker army has also tracked down a second numbers phone, this time in the 415 area code.

It’s not surprising that the logistically awkward and noticeable combination of shortwave transmission can be superseded by a low cost short-term Craigslist/prepaid phone account combo. It’s a damn site easier to set-up, especially with easy internet access and availably of stolen information.

Watch it be a promotional scam for The DaVinci Code or something.