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| Meanwhile, bobcat mom and cub walked by |
We eventually sat around under the big oak and discussed physics, abduction (in logic), and a cool German YouTuber named Sabine Hossenfelder. The air was slightly warm and the breeze was perfect. It really was some kinda paradise.
Then, with Teddy firmly ensconced on the Flintstonian "Jan-proof" couch, Annie rolled up with what I immediately dubbed "Mexico in a dish," and, accompanied by that fine aroma, we started jawin' about mostly silly stuff—including Annie's tales of hideous childhood evacuations—until, natch, I decided that it was time to tie on the feedbag.
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| Two cubs at left |
Annie's Mex dish sure was tasty.
Eventually, moving things inside, I made the traditional popcorn-in-a-wok (despite my leg, upon which I still cannot stand) and we watched some warm and fuzzy animal rescue shows. Teddy likes those.
Eventually, Kathie, an avid animal rescuer, stood up and announced, "there is nothing better than animal rescue." Teddy and I, slightly intimidated, nodded.
For once, we took some pictures, which, I'm guessin', will show up on this page maybe tomorrow.
Are scientists led astray by their prejudice in favor of
"beauty" (elegance, simplicity) in theory?
By LISA ALVAREZ
JULY 2, 2021
Start with the stories, I tell my students. After all, it’s where I started. Like them, I once was a community college student who loved to read. Back then, Gabriel García Márquez, Nobel laureate, was the writer to read. But, perhaps also like my students (and some readers), I was intimidated by the legend, the epic novels and maybe a little skeptical of the most celebrated work.
I was — and am — more curious about the minor books of Colombia’s García Márquez, especially the early work. The short stories and the novellas and his journalism are both instructive and inspiring.
As the L.A. Times Book Club reads his son Rodrigo Garcia’s new memoir, “A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes,” it’s a perfect time to savor the writing of the renowned father.
Here’s where to start reading — or rereading.
Three exemplary collections
My slim Penguin paperback copy of “No One Writes to the Colonel” sports a sticker with its original price of $1.75. The collection of stories and title novella has never gone out of print. The same is true of two other collections of short stories paired with brief novellas: “Leaf Storm and Other Stories” and “Innocent Eréndira and Other Stories.”
These stories offer a primer-like introduction to the sensibility and themes that distinguish García Márquez’s acclaimed work — especially the magic realism that propelled the Latin American Boom, a dynamic literary movement that first detonated in the ‘60s. Often in fewer than a dozen pages, the writer creates the dreamy feat found in his much longer novels: a man who meets the love of his life “six months and eleven days” before his death; the small town dentist with justice on his mind who contemplates the murderous mayor as his patient; the angel who falls to earth and “rewards” his followers with paradoxical miracles; the handsome dead man who washes ashore and transforms a town with his lifeless beauty. As ever, the twinned sense of burgeoning desire, whether for love or for justice or both, combines with the weight of destiny, the inevitability of loss and death.
These stories are gems of the magical realism genre that use the fantastic or surreal in an otherwise realistic narrative, though it is almost too benign or misleading a term. Indeed, García Márquez rejected the adjective “magical,” assigned by outsiders who perhaps could not recognize or reconcile multiple realities. He was writing, he insisted, the lived reality of Latin America, unimaginable to some.
Fervent fans of García Márquez also will find much to enjoy in the shorter work, “Leaf Storm,” especially in how the town of Macondo, famous from the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” makes its first appearance years earlier in the novella, along with that disruptive banana company.
An oft-overlooked novel
In “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” a lesser-known but wildly ambitious García Márquez novel, a seemingly immortal illiterate tyrant rules his country by fear and deception. It is a fever dream of a novel about political power wielded by a ruler who manipulates media and uses spectacle, including a self-enriching lottery scam, to mesmerize. He sells the sea to foreign interests. He assaults women, taunts and tortures opponents and is worshipped by deranged followers. Generals conspire to have the despot institutionalized only to be fed one of their own at a banquet as a cautionary lesson.
When the novel was published in the mid-'70s, the composite model for this imperishable tyrant was Spain’s Francisco Franco and the rogues’ gallery of Caribbean and Latin American caudillos, or “strong men.” Read today, the depiction offers irresistible if perverse insight not only into the past but into our own current political situation.
Nonfiction
Like many writers, García Márquez began in newspapers. Aficionados and newbies alike should consider “The Scandal of the Century and Other Writings,” a wide-ranging collection illuminating the real-life political concerns and characters that shape his celebrated fiction. He reveals the plight of a lone shipwrecked sailor surviving days at sea, the mystery of a dead woman washed up on an Italian beach, the race against the clock to locate the life-saving antidote for a young child — nothing is as straightforward as it seems, ever. Through sharply rendered detail and carefully paced narrative, García Márquez does what great journalists do: make readers care. Simultaneously, he makes larger points, invariably about power, corruption and injustice along with the mysteries of human nature.
Those less-celebrated “other writings” include articles about barbers, revolutionaries, water shortages, writers (of course) and, my personal favorite, an elegiac essay on the death of John Lennon with a cameo of Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes typing with one finger, “isolated from the horrors of the universe” while blasting the Beatles. None of this is far from his fiction. It suggests a first-draft effort at reporting before transforming it into a different art form. Read today, each is the stuff of award-winning investigative journalism or a binge-worthy podcast.
Throughout the decades, Gabriel García Márquez created a multigenre body of work before his death in 2014 at 87. He endures as an every-writer for nearly every reader. Whether through his novels, short stories or journalism, his work remains relevant and urgent in both predictable and surprising ways.
Celebrated as a magical realist, Gabriel García Márquez was not a magician, though his writing surely casts a spell. Magic is obfuscation, deception, sleight of hand. His work exercises its opposite. A reliable witness, an internationally acclaimed public intellectual, he, like George Orwell, told the truth in wildly imaginative fiction, unflinching essays and brave reportage. His truth is needed more than ever now.
Lisa Alvarez is a writer, editor and professor who teaches English at Irvine Valley College and is codirector of the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley.
(National Geographic)
The government’s UFO report has landed: It concludes that strange aircraft have been haunting U.S. warships for years, marking a new era for “unidentified aerial phenomena.”
PUBLISHED JUNE 25, 2021
U.S. national security officials today delivered a report to Congress about investigations into a series of unidentified flying object sightings, a landmark sign that this previously fringe topic has gained mainstream acceptance. And while the report, produced by the office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), does provide some new information about the inexplicable occurrences, it leaves many of the biggest questions unanswered.
Yes, Navy pilots and other military personnel have been seeing mysterious flying objects for decades; a Navy task force reviewed 144 sightings by U.S. government personnel that occurred between 2004 and 2021. No, the Pentagon doesn’t know what they are. There’s no evidence that the objects were sent by space aliens, but the report, mandated by Congress as part of the 2021 National Intelligence Authorization Act, confirms that the sightings remain “unidentified.”
. . .
The report, which includes a classified section available only to lawmakers, details the results of investigations by the Defense Department’s UAP Task Force, established in 2017. Strange flying objects with seemingly bizarre aerodynamic abilities have been spotted by pilots, on radar, and with infrared sensors.
The report does state that the UAP Task Force was not able to attribute any of the sightings to American military or other advanced U.S. government technology. “Some UAP observations could be attributable to developments and classified programs by U.S. entities,” the report says. “We were unable to confirm, however, that these systems accounted for any of the UAP reports we collected.”
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| Dietrich |
The most famous UAP encounters in modern aviation history—cases from 2004, 2014, and 2015 that involve pilot sightings, radar tracking, and objects caught on video—remain unsolved.
. . .
Even without answers, the report is a welcome validation for those in the military who witnessed unknown objects in the sky. “We were ridiculed and mocked by so many, so now it feels nice to have people ask good questions and to have them really be interested in getting to the bottom of it,” says Alex Dietrich, a former Navy pilot who observed a UAP in 2004. “Then, of course, there’s that underlying sense of urgency that we all have: Is this a threat to national security?”
A number of U.S. officials are now posing that same question. What Dietrich saw in the sky 16 years ago started a series of events that changed the discussion about unidentified aerial sightings forever.
. . .
Consensus has gelled around the idea that at least some physical aircraft were flying during the encounters reported by Navy pilots. The DNI report supports this point of view: “Most of the UAP reported probably do represent physical objects, given that a majority of UAP were registered across multiple sensors, to include radar, infrared, electro-optical, weapon seekers, and visual observation.”
. . .
There is an ongoing, invisible cat-and-mouse game between designers of U.S. weapon systems and those made by Russia and China. In places like Syria, Taiwan, and Ukraine, military specialists, nicknamed crows, vie for dominance over the electromagnetic spectrum.
“Over time, the sensors on an aircraft or a missile get more and more sophisticated,” says Mike Meaney, Northrop Grumman’s vice president of Land and Maritime Sensors. “On the flip side, usually within short order, they have new and different ways to spoof or fool those sensors to make them think something’s happening that really isn’t.”
When radar operators receive returns showing things that are impossible—like extremely fast-moving objects and vanishing swarms of aircraft—electronic warfare is the first thing a crow considers. “If I see one enemy plane, and all of a sudden it becomes 20 planes in my display—I’m being spoofed,” Meany says. Such funhouse mirror tricks are useful for avoiding anti-aircraft weapons, which often initially rely on radar to track targets.
Spoofing sounds a lot like what happened in the Gimbal encounters, and the DNI report addresses the possibility. “UAP reportedly appeared to exhibit unusual flight characteristics,” it states. “These observations could be the result of sensor errors, spoofing, or observer misperception and require additional rigorous analysis.” But if spoofing was involved, it would be very advanced tech for 2015. “That’s really the higher level of electronic warfare,” Meany notes.
If the Russian spy ship in Cuba was part of an intelligence gathering operation using covert tools of electronic warfare, that would mean the Kremlin unveiled a potentially sensitive system that would be more valuable as a surprise during an actual conflict. There are vast military ranges in Russia and China where sensitive systems can be tested without tipping their hand—just as there are within the United States.
Meaney says a cardinal rule in electronic warfare is: The less shown, the better. “As far as the cat-and-mouse goes, all sides are very careful in what they show and when they show it,” he says. “We don’t show it until we need it, and it’s been that way for five decades.”
Even if spoofing can explain some of the strange things seen on radar screens, it can’t explain what pilots saw with their own eyes, or the objects captured on video. Perhaps a combination of physical objects and electronic warfare is responsible for some of the UAP incidents, but no one seems to be able to put all the puzzle pieces together in a way that makes sense….
Government report can't explain UFOs, but offers no evidence of aliens
(Politico)
Out of 144 encounters with mysterious aircraft, 143 are literally unidentifiable, according to a newly released report to Congress.
This ran in the Sunday December 24, 2023 edition of the Los Angeles Times and the Orange County Register : July 14, 1955 - November 20, 2...
