Nothing like finding a pineapple grenade in your potatoes, as the BBC reports:
Olga Mauriello, from a small town near Naples, had put the potatoes into water to peel them when she discovered the mud-covered, pine cone-shaped grenade.
She alerted the neighbours, who in turn called the police.
Might have been more appropriate if she had found a potato masher, eh?
Strange how these horribly destructive things end up with such innocuous sounding names, like a sadly ironic form of combat poetry. The Greeks apparently use the term piggybank to describe grenades, adding yet another level of dark humor, which you can find explained relative to pineapples in the translation notes for ‘Bolivar’ on the Poetry International Web.
‘Bolivar’ was written in the winter of 1942-43. It originally circulated in manuscript form and was read at Resistance gatherings. It was first published by Ikaros in September 1944.
[…]
pineapple: Military slang for hand grenade. Greek has ‘koumbaras’, lit. ‘piggybank’.
No, this is not about the effects of some kind of smelly cheese. The weather has yet again taken a turn for the worse in Europe and apparently produced winds strong enough to kill almost fifty people (reported so far), most of whom are said to have been motorists. What percentage of the population would not be considered a motorist these days?
Most news reports said something to the effect of the “worst storm in years”, perhaps due to the fact that the storms in 1999 and 2000 were called the “worst storms in living memory”. Scientists quoted in the news all seem to point to a predicted increase in severe weather related to a steady rise measured in sea temperatures. The consequences of this were also described in the movie “An Inconvenient Truth”.
This reminded me of an incident several years ago when a Monterey Bay research buoy was launched to study extreme weather conditions.
The new MBARI mooring deployed earlier this month broke free from its anchor during the heavy storm Saturday, December 14. The oceanic buoy was anchored 52 kilometers from shore in Monterey Bay. It successfully sent data back to shore even through the storm. The mooring is an engineering prototype for the MBARI ocean observing system (MOOS) project. The mooring was intentionally deployed during the winter to monitor how the buoy and cable respond to environmental stresses when wind and waves reach their maximum strengths.
I guess this might have been called a beta test, but I wonder how much more it would have cost to make the buoy less susceptible to being broken in its first month. Or perhaps the data that was used during the buoy design phase to estimate future storm strength was incomplete or optimistically inaccurate?
Colbert makes things perfectly clear, just in case you were wondering who’s who:
Seems to me amazing amounts of innovation came as a result of the breakup (hey, the Internet was born), but consolidation has slowed things down again now, threatening to leave the US in the dust compared to European and Asian telecom technology…
Again, YouTube comes through with a fine example of rare jazz footage. This was video only available in the Japanese market until 2006, and only on long out-of-print Laserdisc. Now that 9 videos of the 13 performances have been made available again on DVD from Impro-Jazz, they also can be seen online (albeit low-fi) anytime. Amazing.
Tip of the hat to reader A for the link.
Something about watching Chet perform in his final year just makes me want to really think hard about what it means to take risks in life…and brings back to mind the story of violent assault in San Francisco (Chet was attacked in the city in 1966 and, like one of singers in recent news, suffered permanent facial damage that almost ruined his career).
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
