When Is 9/11 Over?

Thursday afternoon, I'm driving my mother to Dairy Queen for lunch. The air is crisp; the sky is blue.

Out of the corner of my eye off to the right, I see a big white L in the sky. It is a jet contrail. And the turn in it is a perfect 90 degrees.

The bottom of my stomach drops out. Oh no. Not again.

Jets aren't supposed to make right-angle turns, you see. When they turn, they make big, sweeping arcs to keep the physics from tearing them apart. The wrong people must be piloting it.

It's a low-grade anxiety that I live with every time I see a jet in the sky. I send a silent plea to the heavens hoping the people in charge of the plane are the people who are supposed to be in charge of the plane.

But seeing evidence that a jet has moved in a way it's not supposed to move shifts the low grade into a more acute concern.

I realize there is nothing I can do about it if terrorists HAVE begun hijacking jets again, turn off my car stereo so that if we are in the middle of another 9/11, I can at least have one more hour of lunch without knowing about it, and continue on to the fast food place.

I eat quietly, trying to push the thoughts out of my mind wondering if somewhere in America there is a skyscraper in flames. Or a city. It doesn't work.

Half an hour or so passes and lunch is over. I slide back into the car and try to decide whether or not to turn the radio on.

If it's happened, I reason, surely SOMEONE who had come into the DQ after us would have said something. They hadn't. They'd gone on cheerfully eating as if nothing had happened.

I turn on the radio. Idiotpop blares from the speakers.

Is it safe? I ask myself. Wouldn't they break in with SPECIAL REPORTS? Or are they playing music while they try to gather all the facts?

The feeling diminishes as I drive back home with no breaking news.

Just the same, when I enter the house I turn on CNN.

Nothing. I breathe a sigh of relief.

Eventually, I come up with the best theory I can. I decide it wasn't ONE contrail I saw but TWO, crisscrossing each other perpendicularly. By coincidence or cruel joke from the universe, the trails dissipated simultaneously at just the right time to appear connected.

I was thousands of miles away from the danger of 9/11. I live hundreds of miles away from the nearest skyscraper, nowhere near anything that anyone would consider an effective target. If it's that bad for me, I can't imagine how it is for those who were in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, or the planes. Or the families of the lost. Or the residents of New York and Washington.

I HATE this "new normal." I want NORMAL normal.

Kill them, Mr. President. Kill them ALL.

I want the world to start turning again.

Still not voting for him . . .

. . . but you gotta admire Tancredo for having the balls to point out the Terrorist Elephant in the Illegal Immigration Debate Room when nobody else will.



[H/T 2 the morons at TPM.]

Uh oh.

Islamists damage giant rock Buddha.

Why is this an "uh-oh," you ask?

Perhaps a little history lesson is in order.

Somewhere between March 7th and 11th, 2001, the Taliban destroyed the two (remember that number; you'll need it later) largest standing Buddha statues in the world; each were roughly 1700 years old.

Six months later almost to the day (and maybe PRECISELY to the day), the Twin Towers were destroyed.

Was it a coincidence, or was the destruction of the statues a signal to the cell of terrorists in America to begin their mission?

[H/T 2 memeorandum.]

He's an adult.

So why are Big Brother and/or Big Ed and/or Big Media keeping the name and nationality of the MU-Rolla quasi-terrorist a secret?

University spokesman Lance Feyh described the 22-year-old man as an "international" student but did not reveal his name or nationality.

UPDATE: The Rolla Daily News identifies the man as "Sujith Venkatramolla, a 22-year-old graduate student," "from India."

My own digging reveals little on the internet about him. Here he left the following comment on something called the Valmiki Group:

Here's an enlargement of his picture. Sorry about the image degradation due to the resizing.

And here, he apparently won some competition in his homeland.

UPDATE 2: After I emailed this post to them, KY3 now has an article up.

This first graphic is from my stat counter. Keep in mind it is set to the Eastern time zone.

[Graphic removed by blogmaster.]


This second one is from the bottom of KY3's article.

Nice of them to mention where they got their tip from.

In case you can't tell, that last bit is what we call sarcasm.

UPDATE 3: (3-1-07) I got a nice email from Perrie Campbell complimenting me on my work, and another from the same person asking if I could obscure the part of the graphic that listed KY3's IP address because his (or her?) employer might not be amused. Since my point was made, I removed the graphic.

KY3 used the picture I dug up on their noon newscast yesterday, but again no mention of me. I can kind of understand that on a newscast, where there is no time for extraneous information, but you'd think they could mention this little blog somewhere in their online edition.