Tonight's Zelda's Inferno exercise: we riffed off of the bizarre and fascinating dying words of gangster Dutch Schultz.

There's this little story/parable that I half remember. Can anyone identify the source? It goes something like this: "You know how you drive a fish insane? You pick him up and hold him just above the water, just for a few seconds, until you see a look of surprise on his face, and then you drop him back in. Then he goes up to all his fish friends and says, 'This is water! We're swimming in water! I've seen it!' And all the other fish say, 'Poor fellow. Ever since that accident he's been going on and on about this "water" nonsense.'"

Googling "how to drive fish crazy" mostly turns up fishing websites. The closest thing I've found is a very short variant in a David Foster Wallace speech, but that's not quite it.

Though that speech is very, very good:

Back before Calvin and Hobbes made him a household name (well, at least in households of good taste), Bill Watterson was an editorial cartoonist for Cleveland's Sun Newspapers. This page has a few of his old strips from their archives. A few chuckles, but there's no doubt that we were better served having Mr. Watterson use his cartoons to investigate imagination, love, and the mysteries of life, rather that Ohio tax policy.

More from the "cops love video surveillance except when it's of them" file: the Seattle PD told Eric Rachner it had deleted the recordings of his questionable arrest, take by the department's standard-issue squad car video camera.

But Rachner's a computer security guy and didn't leave it that: he got ahold of the specs for their system, found out that the data was logged, demanded the logs under public disclosure laws, and eventually obtained to video that supposedly didn't exist.

Two recent bits of thuggery by police in Maryland:

• Prince Georges County police were caught on video assaulting an innocent UM student. The victim suffered a cut on his head that required eight staples to close, a concussion, a badly swollen arm, and various bruising. The scumbags cops them filed false charges against their victim.
• Anthony Graber was apparently being a dangerous jerk on his motorcycle, and got pulled over by a Maryland state cop. Ok, so far, fine. Problem is, the cop was in plainclothes, and did not make a legitimate traffic stop -- he was in an unmarked car with no siren or lights showing, when he cut Graber off (there was a marked car behind Graber, but so far I as I can see in the video, no siren or lights). The cop jumped out of his car without displaying a badge or immediately identifying himself as a police officer -- and with his gun in his hand. That's outrageous behavior that would justify a civilian drawing a weapon on him or taking other defensive action that a reasonable person might take when confronted by an armed person who must be assumed to be a violent criminal.

  It should at least earn the cop in question a suspension until he's been sent back to training and learned how to behave himself.

  But the "best" past here is that Graber was wearing a helmet camera which caught the incident on tape. (Er, on memory card, presumably.) When Graber posted the video to Youtube, hilarity ensued when Joseph Cassilly, State’s Attorney for Harford County Maryland, threatened to prosecute Graber for violating Maryland's wiretap law, a felony carrying a penalty of up to five years. As the analysis at Popehat points about, there's not even the ghost of a legitimate case here, as the law only applies to private conversations, and an arrest occurring on a public street is not a situation where an expectation of privacy arises. Indeed, I'd have to say that no action taken by a police officer in the course of his duties ever has an expectation of privacy about it.

  This is pure intimidation for daring to embarrass a cop gone wild. Graber's computers and his camera were seized, and according to a comment on the Popehat story he was arrested.

  I'm sure that scumbag cops would love for it to be a crime to collect evidence against them, but we haven't reached that level of police state. At least not yet.

I am a gun owner, and stand squarely behind the right to keep and bear arms.

But when a bunch of militia movement wackos schedule an demonstration on the outskirts of D.C., on the anniversary of the OKC bombing and of the Waco massacre, where they plan to come as close to brandishing their weapons as they can without stepping over the legal line, saying crazy shit about "totalitarian socialism" when in fact it was Obama who signed the law that allows firearms in national parks and so made this event legal...guys, you're not helping.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: "Texas Hold 'em" style with Nicole's word deck: we picked four words (I initially read the first one wrong) to share, then each picked three more, for a total of seven.

shared: contemplation/completion innocence messages nostalgia

my hand: competition love journey

pick 5 and go write a poem with them...

nostalgia for things that never were
nostalgia for a love I never knew
nostalgia for an innocence we never had

looking for messages from the fates in the pattern of my life
looking for messages in random things seen along the journey

(This is a long one, and wanders all over the place, but I still think there's a good idea or two in here...)

For the past few days I've been re-reading Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! Trilogy. It's a psychedelic romp chock-full of quotable bits, but there's one in particular that's echoed in my head:

"Freedom won't come through Love, and it won't come through Force. It will come through the Imagination."

This seems to me an important enough idea that it ought to have a name. So I hereby dub it the "First Law of Political-Artistic Liberation" -- FLOPAL, to give it a snappy (?) acronym.

What is the argument for the validity of the FLOPAL? Shea and Wilson explain a little later on in the book, in a discussion between the characters Hagbard Celine and Simon Moon, as they wait for the cops and the tear gas in Chicago in 1968:

"Chairman Mao didn't say half of it," Hagbard replied holding a handkerchief to his own face. His words came through muffled: "It isn't only political power that grows out of the barrel of a gun. So does a whole definition of reality. A set. And the action that has to happen on that particular set and on none other."

"Don't be so bloody patronizing," I objected, looking around a corner in time and realizing this was the night I would be Maced. "That's just Marx: the ideology of the ruling class becomes the ideology of the whole society."

"Not the ideology. The Reality." He lowered his handkerchief. "This was a public park until they changed the definition. Now, the guns have changed the Reality. It isn't a public park. There's more than one kind of magic."

"Just like the Enclosure Acts," I said hollowly. "One day the land belonged to the people. The next day it belonged to the landlords."

"And like the Narcotics Acts," he added. "A hundred thousand harmless junkies became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress, in nineteen twenty-seven. Ten years later, in thirty-seven, all the pot-heads in the country became criminals overnight, by Act of Congress. And they really were criminals, when the papers were signed. The guns prove it. Walk away from those guns, waving a joint, and refuse to halt when they tell you. Their Imagination will become your Reality in a second."

Much of the "Reality" of human experience is created by Authority. And not just the social and legal aspects -- a few hundred years ago, the physical "Reality" that the Earth was the center of the Universe was enforced by putting Galileo under arrest. Eighty-five years ago, the Tennessee legislature and courts used the guns and clubs and cages at their disposal to create the biological "Reality" that Homo sapiens was not related to apes. And just a few years ago, the Bush II administration used its Authority to create a geophysical "Reality" in which human activity is not affecting the climate.

Even though all these Authorities are gone, substantial numbers of people still dwell in the Realities they created.

Authority is hard-wired into the human brain. We are a pack species, programmed to respond to the alphas. As the famous Milgram experiment showed, our natural submission to Authority will get otherwise sane and ordinary people to commit acts of torture. Or consider how in over 70 cases, a telephone caller posing as a cop was able to use his bogus aura of authority manipulate managers and employees of fast food restaurants into performing strip searches and other abusive acts. Authority, like gravity, warps space around it: and like gravity, when concentrated to the extreme, will form a black hole that tears up everything in reach.

What can fight Authority? What can break its Realities, disperse its warp?

At first hearing it sounds like something straight of Snow Crash: researchers at the University of South Carolina took a cotton t-shirt, treated it with boron, and ended up with a fabric reinforced with nanowires made of boron carbide -- a material used in tank armor.

Sadly, a bullet-proof t-shirt is probably some ways away yet. But the technique produces a strong, light material that could be used not only in body armor but in the manufacture of lightweight fuel-efficient vehicles.

The ability to select your seat on-line is neat, but I never thought of this...http://xkcd.com/726/.