Oklo: Ancient African Nuclear Reactors

Credit & Copyright:
Robert D. Loss, WAISRC

Explanation: The remnants of nuclear reactors nearly two billion years old were found in the 1970s in Africa. These reactors are thought to have occurred naturally. No natural reactors exist today, as the relative density of fissile uranium has now decayed below that needed for a sustainable reaction. Pictured above is Fossil Reactor 15, located in Oklo, Gabon. Uranium oxide remains are visible as the yellowish rock. Oklo by-products are being used today to probe the stability of the fundamental constants over cosmological time-scales and to develop more effective means for disposing of human-manufactured nuclear waste.

THANKS: O. K.!

FROM WESTERN DAILY PRESS-UK:

ADVERTISING ON THE HOOF

11:00 – 09 October 2002

Cows have been turned into walking advertisements in a bid to boost the rural economy.

    Company logos and slogans are being painted on to cows’ bodies before the animals
are released on pastures in Switzerland as part of a brand name marketing
campaign.

    Frank Baumann, who is head of the Cow Placard Company, said he hoped the idea
would help boost the rural economy. The company is offering advertisers
the chance to have a logo or slogan painted on to a cow’s side using car
paints.

    The move has been criticised by animal rights groups who said Baumann was simply
looking for publicity and was not supporting agriculture.

    The cost of a cow placard depends on the size and duration of the advertisement
but tends to be about £250.

COURTESY MARK L.!

From the LATimes:

Tantra’s Rogan Josh

Active Work Time: 40 minutes
* Total Preparation Time: 2 hours

Sanjay Dwivedi suggests serving the rogan josh topped with raw onion and accompanied by rice. Any leftovers can be combined the next day for an instant
biryani.

9 cloves garlic
1 (2 1/2-inch) piece ginger root

1/2 cup oil
2 teaspoons cumin seeds
5 green cardamom pods
3 black cardamom pods
1 bay leaf
1 cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon whole cloves
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
2 pounds onions (about 3 onions), sliced

2 lamb shanks, each cut in 4 pieces
2 pounds lamb leg meat, cut in 2-inch pieces
1 cup water
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
1 teaspoon pure red chile powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon ground coriander
2 tablespoons fresh tomato puree
1 teaspoon garam masala

Juice of 1 lemon
2 teaspoons sugar
Salt

Combine the garlic and ginger with about 2 tablespoons of water in a small food processor and process to a paste. Set aside.

To a hot pan, add the oil and heat over high heat. Add the cumin seeds first and let splutter, then the green cardamoms, black cardamoms, bay leaf, cinnamon stick, cloves and fennel seeds.

    Add the sliced onions and cook, stirring as needed, until golden brown, about 35 minutes. Reduce the heat to medium-high, add the lamb shank pieces and cook 10 minutes. Add the diced lamb, then lower the heat and gently simmer 45 minutes, stirring often. Add the water and the ginger-garlic paste and cook for 10 minutes. Add the turmeric, chile powder, cumin and coriander. Cook 10 minutes, then stir in the tomato puree and garam masala. Continue cooking until the shank meat is very tender, 20 minutes longer. Stir in the lemon juice and sugar, then season to taste with salt. Divide among 8 serving plates, making sure each serving has a lamb shank piece.

6 servings. Each serving:
482 calories; 161 mg sodium; 122 mg cholesterol; 29

grams fat; 5 grams saturated
fat; 15 grams carbohydrates; 40 grams protein; 3.01

grams fiber.

*

Chicken Mangalorean

Active Work Time: 35 minutes
* Total Preparation Time: 1 1/2 hours

This is from Surya restaurant.

2 cloves garlic

1 (1 1/2-inch) piece ginger
root

2 1/2 teaspoons oil, divided

2 onions, cut in fine dice

2 tomatoes, chopped

1 (4-inch) cinnamon stick,
broken in half

6 cardamom pods

10 whole cloves

1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

2 pounds boneless skinless
chicken thighs, cut in 2-inch pieces

1/2 (13.5-ounce) can coconut
milk

1/2 cup water

1 teaspoon black mustard
seeds

4 to 5 small dried red chiles

15 to 20 fresh curry leaves

Combine the garlic and ginger
with about 1 tablespoon of water in a small food

processor and process to
a paste. Set aside.

    Heat
1 teaspoon of oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add the onions,

tomatoes, garlic and ginger
paste, cinnamon stick, cardamom pods, cloves, cumin

seeds, coriander, turmeric
and salt. Cook 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

    Add the
chicken and stir to mix with the spices. Cook 15 minutes uncovered,

stirring occasionally, then
cover and cook 5 minutes. Add the coconut milk and

water. Cover and cook 10
minutes.

    Meanwhile,
heat the remaining 1 1/2 teaspoons of oil in a skillet over high heat

until very hot.Add the mustard
seeds (be careful, they’ll pop out of the

skillet), chiles and curry
leaves. The oil should be hot enough so the curry

leaves crackle and turn
black right away; the chiles should also turn black.

Cook no more than 3 minutes.
Pour this mixture into the chicken. Simmer 5

minutes longer.

6 servings. Each serving:
320 calories; 692 mg sodium; 99 mg cholesterol; 20

grams fat; 9 grams saturated
fat; 7 grams carbohydrates; 29 grams protein; 1.72

grams fiber.

*

Shrimp Vindaloo

Active Work Time: 20 minutes
* Total Preparation Time: 45 minutes

From Addi Decosta, former
owner of Chicken Madras in Hawthorne, now of Addi’s

Tandoor in Redondo Beach.

15 whole cloves, divided

1 teaspoon cumin seeds

2 (3-inch) cinnamon sticks,
divided

6 cloves garlic, divided

10 small dried red chiles,
or more to taste

3/4 teaspoon turmeric

24 whole black peppercorns,
divided

3/4 cup white vinegar

2 cups water

1 (1-inch) piece ginger
root

1 tablespoon oil

2 large red onions, minced

1 boiling potato, peeled
and cut into 2-inch chunks

2 pounds large shrimp, peeled
and deveined

2 teaspoons salt

2 teaspoons sugar

Place 9 cloves, the cumin
seeds, 1 cinnamon stick, 3 garlic cloves, the chiles,

turmeric, 18 peppercorns
and the vinegar in a blender. Blend on high speed until

as smooth as possible, about
4 to 5 minutes. Add the water and blend just to

combine. Set aside.

    Place
the remaining garlic and the ginger in a small food processor along with

about 1 tablespoon of water.
Process until a paste is formed. Set aside.

    Heat
the oil in a large saucepan over high heat. Add the onions, remaining

cloves, remaining cinnamon
stick and remaining peppercorns. Cook, stirring

often, until the onions
have browned, about 15 minutes. Add the mixture from the

blender, the ginger-garlic
paste and the potato and continue to cook over high

heat until the mixture thickens
a bit and the potato is almost cooked through,

10 to 15 minutes. Add more
water if the curry thickens too much. Add the shrimp,

salt and sugar and cook
another 5 minutes, stirring, until the shrimp are cooked

through.

4 servings. Each serving:
256 calories; 1,510 mg sodium; 276 mg cholesterol; 6

grams fat; 1 gram saturated
fat; 21 grams carbohydrates; 32 grams protein; 3.54

grams fiber.

Variation: Substitute 1 1/2
pounds boneless pork, cut into small cubes, for the

shrimp. Prepare the sauce
as for Shrimp Vindaloo, add the pork and cook over low

heat 1 hour. Cool and refrigerate
overnight. Reheat and serve. 4 servings.

*

Malai Kofta

Active Work Time: 20 minutes
* Total Preparation Time: 1 hour

From A-1 Produce and Veggie
Lovers Deli in Northridge.

KOFTA

1 carrot

1/8 cauliflower

6 ounces paneer cheese

2 tablespoons besan (chickpea
flour)

1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

Salt

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

Oil, for deep-frying

Very finely shred the carrot,
cauliflower and cheese. Combine with the besan,

cumin seeds, coriander,
salt to taste and baking powder in a bowl. Mix well,

mashing together by hand.
Divide into 8 portions and form each into a ball.

    Add 1
1/2 inches of oil to a saucepan and heat to 350 degrees. Add the balls
and

deep-fry until browned,
45 seconds. Set aside on paper towels to drain.

SAUCE

1 large onion, cut in pieces

2 tablespoons finely chopped
garlic

1 1/2 tablespoons finely
chopped ginger root

Water

1/4 cup oil

3/4 teaspoon cumin seeds

1 teaspoon finely chopped
serrano chile

2 1/2 large tomatoes

1 teaspoon salt

Scant teaspoon pure red
chile powder

1/2 teaspoon ground coriander

1/2 teaspoon garam masala

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

3/4 cup heavy whipping cream

15 golden raisins

10 cashews

1 teaspoon dried methi (fenugreek)
leaves

Combine onion, garlic and
ginger in a blender; blend until pureed, adding about

2 tablespoons water to make
blending possible.

    Heat
a skillet over high heat. Add the oil. When the oil is hot, add the cumin

seeds and fry a few seconds.
Add the blended onion mixture and the serrano chile

and fry well, stirring,
until the mixture thickens and dries out but is not

browned, about 10 minutes.

    Puree
the tomatoes in the blender and add to the skillet. Rinse out the blender

with 1/3 cup water and add
to the skillet. Cook 10 minutes.

    Add the
salt, chile powder, coriander, garam masala and turmeric. Let this cook

at a boil until it deepens
in color and the oil rises to the surface, about 10

minutes. Add the cream and
1/3 cup water. Add the raisins and cashews. Rub the

methi leaves between the
palms of your hands to crush, then add to the skillet.

Taste for seasoning. Cook
another 5 minutes. Add the Kofta; simmer 5 minutes.

Thin with water or more
cream, if needed.

4 servings. Each serving:
487 calories; 896 mg sodium; 37 mg cholesterol; 38

grams fat; 9 grams saturated
fat; 30 grams carbohydrates; 11 grams protein; 4.18

grams fiber.

Cover feature of Newsweek’s Oct 7 issue:

Young and Depressed

Ten years ago this disease was for adults only. But as teen depression comes out of the closet, it‚s getting easier to spot˜and sufferers can hope for a brighter future

By Pat Wingert and Barbara Kantrowitz

NEWSWEEK

Oct. 7 issue ˜  Brianne
Camilleri had it all: two involved parents, a caring

older brother and a comfortable
home near Boston. But that didn‚t stop the

overwhelming sense of hopelessness
that enveloped her in ninth grade. „It was

like a cloud that followed
me everywhere,‰ she says. „I couldn‚t get away from

it.‰

         
BRIANNE STARTED DRINKING and experimenting with drugs. One Sunday she

was caught shoplifting at
a local store and her mother, Linda, drove her home in

what Brianne describes as
a „piercing silence.‰ With the clouds in her head so

dark she believed she would
never see light again, Brianne went straight for the

bathroom and swallowed every
Tylenol and Advil she could find˜a total of 74

pills. She was only 14,
and she wanted to die.

      
A few hours later Linda Camilleri found her daughter vomiting all over

the floor. Brianne was rushed
to the hospital, where she convinced a

psychiatrist (and even herself)
that it had been a one-time impulse. The

psychiatrist urged her parents
to keep the episode a secret to avoid any stigma.

Brianne‚s father, Alan,
shudders when he remembers that advice. „Mental illness

is a closet problem in this
country, and it‚s got to come out,‰ he says. With a

schizophrenic brother and
a cousin who committed suicide, Alan thinks he should

have known better. Instead,
Brianne‚s cloud just got darker. After another

aborted suicide attempt
a few months later, she finally ended up at McLean

Hospital in Belmont, Mass.,
one of the best mental-health facilities in the

country. Now, after three
years of therapy and antidepressant medication,

Brianne, 19, thinks she‚s
on track. A sophomore at James Madison University in

Virginia, she‚s on the dean‚s
list, has a boyfriend and hopes to spend a

semester in Australia˜a
plan that makes her mother nervous, but also proud.

AN ŒEPIDEMIC‚?

      
Brianne is one of the lucky ones. Most of the nearly 3 million

adolescents struggling with
depression never get the help they need because of

prejudice about mental illness,
inadequate mental-health resources and

widespread ignorance about
how emotional problems can wreck young lives. The

National Institutes of Mental
Health (NIMH) estimates that 8 percent of

adolescents and 2 percent
of children (some as young as 4) have symptoms of

depression. Scientists also
say that early onset of depression in children and

teenagers has become increasingly
common; some even use the word „epidemic.‰ No

one knows whether there
are actually more depressed kids today or just greater

awareness of the problem,
but some researchers think that the stress of a high

divorce rate, rising
academic expectations and social pressure may be pushing

more kids over the edge.

    This
is a huge change from a decade ago, when many doctors considered

depression strictly an
adult disease. Teenage irritability and rebelliousness

was „just a phase‰ kids
would outgrow. But scientists now believe that if this

behavior is chronic, it
may signal serious problems. New brain research is also

beginning to explain why
teenagers may be particularly vulnerable to mood

disorders. Psychiatrists
who treat adolescents say parents should seek help if

they notice a troubling
change in eating, sleeping, grades or social life that

lasts more than a few weeks.
And public awareness of the need for help does seem

to be increasing. One case
in point: HBO‚s hit series „The Sopranos.‰ In a

recent episode, college
student Meadow Soprano saw a therapist who recommended

antidepressants to help
her work through her feelings after the murder of her

former boyfriend.

       
Without treatment, depressed adolescents are at high risk for school

failure, social isolation,
promiscuity, „self-medication‰ with drugs or alcohol,

and suicide˜now the third
leading cause of death among 10- to 24-year-olds. „The

earlier the onset, the more
people tend to fall away developmentally from their

peers,‰ says Dr. David Brent,
professor of child psychiatry at the University of

Pittsburgh. „If you become
depressed at 25, chances are you‚ve already completed

your education and you have
more resources and coping skills. If it happens at

11, there‚s still a lot
you need to learn, and you may never learn it.‰ Early

untreated depression also
increases a youngster‚s chance of developing more

severe depression as an
adult as well as bipolar disease and personality

disorders.

NEW APPROACHES

      
For kids who do get help, like Brianne, the prognosis is increasingly

hopeful. Both antidepressant
medication and cognitive-behavior therapy (talk

therapy that helps patients
identify and deal with sources of stress) have

enabled many teenagers to
focus on school and resume their lives. And more

effective treatment may
be available in the next few years. The NIMH recently

launched a major 12-city
initiative called the Treatment for Adolescents With

Depression Study to help
determine which regimens˜Prozac, talk therapy or some

combination˜work best on
12- to 18-year-olds. Brent is conducting another NIMH

study looking at newer medications,
including Effexor and Paxil, that may help

kids whose depression is
resistant to Prozac. He is trying to identify genetic

markers that indicate which
patients are likely to respond to particular drugs.

       
Doctors hope that the new research will ultimately result in specific

guidelines for adolescents,
since there‚s not much evidence about the effects of

the long-term use of these
medications on developing brains. Most

antidepressants are not
approved by the FDA for children under 18, although

doctors routinely prescribe
these medications to their young patients. (This

practice, called „off-label‰
use, is not uncommon for many illnesses.) Many of

the drugs being tested˜like
Prozac and Paxil˜are known as SSRIs, or selective

serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
They regulate how the brain uses the

neurotransmitter serotonin,
which has been connected to mood disorders.

       
Outside the lab, the hardest task may be pinpointing kids at risk.

Depressed teens usually
suffer for years before they are identified, and fewer

than one in five who needs
treatment gets it. „Parents often think their kid is

just being a kid, that all
teens are moody, oppositional and irritable all the

time,‰ says Madelyne Gould,
a professor of child psychiatry at Columbia

University. In fact, she
says, the typical teenager should be more like „Happy

Days‰ than „Rebel Without
a Cause.‰ Even adults who make a career of working

with kids˜teachers, coaches
and pediatricians˜can misread symptoms. On college

campuses, experts say, cases
of depression are too often misdiagnosed as

mononucleosis or chronic-fatigue
syndrome. That‚s why many kids still suffer

unnoticed, even though more
schools are using screening tools that identify kids

who should be referred for
a professional evaluation. Often it‚s only the overt

troublemakers˜disruptive
or violent kids˜who get any attention. „In most cases,

if a child is doing adequately
in school, is getting decent grades, but seems a

little depressed, there‚s
a great likelihood that the child won‚t come to the

attention of the teacher,
counselor administrator or school psychologist,‰ says

Phil Lazarus, who runs the
school-psychology training program at Florida

International University
and is chairman of the National Association of School

Psychologists‚ emergency-response
team.

FINDING HELP

      
And finding the right help can be as difficult as identifying the kids

who need help. There are
currently only about 7,000 child and adolescent

psychiatrists around the
country, far fewer than most mental-health experts say

is required. The shortage
is most acute in low-income areas and there are severe

consequences in communities
with more than enough traumatic circumstances to

trigger a major depression.
At the age of 13, Jonathan Haynes of San Antonio was

clearly on a dangerous path.
His parents, both crack addicts, were homeless˜a

major risk factor for depression.
Haynes did what he says was necessary to

survive: sold crack himself,
and broke into houses and cars. But his life began

to improve in the most unlikely
place: jail. In 1999, his parents, by then

drug-free, encouraged him
to get help. Still high from the marijuana he had

smoked that day, Haynes
turned himself in to police. At Southton, the county‚s

maximum-security facility
for juveniles, he was diagnosed and prescribed

antidepressants. Now 18,
Haynes works as a cook and lives with his family on San

Antonio‚s East Side. „I
got my priorities straight,‰ he says. „I gotta stay

strong. I got strong parents.
That helps. Ever since I got out of Southton, I‚ve

been off the streets.‰

       
In his case, it seems clear that traumatic family events contributed to

his illness. But more often
the trigger for adolescent depression is not so

obvious. Scientists are
studying a combination of factors, both internal and

external. The hormonal surges
of puberty have long been shown to affect moods,

but now new research says
that changes in brain structure may also play a role.

During adolescence, the
brain‚s gray matter is gradually „pruned,‰ and unused

brain-cell connections are
cleared out, creating superhighways that allow us as

adults to focus and learn
things more deeply, says Dr. Harold Koplewicz, author

of „More Than Moody: Recognizing
and Treating Adolescent Depression.‰ The link

between this brain activity
and depression isn‚t clear, but Koplewicz says the

pruning happens between
the ages of 14 and 17, when rates of psychiatric

disorders increase significantly.

      
Scientists also believe that there‚s a genetic predisposition to

depression. „The closer
your connection to a depressed family member˜a depressed

father rather than a depressed
uncle, for example˜the greater an individual‚s

likelihood of suffering
depression,‰ says John Mann, chief of the department of

neuroscience at Columbia
University. Negative experiences, such as growing up in

an abusive home or witnessing
violence, increases the probability of a

depressive episode in kids
who are at risk. Doctors around the country reported

an influx of young patients
after last year‚s terrorist attacks, although it‚s

too soon to tell whether
this will translate into significantly higher numbers

of youngsters diagnosed
with major depression. Lisa Meier, a clinical

psychologist in Rockville,
Md., a Washington, D.C., suburb, says the attacks

made many kids‚ worst fears
seem all too real. „Prior to September 11, if a

child said they were afraid
a bomb would drop on their house, that was very

clinically significant,
because it was an atypical fear,‰ Meier says. „It‚s not

atypical anymore.‰

 Gabrielle Cryan, now
19, got her first Prozac prescription when she was a high

school senior

TRIAL-AND-ERROR THERAPY

      
Many depressed adolescents have a long history of trouble, which often

includes misdiagnosis and
a lot of trial-and-error therapy that can aggravate

the social and emotional
problems caused by the depression. Morgan Willenbring,

17, of St. Paul, Minn.,
has suffered from depression since he was 8, but school

officials first thought
he had attention-deficit disorder. „I think that‚s

because they see that a
lot,‰ says his mother, Kate Meyers. „They tend to lump

together what they see as
acting-out behavior.‰ It took more than two years to

figure out a good treatment
regimen. Desipramine, one of the older

antidepressants, didn‚t
work. Then Willenbring spent six years on Wellbutrin,

which was effective but
problematical because he needed to take it three times a

day. „It‚s very easy to
forget, which was not helping,‰ he says. When he missed

too many doses, he had trouble
concentrating and got into fights at home. But a

month ago he switched to
a once-a-day drug called Celexa and says he‚s doing

better. He even managed
to get through breaking up with his longtime girlfriend

without missing a day of
school.

       

The results of the NIMH study may help make life easier for youngsters

like Willenbring. The lead
researcher, Dr. John March, a professor of child

psychiatry at Duke University,
says there is already evidence from other studies

supporting short-term behavioral
therapy and drugs like Prozac and Paxil. But

that regimen works only
in about 60 percent of cases, and almost half of those

patients relapse within
a year of stopping treatment. „We‚re hoping [the study]

will tell us which treatment
is best for each set of symptoms,‰ March says, „and

whether the severity of
symptoms biases you toward one treatment or another.‰

       

Until the results of that study and others are in, parents and teenagers

have to weigh the risk of
medication against the very real dangers of ignoring

the illness. A recent report
from the Centers for Disease Control found that 19

percent of high-school students
had suicidal thoughts and more than 2 million of

them actually began planning
to take their own lives. One of them was Gabrielle

Cryan. In 1999, during her
junior year at a New York City high school, „I

obsessed about death,‰ she
says. „I talked about it with everyone.‰ With her

parents‚ help, she found
a therapist just before the start of her senior year

who „put a name to what
I‚d been feeling,‰ says Cryan. „My therapist made me

realize it, face it and
get over it.‰ She also received a prescription for

Prozac. Although she had
some hesitations about Prozac, „it really did help me,‰

she says. So did the talk
therapy. „The first part of the healing process˜and I

know this sounds corny˜was
becoming more self-aware,‰ she says. The therapy

helped her see that „everything
was not a black-and-white situation.‰ Before

therapy, little things would
throw her into a funk. „I couldn‚t find my shoe and

the whole week was ruined,‰
she says now with a laugh. „They taught me to get

some perspective.‰ And while
her depression now is „nonexistent,‰ she knows that

she may have to face it
again in the future. „We‚re all a work in progress,‰

Cryan says. „But I‚ve picked
up a lot of tools. When I feel symptoms coming on,

I can reach out and help
myself now.‰ Stories like hers are the successes that

lead others out of the darkness.

——————————————————————————–

With Brian Braiker in Boston,
Karen Springen in Chicago and Ellise Pierce in

Dallas

Florida man rescued after being lost at sea

Friday, October 4, 2002
Posted: 12:44 PM EDT (1644 GMT)

 CHARLESTON, South Carolina (AP) — A Florida man who was lost at sea for more than two months was rescued 40 miles off the coast, officials said.

    The Coast Guard reached Terry Watson, 43, around 7 p.m. Thursday. Emaciated and weak, Watson was suffering from dehydration, delusion and shock, officials said.

    “I died a month ago,” Watson told The Post and Courier after he was assisted off a Coast Guard rescue boat.

    Watson and his 23-foot sailboat called the Psedorca were found 42 miles southeast of Little River
Inlet, which is located near the North Carolina-South Carolina border, the Coast Guard said.

    Authorities say Watson was last spotted in Miami on July 19. The captain of another boat said he was traveling with Watson around the Florida Keys and reported the boat missing July 23.

    A search of more than 8,000 square miles turned up nothing.

    Officials aren’t sure how Watson survived. He apparently used his broken mast to rig a shelter, but Coast Guard crewmen said they had not been able to talk with Watson long enough to determine how long he has been without food and water.

    A charter fishing boat captain found Watson and his ship at 1:25 p.m. Thursday and radioed the Coast Guard for help, authorities said.

    A helicopter dropped a rescue swimmer near the boat, but Watson refused to leave his vessel.

    “The helicopter apparently scared him, and he was not in good physical condition. He could barely
move,” said Coast Guard Petty Officer Scott Carr.

    The Coast Guard then sent a rescue boat from Georgetown. When it arrived, Watson
again refused to leave his boat, Carr said.

    Though the crew was prepared to use force to remove him to safety, they eventually persuaded Watson to come aboard Thursday evening, Carr said.

    He arrived at the Winyah Bay Coast Guard Station wearing a black and red life vest, a thermal underwear shirt, tattered green pants and brown hiking boots.

    At times he appeared disoriented, giving a rambling answers to questions. Other times, he appeared more coherent, the newspaper reported.

    “The Coast Guard is very nice,” Watson said. “I just need some food. I’ll be all right. I wouldn’t mind having some chocolate pudding.”

    Watson was taken to Georgetown Memorial Hospital for observation.

from http://www.observer.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,804928,00.html

You shone like the sun

Syd Barrett was the prodigiously talented founder of Pink Floyd, but after just two years at the centre of the 60s psychedelic scene, he suffered a massive breakdown and has lived as a recluse ever since.

In this extract from his candid new book, Tim Willis tracks him down and pieces together the
story of rock’s lost icon

Sunday October 6, 2002

The Observer

Remember when you were young,
You shone like the sun. Shine on you

crazy diamond. Now there’s
a look in your eyes, Like black holes in

the sky. Shine on you crazy
diamond.

–Pink Floyd’s tribute to
Syd Barrett on Wish You Were Here, 1975

The received wisdom is that
you don’t disturb him.The last interview

he gave was in 1971, and
from then until now, there are only about 20

recorded encounters of any
kind. His family says it upsets him to

discuss the days when he
was the spirit of psychedelia, beautiful Syd

Barrett, the leader of Pink
Floyd. He doesn’t recognise himself as

the shambling visionary
who, during an extended nervous breakdown

exacerbated by his drug
intake, made two solos LPs, Madcap and

Barrett , which are as eternally
eloquent as Van Gogh’s cornfields.

He doesn’t answer to his
60s nickname now. He’s called Roger Barrett,

as he was born in 1946.

    On a
blistering hot day, pacing the cracked tarmac pavement in this

suburban Cambridge street,
I wonder if I can act honourably by him.

When the DJ Nicky Horne
doorstepped him in the 80s, Barrett said,

‘Syd can’t talk to you now.’
Perhaps, in his own way, he was telling

the truth. But I could talk
to him as Roger; ask him if he was still

painting, as reported. I
could pass on regards from friends he knew

before he became Syd.

    Two housewives
in the street say he ignores their ‘Good mornings’

when he goes out to buy
his Daily Mail and changing brands of fags.

Apart from his sister, they
don’t think he has any visitors – not

even workmen. But they don’t
see why I shouldn’t take my chances.

It’s been a few years since
backpackers camped by his gate. ‘He

didn’t open the door for
them, and he probably won’t for you.’

    So I
walk up the concrete path of his grey pebble-dashed semi, try

the bell and discover that
it’s disconnected. At the front of the

house, all the curtains
are open. The side passage is closed to

prying eyes by a high gate.
I knock on the front door and, after a

minute or two, look through
the downstairs bay window. Where you

might expect a television
and a three-piece suite, Barrett has

constructed a bare, white-walled
workshop. Pushed against the window

is a tattered pink sofa.
On the hardboard tops, toolboxes are neatly

stacked, flexes coiled,
pens put away in a white mug.

    Then,
a sound in the hall. Has he come in from the back garden?

Perhaps it needs mowing,
like the front lawn – although, judging by

the mound of weeds by the
path, he’s been tidying the beds today.

    I knock
again, and hear three heavy steps. The door flies open and

he’s standing there. He’s
stark naked except for a small, tight pair

of bright-blue Y-fronts;
bouncing, like the books say he always did,

on the balls of his feet.

    He bars
the doorway with one hand on the jamb, the other on the

catch. His resemblance to
Aleister Crowley in his Cefalu period is

uncanny; his stare about
as welcoming…

In 1988, the News of the
World quoted the writer Jonathan Meades who,

20 years before had visited
a South Kensington flat that Barrett

shared with a bright, druggie
clique from his home town of Cambridge.

‘This rather weird, exotic
and mildly famous creature was living in

this flat with these people
who to some extent were pimping off him,

both professionally and
privately,’ said Meades. ‘There was this

terrible noise. It sounded
like the heating pipes shaking. I said,

“What’s that?” and [they]
sort of giggled and said, “That’s Syd

having a bad trip. We put
him in the linen cupboard.”‘

    It’s
a common motif in the Barrett legend: the genius mistreated,

forced to endure unspeakable
mental anguish for the fun of his

fairweather friends. But
it’s not necessarily true. There are some

terrible tales from that
flat in Egerton Court. But on this occasion,

as flatmate Aubrey ‘Po’
Powell remembers it, ‘Pete Townshend used to

come there, and Mick and
Marianne. It was an incredibly cool scene.

Jonty Meades was a hanger-on,
a straight cat just out of school. I’m

sure we told him that version
of events – but only to wind him up.’

    Similarly,
Barrett’s lover and flatmate at the time, Lindsay Corner,

denies the stories that
he locked her in her room for three days,

feeding her biscuits under
the door, then smashed a guitar over her

head. This time, however,
three other residents swear he did: ‘I

remember pulling Syd off
her,’ says Po. And that’s the trouble with

the whole Barrett business.
There are witness accounts by people who

weren’t there, those who
were there disagree – half of them, being as

totally off their faces
as Barrett was, must have a question mark

over their evidence. If
you can remember the 60s, as they say…

    By October
1966, Barrett was already well on the way to stardom. Pink

Floyd supported the Soft
Machine’s experimental jazz-rock at the IT

magazine launch party, a
2,000-strong happening in the disused

Roundhouse theatre, featuring
acid aplenty, Marianne Faithfull

dressed as a nun in a pussy-pelmet,
and Paul McCartney disguised as

an Arab. There was a giant
jelly and a Pop Art-painted Cadillac, a

mini-cinema and a performance
piece by Yoko Ono.

    ‘All
apparently very psychedelic,’ sniffed The Sunday Times of the

Floyd, thus encouraging
hundreds of difficult teenagers to check out

their new residency at the
All Saints Hall in Ladbroke Grove.

    Now once-
or twice-weekly, the shows took time to take off. Barrett’s

friend Juliet Wright remembers
an occasion when there were so few

punters that Barrett movingly
recited Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’

soliloquy onstage. But soon
ravers were crossing London for the

lights and the weirdness,
titillated by music-press adverts using

Timothy Leary’s phrase of
‘Turn on, Tune in, Drop out’. With

Barrett’s nursery-rhyme
freak-outs lasting 40 minutes each, the Floyd

become known as Britain’s
first ‘psychedelic’ band.

    Apart
from playing a packed live schedule, the Floyd were in pursuit

of a recording contract,
rehearsing and making rough demos. Floyd gig

promoter Joe Boyd, who had
production experience, took them into a

studio in late January.
Barrett had written ‘Arnold Layne’ by then,

and perfected the relentless
riff of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’. EMI –

the same label as the Beatles
– signed them up on the basis of these

demos, nominating ‘Arnold’
as the first single. Barrett was

delighted. ‘We want to be
pop stars,’ he said, gladly grinning for

cheesy publicity shots of
the band high-kicking on the street.

However, by the beginning
of April, he was already railing in the

music papers against record-company
executives who were pressing him

for more commercial material.

    He was
even less cheery by the end of the month. Six weeks before,

‘Arnold Layne’ had been
released. This jolly tale of Barrett’s

childhood pal and later
Pink Floyd member Roger Waters’s mum’s

washing-line raider was
helped up the charts by a ban from Radio

London, due to its lyrics
about transvestism. But Barrett had grown

to hate playing note-perfect,
three-minute renditions on stage. On 22

April it reached number
20, its highest position. On 29 April,

Barrett was still playing
it, at Joe Boyd’s UFO club at dawn and on a

TV show in Holland that
evening. The band then drove back to London

to headline at 3am in Britain’s
biggest happening ever, the ’14 Hour

Technicolor Dream’ at the
cavernous Alexandra Palace.

    It was
a druggy affair. Floyd’s co-manager Peter Jenner was certainly

tripping that night, and
Barrett is said to have been. John Lennon,

Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix
were among those who played to a

10,000-strong audience.
There were 40 bands, dancers in strobe shows,

a helter-skelter and a noticeboard
made of lightbulbs which displayed

messages like ‘Vietnam Is
A Sad Trip’. The Floyd came on as the sun’s

pink fingers touched the
huge eastern window. Barry Miles, the 60s

chronicler, reported: ‘Syd’s
eyes blazed as his notes soared up into

the strengthening light,
as the dawn was reflected in his famous

mirror-disc Telecaster [or
rather, Esquire].’ The truth was less

rosy. Barrett was tired,
so terribly tired.

    There’s
a horrible ring of truth to Barrett’s old college friend Sue

Kingsford’s contention that,
in 1967, Barrett would regularly visit

her in Beaufort Street,
to score from a heavy acid dealer in the

basement called ‘Captain
Bob’. It certainly sounds more likely than

the rumours that Barrett’s
camp-followers were lacing his tea with

LSD. Kingsford’s boyfriend
Jock says: ‘Spiking was a heinous crime.

You just wouldn’t do it.
There was a ritual to acid-taking those days

– a peaceful scene, good
sounds.’

    Cambridge
pal and future Floyd member David Gilmour reckons: ‘Syd

didn’t need encouraging.
If drugs were going, he’d take them by the

shovelful.’ Gilmour tends
to agree with something fellow Camridgian

and Floyd’s bassist Waters
once said that ‘Syd was being fed acid.’

But Sue Kingsford giggles:
‘We were all feeding it to each other…

It was a crazy time.’ Despite
her attachment to Jock, she had a

one-night stand with Barrett.
‘We were tripping,’ she explains.

    Ah, but
what does she mean by tripping? Another of Barrett’s

Cambridge friends, Andrew
Rawlinson, comments: ‘Acid in those days

was five times stronger
than today’s stuff. On a proper trip, you

might take 250 micrograms.
But a faction believed in taking 50mcg

every day. [There was even
a popular hippy-handbook on the subject.]

On that, you could function
– you might even appear normal – but you

couldn’t initiate much.’

    Perhaps
that was Barrett’s way. But if he had actually taken a proper

dose of acid at the Technicolor
Dream then it was a fairly rare

event. He simply didn’t
have the time for anything stronger than dope

– which he did smoke in
copious quantities. And maybe for a few

Mandrax, the hypnotic tranquillisers
which, if one can ride the first

wave of tiredness, induced
an opiate-like buzz when swallowed with

alcohol. In legend, ‘Mandies
make you randy.’ They may have appealed

to Barrett because they
were fashionable in the late 60s – or because

they stopped his mind from
spinning.

    The band
weren’t worried by his behaviour, yet Syd was Syd. And if,

by the end of May, people
who hadn’t seen Barrett for a while thought

he had changed, his month
had started well. On 12 May 1967 the band

played the ‘Games for May’
concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Barrett wrote an early version
of ‘See Emily Play’ for the event,

which was essentially a
normal concert bookended by some pretentious

bits. The Floyd introduced
a rudimentary quad sound-system, played

taped noises from nature
and had a liquid red light show. Mason was

amplified sawing a log.
Waters threw potatoes at a gong. The roadies

pumped out thousands of
soap bubbles and one of them, dressed as an

admiral, threw daffodils
into the stalls. The mess earnt the Floyd a

ban from the hall and a
favourable review from The Financial Times.

    On 2
June, the Floyd played Joe Boyd’s UFO after a two-month absence.

Though the other band members
were friendly, Boyd said Barrett ‘just

looked at me. I looked right
in his eye and there was no twinkle, no

glint… you know, nobody
home.’ Visiting London from France, David

Gilmour dropped in on the
recording of ‘Emily’: ‘Syd didn’t seem to

recognise me and he just
stared back,’ he says. ‘He was a different

person from the one I’d
last seen in October.’ Was he on drugs,

though? ‘I’d done plenty
of acid and dope – often with Syd – and that

was different from how he
had become.’

    Touring
the provinces in July, like the rest of the band, Barrett

resented the beery mob baying
for ‘Arnold’ and ‘Emily’. The Floyd

even wrote a white-noise
number called ‘Reaction in G’ to express

their feelings. But Barrett’s
inner reaction was harder to fathom.

With his echo-machines on
full tilt, he might detune his Fender until

its strings were flapping,
and hit one note all night. He might stand

with his arms by his side,
the guitar hanging from his neck, staring

straight ahead, while the
others performed as a three-piece.

    Perhaps
Barrett was making a statement. Perhaps he was pushing his

experimental notions of
‘music-of-the-moment’ to new boundaries.

Whatever else, he was now
seriously mentally ill. And almost

certainly he suspected it
himself.

    After
a couple of further concert debacles, Jenner and his partner

Andrew King were forced
to act. Though their debut LP Piper at the

Gates of Dawn was released
on 4 August, Blackhill cancelled the next

three weeks’ gigs and arranged
a holiday for Barrett and Corner on

the Balearic island of Formentera.
Hutt and Rick Wright would be

chaperones, accompanied
by their partners and Hutt’s baby son. Waters

and his wife would be in
Ibiza. When Melody Maker learnt of this,

their front-page splash
read: ‘Pink Floyd Flake Out’.

2 November 1967, US mini-tour.
Pink Floyd were not prepared for the

American way. They had expected
the San Francisco scene to be similar

to Britain’s. Instead, they
found themselves in humungous venues like

the Winterland, supporting
such blues bands as Big Brother and the

Holding Company (led by
Janis Joplin). The three nights they played

with Joplin, they borrowed
her lighting because their own seemed too

weedy. The crowd weren’t
into feedback or English whimsy –

acid-inspired or not. Barrett
was off the map, and when he did play,

it was to a different tune.

    At the
beginning of the week his hair had been badly permed at Vidal

Sassoon, and he was distraught.
The greased-up ‘punk’ style with

which he’d been experimenting
would be better. Waters remembers that

in the dressing-room at
the Cheetah Club in Santa Monica, Barrett

suddenly called for a tin
of Brylcreem and tipped the whole lot on

his head. As the gunk melted,
it slipped down his face until Barrett

resembled ‘a gutted candle’.
Producing a bottle of Mandrax, he

crushed them into the mess
before taking the stage. David Gilmour

says he ‘still can’t believe
that Syd would waste good Mandies’. But

a lighting man called John
Marsh, who was also there, confirms the

story. Girls in the front
row, seeing his lips and nostrils bubbling

with Brylcreem, screamed.
He looked like he was decomposing onstage.

Faced with this farce, some
of the band and crew abandoned themselves

to drink, drugs, groupies
and the sights. When they arrived in Los

Angeles, Barrett had forgotten
his guitar, which caused much cost and

fuss. ‘It’s great to be
in Las Vegas,’ he said to a record company

man in Hollywood. He fell
into a swimming-pool and left his wet

clothes behind.

    The Floyd
survived the tour by the skin of their teeth. On TV’s Pat

Boone Show, where they did
‘Apples and Oranges’, Barrett was happy to

mime in rehearsals – but
live he ignored the call to ‘Action’ four or

five times, leaving Waters
to fill in. Asked what he liked in the

after-show chat, Barrett
replied… after a dreadful pause…

‘America!’, which made the
audience whoop. On American Bandstand and

the Perry Como Show, he
did not move his lips, to speak or mime.

    Finishing
their commitments on the West Coast, the band began

thinking of how to replace
or augment him. The next day, they were in

Holland, handing Barrett
notes in the hope that he would talk to

them. The day after, they
were bus-bound on a British package tour

with Hendrix, the Move,
Amen Corner, the Nice and others, playing two

17-minute sets a night for
three weeks, with three days off in

middle.Though he had worked
harder, the schedule was too much for

Barrett. Onstage, he was
unable to function. Sometimes he failed to

show up and the Nice’s Dave
O’List stood in for him. Once, Jenner had

to stop him escaping by
train.

    Barrett
did play occasional blinders through out the autumn of 1967,

but these instances were
as unpredictable as spring showers, and the

band’s hopes that he might
‘return’ dimmed. The Floyd stumbled

through to Christmas, while
the three other band members hatched a

plan: they would ask David
Gilmour to join the group to cover lead

guitar and vocals while
their sick colleague could do what he wanted,

so long as he stood onstage.

    Barrett
couldn’t care less, and Gilmour, broke, bandless and driving

a van for a living – was
known to be not only a terrific guitarist

but also a wonderful mimic
of musical parts. Drummer Nick Mason had

already sounded him out
when they ran into each other at a gig in

Soho. On 3 January 1968,
Gilmour accepted a try-out. The band had a

week booked in a north London
rehearsal hall before going back on the

road.

    Four
gigs followed in the next fortnight, with Barrett contributing

little. He looks happy enough
in a cine-clip from the time, joining

in with the lads for a tap-dance
in a dressing-room. ‘But in

reality,’ says Gilmour,
‘he was rather pathetic.’ On the day of the

fifth gig the others were
driving south from a business meeting in

central London. As they
drove, one of them – no one remembers who –

asked, ‘Shall we pick up
Syd?’ ‘Fuck it,’ said the others. ‘Let’s not

bother.’ Barrett, who probably
didn’t notice that night, would never

work again with the band
that he had crafted in his image. And they

never quite put him out
of their minds.

    Not that
their minds were made up. Though the Floyd would go on to

huge fame and fortune, at
the time they believed they probably had a

few months left of milking
psychedelia before ignominious

disbandment. Barrett, as
Waters says, was the ‘goose that had laid

the golden egg’. Now their
frontman had become such a liability on

tour, they would rather
appear without their main attraction than

risk his involvement.

    However,
Barrett still had the band’s schedule. Waters remembers him

turning up with his guitar
at ‘an Imperial College gig, I think, and

he had to be very firmly
told that he wasn’t coming on stage with

us’. At the Middle Earth,
wearing all his Chelsea threads, he

positioned himself in front
of the low stage and stared at Gilmour

throughout his performance.
Now he had to watch his old college

friend playing his licks.
Undoubtedly, he felt hurt by this treatment.

    Though
the money from Piper came rolling in, Barrett’s work went

completely to pot. Jenner
took him into the Abbey Road studios

several times between May
and July 1968, bringing various musicians

and musical friends to help
out, but achieved next to nothing.

    Barrett
was all over the place – forgetting to bring his guitar to

sessions, breaking equipment
to EMI’s displeasure. Sometimes he

couldn’t even hold his plectrum.
He was in a state, and had little

new material. Jenner had
the experience neither as a person not as a

producer to coax anything
out of him. By August, he and King were

having less and less to
do with Barrett – which could equally be said

of the other lodgers in
Egerton Court.

    According
to flatmate Po, ‘Syd could still be very funny and lucid,

but he could also be uncommunicative.
Staring. Heavy, you know?’

    In the
spring of 1968, Roger Walters had talked to the hip

psychiatrist RD Laing. He
had even dri ven Barrett to an appointment:

‘Syd wouldn’t get out. What
can you do?’ In the intervening months,

however, Barrett became
less hostile to the idea of treatment. So

Gale placed a call to Laing
and Po booked a cab. But with the

taxi-meter ticking outside,
Barrett refused to leave the flat.

    By the
autumn of 68, he was homeless. Periodically he returned to

Cambridge, where his mother
Win fretted, urged him to see a doctor,

and blindly hoped for the
best. In London, he crashed on friends’

floors – and began the midnight
ramblings which would continue for

two years.

    By the
mid 70s, the Syd Barrett Appreciation Society had folded, due

to ‘lack of Syd’. But he
wasn’t quite invisible. In 1977,

ex-girlfriend Gala Pinion
was in a supermarket on the Fulham Road.

‘Where are you going, then?’
he said. ‘I’m going to buy you a drink.’

They went for a drink, and
he invited her back to his flat. Once

there, ‘He dropped his trousers
and pulled out his cheque book,’ says

Pinion. ‘How much do you
want?’ he asked. ‘Come on, get your knickers

down.’

    Gala
made her excuses and left, never to see him again. However, even

as an invisible presence,
he loomed large. The previous year, punk

rock had appeared and the
King’s Road had become heartland. Without

success, the Sex Pistols,
their manager Malcolm McLaren and their art

director Jamie Reid tried
to contact Barrett, to ask him to produce

their first album. The Damned
hoped he would produce their second,

realised it was impossible
and settled for the Floyd’s Nick Mason

(‘Who didn’t have a clue’,
according to the band’s bassist Captain

Sensible).

    Barrett
continued to do as little and spend as much as ever.

Bankrupt, he left London
for Win’s new Cambridge home in 1981.

    
From then until now, only a handful of encounters with Barrett have

been reported first-hand,
but some facts have come to light. An

operation on his ulcer meant
that Barrett lost much of his excess

weight. Win thought he should
keep himself occupied, so Roger

Waters’s mother Mary found
him a gardening job with some wealthy

friends. At first he prospered
but, during a thunderstorm, he threw

down his tools and left.

    By this
time, he was just calling himself ‘Roger’. In 1982, his

finances restored, he booked
into the Chelsea Cloisters for a few

weeks, but found he disliked
London. He heard the voice of freedom

and he followed – walking
back to Cambridge, where he was found on

Win’s doorstep – and leaving
his dirty laundry behind.

    The circumstances
of his final return to Cambridge were rightly

interpreted by his family
as a ‘cry for help’ and he agreed to spend

a spell in Fulbourne psychiatric
hospital. (It has often been said,

on the grounds that he has
an ‘odd’ mind, rather than a sick one.) He

continued for a while as
an outpatient at Fulbourne, with no trouble.

    Barrett
has never been sectioned. He has never had to take drugs for

his mental health, except
after one or two uncontrollable fits of

anger, when he was admitted
to Fulbourne and administered Largactyl.

However, he has received
other treatments. In the early 80s, he spent

two years in a charitable
institution, Greenwoods, in Essex. At this

halfway house for lost souls,
he joined in group and other forms of

therapy, and was very content.
But after an imagined slight, he

walked out – again all the
way to Win’s house. The increasingly frail

Win moved in with her daughter
Roe and her husband Paul Breen,

according to Mary Waters,
‘because she was so scared of his

outbursts’.

    Some
people think Barrett suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. It

certainly seems he can’t
be bothered to think about anything that

doesn’t directly affect
him. He kept rabbits and cats for a while but

forgot to feed them, so
they had to be sent to more caring homes.

Thereafter, the only intimate
contacts he maintained were with Win

and Roe. Otherwise, he seems
to have lost the habit – and become wary

– of human interaction,
limiting himself to encounters with shop

assistants and his sympathetic
GP, whose surgery has become a second

home. He was – and is still
– in and out of hospital for his ulcers.

    Paul
Breen revealed that his brother-in-law was ‘painting again’, and

meeting his mother in town
for shopping trips. It was a ‘very, very

ordinary lifestyle,’ said
Breen, but not reclusive: ‘I think the word

“recluse” is probably emotive.
It would be truer to say that he

enjoys his own company now,
rather than that of others.’

    As more
years went by, other news leaked out. Barrett was collecting

coins. He was learning to
cook, and could stuff a mean pepper. On the

death of Win in 1991, he
destroyed all his old diaries and art books

– and also chopped down
the front garden’s fence and tree, and burnt

them (though more in a spirit
of renewal than grief). He had been a

great support to Roe in
her mourning, but hadn’t attended the funeral

because he ‘wouldn’t know
what to do’. He still wrote down his

thoughts all the time. He
still painted – big works, six foot by four

– but destroyed any that
he didn’t consider perfect, and stacked the

rest against the wall. And
sometimes he was unable to finish them,

because obsessive fans had
climbed over his back fence, and stolen

the brushes from the table
outside, where he worked.

    A few
titbits, to finish. In 1998, Barrett was diagnosed as a B-type

diabetic – a genetic condition
– and was prescribed a regime of

medication and diet to which
he is sporadically faithful. His

eyesight will inevitably
become ‘tunnelled’ as a result – sooner,

rather than later, unless
he regularly takes his tablets. However, he

is far from ‘blind’, as
reported on the more excitable websites.

    For Christmas
2001, Barrett gave his sister a painting. For his

birthday in January 2002,
she brought him a new stereo, because he

likes to listen to the Stones,
Booker-T and the classical composers.

However, he evinced no interest
in the recent Echoes: The Best of

Pink Floyd (on which nearly
a fifth of the tracks are written by him,

despite the fact that he
only recorded with the band for less than a

30th of its lifespan). To
coincide with the album’s release, the BBC

screened an Omnibus documentary
about him, which he watched round at

Roe’s house. He is reported
to have liked hearing ‘Emily’ and,

particularly, seeing his
old landlord Mike Leonard – who he called

his ‘teacher’. Otherwise,
he thought the film ‘a bit noisy’.

 

    ‘Mister
Barrett?’

    ‘Yes.’

    His voice
is deeper than on any recordings, more cockneyfied than on

the TV interviews he gave
in 67. Behind him, the hall is clean but

bare, the floorboards mostly
covered in linoleum. I mention someone

dear to him, from his childhood.
She’d be coming to Cambridge in a

couple of weeks, and wondered
if Barrett might like a visit?

    ‘No.’

    He stands
and stares, less embarrassed than me by the vision of him

in his underpants.

    ‘So is
everything all right?’

    ‘Yeah.’

    ‘You’re
still painting?’

    ‘No,
I’m
not doing anything,’ he says (which is true – he’s talking

to me). ‘I’m just looking
after this place for the moment.’

    ‘For
the moment? Are you thinking of moving on?’

    ‘Well,
I’m not going to stay here for ever.’ He pauses a split

second, delivers an unexpected
‘Bye-bye’, and slams the door.

    I’m left
like others before me, trying to work out just what he

meant. ‘I’m not going to
stay here for ever.’ Does he just mean, ‘One

day, I might move house.’
Or is it a nod to the fate that awaits us

all? A coded message that
he may re-emerge into the world – perhaps

show new work or perform?
And is opening the door in your underpants

an unwitting demonstration
of self-confidence, or an eccentricity, or

worse? I retrace my steps,
cross the main road to my car where I

write a note that I hope
is tactful: ‘Dear Mr Barrett, I’m sorry to

have disturbed your sunbathing.
I didn’t have time to mention that

I’m writing a book on you…’
I plead my case, give my telephone

number, and return down
the cracked pavement.

    As I
reach the gate, I see him weeding in the front corner of the

garden, on his knees.

    ‘Hi,’
I say. ‘I’ve written you a note.’

    ‘Huh,’
he says, not looking up, throwing roots behind him.

    ‘May
I leave it?’ He straightens and stares into my eyes, but doesn’t

answer. He’s wearing khaki
shorts now, and gardening gloves, which

aren’t really suited to
receiving the note – and I would be tempting

fate to rest it on the side
of the wheelbarrow which he has bought

with him.

    ‘Shall
I put it through the letterbox?’

    ‘It’s
nothing to do with me,’ he says. So I do.

    ‘Nice
day,’ I say, on leaving. ‘Goodbye.’

    He doesn’t
reply, and I never hear from him.

Chess champ trounces Deep Fritz computer

Wednesday, October 9, 2002
Posted: 9:47 AM EDT (1347 GMT)

MANAMA, Bahrain (Reuters)
— World champion Vladimir Kramnik outwitted the world’s most powerful
chess computer Deep Fritz to win the third game in a match dubbed the “Brains
in Bahrain” contest. Fans of the human were rooting for him to pull off
another victory during game four on Thursday.

    The 27-year-old Russian, playing with black pieces, beat German-developed Fritz in 51 moves
to lead the eight-game series 2.5-05. The first game was drawn.

    Fritz
is capable of evaluating 3.5 million moves per second and the man-versus-machine
contest is a sequel to Gary Kasparov’s 1997 battle with super-computer
Deep Blue in New York. The computer won that contest.

    Kramnik,
who was crowned world champion in 2000 when he beat compatriot Kasparov
in London, will get $1 million if he wins, $800,000 if the match is drawn,
and $600,000 if he loses.

    Fritz
won the opening skirmish even though he began with the aggressive Scotch
Opening, precisely the kind of tactical maneuver experts say computers
do not understand well.

    As he
had done in the previous two games, Kramnik confused Fritz with an early
gambit of queens and then slowly outplayed the computer in a brilliant
display of chess.

    The queenless
middle game had a rigid pawn structure which Kramnik could pick apart at
leisure.

    Kramnik
said he knew he was winning as early as move 19.a3, when Fritz weakened
its pawns on the king’s side.

    Under
the new rules, Kramnik was given the computer two weeks before the contest
to practice against the new software and assess its style.

Copyright © 1995 by Terri Windling. This article was published in “Realms of Fantasy” magazine

“A Gothic footbridge made of stone spans the broad Vltava River, linking five ancient towns together
into Prague, the hauntingly beautiful capital city of the Czech Republic.
West of the bridge is the Old Town; to the east is Mala Strana (the Little
Quarter), a collection of crooked cobbled streets between the river and
the castle on the hill. Strolling across Charles Bridge at twilight, the
“City of One Hundred Spires” looks distinctly unreal, as dreamlike and
hallucinatory as any of the art it has inspired. This is Franz Kafka’s
city, after all. A town where nothing is quite as it appears. A town steeped
in legends and alchemy, with a long, bizarre, rather tragic history. Where
the past is tangible, crowding the present-day streets with ghosts and
stories.

    
The apartment where I am staying is in Mala Strana, tucked between crumbling
Baroque buildings, quiet parks and the bubbling Devil’s Stream — named,
I am told, for a demon in the water, or else for a washerwoman’s temper.
I have come because of the Art Nouveau movement which blossomed here one
hundred years before. With its roots deeply planted in Czech folklore,
Art Nouveau architecture and design has turned Prague into a fantasist’s
dream: extravagantly adorned with sprites, undines, and the pensive heroes
of myth and legend, standing draped over doorways, on turret towers, holding
up the red-tile roofs. Stories surround me everywhere I look. Music, too,
is a constant presence. The sound of Mozart on a solo violin follows me
down a dusky alleyway. I glimpse the form of the young musician in a lit
window on a floor above. The next block, I hear piano scales; and down
the street, the strains of a string quartet from a small palace concert
hall. The night air is crisp, cold, the last of autumn shading into winter.

    
The friends I am visiting here in Prague are involved in a world of magic
themselves. William Todd-Jones is a Welsh puppeteer at work on a film of
Pinocchio. The film crew, directed by Steve Barron, have made use of these
old, unspoiled streets to recreate the timeless landscape of a classic
children’s story. Although ostensibly set in Italy, Carlos Collodi’s tale
of a wooden puppet who longs to be a real boy is a fitting one to bring
to Prague — and not just because of the economic climate that lures so
many film productions here. This is a city filled with puppets: from the
simplest wooden marionettes hawked by street vendors on Charles Bridge
to the elaborate, fanciful figures found on display in posh art galleries.
This ancient folk art/folk theater tradition still flourishes here in Eastern
Europe in a way unimaginable in the West — where puppetry, like fantasy
itself, is deemed to be for children only.

    
Czech puppets often depict the figures from old Bohemian folktales, a rich
oral storytelling tradition that dates back to the founding of this land.
According to the history books the Czech tribe established itself in Bohemia
sometime between the 5th and 8th centuries, following a vanished Celtic
tribe, and one of Germanic peoples. The Premysls were the first ruling
dynasty, founded by the Queen Libuse — a romantic, half-legendary figure
described by Cosmas of Prague (c. 1045-1125) as “. . .a wonderful woman
among women, chaste in body, righteous in all her morals, second to none
as a judge over the people, affable to all and even amiable, the pride
and glory of the female sex, doing wise and manly deeds; but, as nobody
is perfect, this so praise-worthy woman was, alas, a soothsayer. . . .”

    
When the men of her tribe grew disgruntled about being ruled by a woman,
she fell into a trance, pointed toward the hills, and instructed them to
follow her horse; it would lead them to the simple ploughman who was destined
to be her husband. That ploughman was the first Premysls, a muscular and
handsome young man according to the legends — and to the many statues
of the pair one finds in Prague today. Another legend attributes the founding
of the city itself to Libuse’s visions. In a trance she saw two golden
olive trees and “a town, the glory of which will reach the stars.” The
spot described by the queen was found, and on it was a man building a doorsill
for his cottage. The Czech word for doorsill is prah, giving Libuse’s new
town it’s name: Praha (Prague). The town was then erected on the hill where
Prague Castle stands today.

    
The Premysls rule over Bohemia lasted well into the Middle Ages. Prague
thrived, and by the 14th century, under the rule of Charles IV, the city
was larger than London or Paris and boasted western Europe’s first university.
But religious strife between various Christian faiths presented serious
on-going problems, resulting in many bloody massacres, assassinations and
executions. A series of weak absentee Kings further damaged the independent
kingdom until, in the 16th century, the Austrian Habsburgs claimed the
throne. German became the official court language as tiny Bohemia was swallowed
up by the Holy Roman Empire.

    
In 1583, the Emperor Rudolph II moved his capital from Vienna to Prague.
Rudolph was an unusual man: an intellectual and a mystic, reputed to be
mentally unhinged (he walked around with the fingers of a dead man stuffed
in his back pocket). Rudolfine Prague was glittering and surreal, a city
teeming with alchemists, astrologists, necromancers, soothsayers, artists,
musicians, brilliant mathematicians, and religious zealots of every stripe
and color. The search for the Philosopher’s Stone (“the stone which is
not a stone, a precious thing which has no value, a thing of many shapes,
this unknown which is most known of all,” according to the alchemist Hermes
Trismegistus) consumed Rudolph and his court, and indeed much of Prague
nobility. The famed English astrologer/wizard John Dee and his partner
Edward Kelly spent five years together in Prague (much of it on Rudolph’s
payroll), gazing into crystal balls and conducting conversations with angels.
Kelly stayed on when Dee returned to England, claiming to have discovered
the coveted secret of turning lead into gold. Kelly gained a knighthood,
but eventually landed in prison on sorcery and heresy charges. Legend has
it he died in Prague, but no one really knows for sure.

    
Despite continued religious strife, the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian rule
did not weaken until the 19th century. Then the Czech language, which had
all but died out, was revived by a handful of writers and language scholars.
A wave of nationalism swept the country, and a strong desire for Slav self-rule.
In the arts, this translated into a passion for the history, myths and
folklore of Bohemia. The national operas of Bedrich Smetana drew upon rustic
traditional stories, and the symphonies of Antonin Dvorak were influenced
by Slav folk music. Art Nouveau was a 19th century movement that came to
Prague via Paris and Vienna. In architecture, the style was distinguished
by the abundant use of decorative elements drawn from sensual, natural
forms: vines and lilies, sunflowers, poppies, and the shapes of the human
body. Czech artists used this fluid style to cover the faces of new buildings
with figures drawn from Slav folklore, creating some of the finest examples
of Art Nouveau to be found anywhere in Europe. A huge slum clearance in
the old Jewish Quarter led to many new buildings in the Art Nouveau style
— buildings miraculously preserved despite the ravages of two World Wars.

    
The most famous Czech Art Nouveau artist was not an architect but a graphic
designer: Alphonse Mucha, whose theater posters for the actress Sara Bernhardt
catapulted him into sudden fame. In Paris between 1890 and 1910, his posters,
prints, even jewelry designs, were ubiquitous in fashionable circles —
standing the test of time with their great popularity to this day. Although
Mucha’s distinctive work has come to exemplify the Art Nouveau style, he
himself hated the term, insisting that art could never be “new” because
it was eternal. A fiercely nationalistic man, literate, and prone to mystic
leanings, Mucha himself was most proud of the work completed upon his return
to Prague: the Slav Epic, comprised of twenty large panels in tempera and
oil paint. Commissioned for Prague’s Municipal Building, an Art Nouveau
masterpiece itself, these gorgeous paintings illustrate Slav history and
legend in rich detail. Mucha spent his later years in Prague, watching
his dream of national independence turn to reality in 1918, when the Czechs
paired with neighboring Slovakia to establish their own republic. Twenty
years later that dream crumbled as Hitler’s army rolled into the city.
Mucha was one of the first of the nationalist intellectuals to be grilled
by the Gestapo. Already in poor health, the artist died three months later,
a broken man.

    
A lesser known but equally interesting Czech artist is Frantisek Bilek,
who brought Art Nouveau ideas back to Prague after studying in Paris in
the 1890s. Bilek was an intelligent, iconoclastic and wildly inventive
man, a sculptor and designer who worked with an astonishing variety of
materials. Like Mucha, he had a strong mystical bent, and a passion for
Czech history and lore. His art combined ideas from music, literature and
philosophy to explore the mysticism, magic and spirituality inherent in
everyday life. The peculiar house Bilek built for himself (in a design
meant to represent a cornfield) is now a museum of the artist’s work and
philosophy.

    
The most famous of Prague’s creative figures, of course, was the German-speaking
Franz Kafka (1883-1924), whose brooding surrealistic vision captured the
darker flavor of the city where he lived for all but a few years of his
life. The tormented man-turned-cockroach in Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the
bleak labyrinthine despair of his novel The Castle are now well known to
generations of readers and philosophy students around the world. Kafka
never lived to see any of the fame that would one day emblazon his name
across his city’s tourist maps and postcards. He died, surrounded by unpublished
manuscripts, in a small flat over Old Town Square — a place of Gothic
towers and Baroque rooftops aptly described as the Brothers Grimm in stone,
which Kafka considered “the most beautiful setting that has ever been seen
on this earth.”

    
In Czechoslovakia, as elsewhere in Europe, artists moved on to Cubism and
Surrealism in the period between the two world wars. It is not surprising
that a city with a history of alchemy and mysticism would become the second
most active center of Surrealism after Paris. Karel Capek was a writer
whose engaging work shows the influence of both movements — combined with
a love of Czech folklore, and a distrust of industrialized life. Often
called “the Czech Kurt Vonnegut,” he is best known for his novel War of
the Newts, and for his science fiction play R.U.R., a Broadway hit which
gave the world the word robot (from the Czech robota, meaning: hard labor).
His brother Josef was a noted Cubist painter, but he also produced Thurber-esque
cartoons to illustrate some of Karel’s work. Together they published a
charming book called Nine Fairy Tales and One Thrown in for Good Measure.
Translated into English by Dagmar Herrmann, it was published in the US
in 1990 to mark the centenary of Karl Capek’s birth.

    
The extraordinary Prague art scene that existed between the two World Wars
was all but stamped out when the new country fell to Hitler’s armies. Intellectuals,
many of them Jewish, fled or were exterminated. Out of ninety thousand
people in the Old Jewish Quarter of Prague, eighty thousand were killed.
The Old Jewish Quarter, an extravaganza of beautiful Art Nouveau architecture,
had originally been established many centuries before as a walled medieval
ghetto, often locked to segregate its inhabitants. The community had its
own folktales, particularly those of the Golem and Rabbi Loew. Loew was
a Talmudic scholar said to have lived in the 15th century — a hero in
various fairy tale exploits whose villain was usually Brother Thaddeus,
a wicked cleric prone to pogroms and accusing Jews of killing Christian
babies. The Golem comes from the mystical cabalist idea that each mortal
contains within him a spark of the divine. In prayer, Loew was instructed
to build a man out of mud, to walk around it several times, and then place
the unknown name of God (the shem) in its mouth. The Golem thus created
is a rather humorous, slapstick creature who nonetheless appears at times
of crisis to save the Jews from danger. He did not, alas, make an appearance
when Hitler’s Gestapo came to town.

    
After the war, Czech arts fared no better under the strict Social Realist
doctrine of Communism. In the Sixties, this seemed to loosen a bit; art
and optimism swept Prague, culminating in the student revolt of Prague
Spring in ’68. Then Soviet tanks rolled into the city, and all Prague watched
in horror as hundreds of unarmed people were shot, effectively crushing
the resistance and the spirits of a whole generation. Another two decades
of Communism passed before the Czech people revolted again. After the fall
of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Prague students confronted baton-wielding police
on the streets of New Town. The televised confrontation, showing the brutality
of the police against students armed only with candles and flowers, shook
the Czech population to the core, and a million people took to the streets
to demand the government’s resignation. This extraordinary peaceful uprising,
known as The Velvet Revolution, toppled the old Communist regime, and in
less than two months playwright Vaclav Havel was elected to the presidency.

    
Since then, Czech and Slovakia have formed two separate nations. Prague
has opened its doors to the West, and called home its many exiles. The
city’s beauty, mystique, and cheap rents have attracted a large English-speaking
community, many of them writers, artists and filmmakers hoping to find,
or recreate, the “cafe life” of Europe between the wars. At sidewalk cafes
and in coffee bars one sees many young faces these days and hears many
different languages spoken. Some Czechs are delighted with this new infusion
of young energy, others are dismayed by the tourist invasion. But despite
the crowds in Old Town Square and around the other tourist attractions,
the real life of Prague goes in the back streets of the city — in the
casual and unmarked beer halls which one discovers only with the aid of
Czech friends, in the art studios, theaters and jazz clubs tucked away
on unlikely streets, where the Czechs exercise their hard-won right to
gather, to argue, and to create.

    
In recent years, Hollywood in particular has discovered the charms of Eastern
Europe, with its economical labor pool and a wealth of exotic locations
from castles to cities to countryside. My friend’s film, Pinocchio, has
been shot in Prague’s back streets, on its rooftops, in a quarry, and in
a small Czech village. Now they are doing bluescreen shots in the large
film studio on the outskirts of town, the painstaking work that will make
the wooden puppet come to life on film. It is fascinating to watch Todd
and the others at work manipulating the puppet. It takes several puppeteers
working together to move, in co-ordination, the legs, the arms, the torso,
the head, and all the facial movements that give the puppet expression.
Todd wears what looks like a blue diving suit so that he can be eliminated
from the picture, leaving behind only the image of the wooden puppet in
motion. It is an unusual and highly skilled form of acting — physical,
even acrobatic. A good team seems to work together as if by magic or telepathy.

    
At a break in the filming, the director, Steve Barron, talks about Pinocchio
with me. It is, he says, a tale that he has long wanted to film. He has
an abiding love for fantasy stories, particularly ones grounded in the
world we know. Steve directed the “Storyteller” series (created with Jim
Henson, of Muppet fame), filming beautiful and intelligent retellings of
lesser known fairy tales, such as the quirky Hans My Hedgehog. What drew
him to Pinocchio was the human emotion lodged within Collodi’s magical
adventure tale: the wooden boy who longs to be like the other boys, to
be real, to fit in. That deep desire to belong, Steve says with a smile,
is a feeling he remembers well.

    
Carlos Collodi was an Italian journalist who became a popular writer of
children’s stories. He first published Pinocchio in an episodic, serial
form; it was then gathered together as a single book in 1883. Since then
the story has been filmed several times, but never (in America) quite successfully.
The Disney version in particular lacks the original story’s sinister edge
that makes the ultimate reunion between the puppet and his father so affecting.
Like Steve, Mac Wilson (the head puppeteer) says it is a story he has long
wanted to film, the ultimate story for a puppeteer. And a technically challenging
one, for the puppet is on-screen for a great deal of the movie. The task
of Mac’s team of puppeteers is to show how a bit of carved and painted
wood can be turned into a living, breathing character whom an audience
will come to love.

    
It seems fitting that they must accomplish this here, in the ancient land
of Bohemia, where puppet-makers have been bringing such creatures to life
for centuries. The folktales of Bohemia are full of creatures carved from
trees: male and female, painted, then dressed, then brought to life by
the power of speech. One becomes a ravenous child, eating everything in
sight, his parents, his village, the countryside, until he’s finally destroyed.
Another is a girl, ravishing but mute, who is wed to a prince and then
turns back into wood in his arms on their wedding night. Creation, destruction,
illusion. . .reminding us that all is not as it appears. . . .

    
Since the Revolution, fantasy, folklore and surrealism is catching up with
Social Realism as a vibrant presence in modern Czech arts. Adolf Born is
an artist whose phantasmagoric paintings could almost be children’s book
illustrations but for the macabre, perversely erotic elements of his imagery.
Jiri Anderle is a master of delicate, surreal pencil drawings. The collection
of his art with text by Vaclav Havel is particularly worth seeking out.
Peter Sis is a Czech painter, filmmaker and children’s book author now
living in New York. The Three Golden Keys is a gorgeous, dreamlike picture
book about his home city of Prague, created for his young daughter who
was born in America. The book captures the beauty and melancholy of the
old city streets; it is an intimate and haunting work which I strongly
recommend. For those interested in Czech folklore, K.J. Erben’s Tales from
Bohemia is a particularly nice collection, reprinted from the original
Prague edition with lovely illustrations by Artus Scheiner.

    
One Prague book critic has decried the surge in popularity of “works of
mere escapism” — such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (a best-seller
in the Czech Republic), as well as home-grown magical works by young Czech
fantasists. Yet it is not surprising to learn that after years of force-fed
Realism, readers have discovered the pleasures to be found in works of
modern fantasy, the best of which speaks on two levels at once: not only
as a magical “escape” from humdrum reality but also as a metaphorical exploration
of the basic truths underlying modern life: love and hate, loyalty and
betrayal, courage and despair, survival, transformation. Tolkien’s tale,
for instance, is a bittersweet story of war, heroism, and loss. Sauron’s
dark hold on Middle Earth, and the terror of his Dark Riders, must have
a particular resonance for those who saw the Prague Spring crushed, and
watched in horror as police attacked young people armed only with flowers.
. . .

    
Prague is a place where the old and the new, the realistic and surrealistic,
have come together in a singular manner — in its arts, its streets, its
politics, its way of life, and its stories. This capital city is contemporary,
vital and full of promise for the future; yet ancient blood still stains
the stones and ancient ghosts still haunt the roads: the innocent women
burned as witches, the religious martyrs thrown from the towers, the men
and women executed for the wrong faith, the wrong name, the wrong ideas.
I have never been in a place where so much history seems crowded together,
packed into the few square miles overlooked by old Prague Castle.

    
On my last night in Prague, I pass through the city riding on the back
of my friend’s motorcycle, the sleek machine passing over the old cobblestones,
slippery with rain. The old and the new flash past us as we speed across
the river and down the streets of Mala Strana. The ghosts of the past are
still whispering their tales: folk tales, fairy tale, history and legend.
But I’m back in the modern world now. I’m moving too fast to listen.

from the October 03, 2002 edition – http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1003/p01s01-ussc.html

Your ad here: Cop cars as the next billboards

By Daniel B. Wood | Staff
writer of The Christian Science Monitor

LOS ANGELES – The city of Springfield, Fla., will soon be getting 15 new squad cars equipped with
the latest in computer databases, satellite tracking, and back-seat jail
bars. The cost of each vehicle is only $1 … with a catch.

    These aren’t traditional “black and white” police cars. Instead, each cruiser
will be emblazoned with advertisements that could vary from local services
(“Minnie’s Beauty Salon” and “Bert’s Radiators”) to, say, national doughnut
or burger chains. Dozens of cash-strapped towns are also considering
the idea, an offer made by a marketing company.

    While
law-enforcement experts see a whole new source of revenue to replace aging,
outdated fleets, critics wonder whether this could mean we’ll be seeing
live TV broadcasts of car chases in which the pursuers sport ads for happy
meals next to each siren.

    In additions
to questions of conflict of interest, some wonder whether this is one step
too far in the commercialization of America.

    “American
society has really gone beyond the pale in turning every part of the environment
into ad space,” says Professor Michael Maynard, who teaches journalism,
advertising, and PR at Temple University. “There should be some things
that are off limits.”

    But proponents
counter that the ads will be tasteful (none for alcohol, tobacco, firearms,
or gambling). City buses and dog-catcher trucks already carry such advertisements,
and this is merely the next logical step, they say.

    Government
Acquisitions LLC, the firm in Charlotte, N.C., that is pushing the idea,
is already getting lots of takers.

    Since
May, 12 police departments ˆ in locations as diverse as Ozark, Ala., and
Caddo Valley, Ariz. ˆ have signed up for the offer. The company says it
has been inundated with enquiries from police. “Everybody wins. Cities
get the extra protection they need, and businesses get a way to contribute
to the local police,” says Ken Allison, managing partner of the company.

    But at
least one observer is worried about the possible implications of such a
deal. “I see a problem with conflict of interest right out of the gate,”
says Prof. Gary Kritz, who teaches advertising and marketing at Seton Hall
University in New Jersey. “If local police forces have advertisements for
local businesses, might the police be tempted to look the other way if
one of those businesses commit crimes against society? The ads could in
effect be viewed as bribing a public officer, which in itself is a crime.”

    One of
the first towns to actually approve the idea is Springfield, Fla., population
9,000. City commissioners recently glanced at their aging fleet of squad
cars, and their tax-income projections for the next few years, and decided
to look into the idea to help them police their streets. “We don’t have
property tax, we don’t have sales tax, and we are very limited on state
revenue sharing,” says police chief Sam Slay. “I’ll be honest and say I
didn’t like the idea at first, but from a practical standpoint this is
something we just cannot ignore.”

    Gary
Gernandt, a city councilman in Omaha, Neb., initially didn’t like the idea
either, but says the savings for the city could top $1 million. “We think
the idea is worth exploring. Our current graffiti van was purchased
by private money, and corporations have logos all over it. Our stadium
has ads on the fences and corridors ˆ as does our civic auditorium. As
long as it’s done tastefully, advertising on police cars is no different.”

    But police
cars are different, say some legal scholars. There is a danger of the appearance
of impropriety in the eyes of the public. And there are practical issues
of proper identification of the cars.

    “Ads
would distract from the civic symbols, emergency phone numbers, squad-car
numbers,” says Robert Pugsley, a law professor at Southwestern University
School of Law in Los Angeles. “A police car should not look like a NASCAR.
It could lead to legal difficulties.”

    Still
others wonder whether the ads will stop at police cars. They muse that
logos might end up on the lapels or trousers of cop uniforms ˆ in the same
way that a woman recently began selling ad space on her bowling skirt,
and a bald head offered his head to the highest advertising bidder on eBay.
And
they’re worried about other recent agreements between private businesses
and public entities. The San Diego City Council, for example, is currently
weighing a proposal for the city to partner with GM. In exchange for allowing
advertising on its beachfront lifeguard towers, the automobile company
is offering to give the city 35 vehicles. And the town of St. Peters, Mo.,
just announced that it is going to experiment with leasing ads on the sides
of its trash-collection trucks.

    “I really
feel we’ve finally gone completely over the edge of appropriateness and
better judgment into a fuzziness between commercial and public discourse
that is really dangerous,” says Kalle Lasn, author of several books on
the rise of advertising and publisher of Adbusters Magazine. “We’ve already
tracked the rise of ads into every area of life from urinals to golf holes.
I think this will diminish respect for the whole institution of police,”
Mr. Lasn says.

COURTESY: D. SILVER!

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/04/international/americas/04COLO.html

October 4, 2002

New Role for U.S. in Colombia: Protecting
a Vital Oil Pipeline

By JUAN FORERO

SARAVENA, Colombia, Sept.
27 ˜ Casting a wary eye for rebel snipers, Lt. Felipe Zúñiga
and his counterinsurgency troops slog through the wet fields and patches
of jungle here. Their mission has nothing to do with drugs ˜ until now,
the defining issue in Colombia for American policy makers ˜ but instead
with protecting a pipeline that carries crude to an oil-hungry America.

    The 500-mile
pipeline, which snakes through eastern Colombia, transporting 100,000 barrels
of oil a day for Occidental Petroleum of Los Angeles, is emerging as a
new front in the terror war. One of Colombia’s most valuable assets, the
pipeline has long been vulnerable to bombings by Colombia’s guerrilla groups,
which along with the country’s paramilitary outfits are included on the
Bush administration’s list of terrorist organizations.

    Sometime
in the next month, in a significant shift in American policy, United States
Special Forces will arrive in Colombia to begin laying the groundwork for
the training of Lieutenant Zúñiga and his 35-man squad in
the finer arts of counterinsurgency. Over the next two years, 10 American
helicopters will bolster the Colombian counterinsurgency efforts, and some
4,000 more troops will receive American training, which will begin in earnest
in January, Bush administration and American military officials said in
interviews in recent days.

    The policy
shift dovetails with the Bush administration’s new, global emphasis on
expanding and diversifying the sources of America’s oil imports, with an
eye to reducing dependence on Middle Eastern oil. That new approach, outlined
in the administration’s energy report issued last year, is gaining ever
more importance with the threat to Persian Gulf oil supplies from the looming
war with Iraq.

    The $94
million counterinsurgency program is also an important element in the offensive
by Colombia’s new government against two rebel groups and a paramilitary
force that dominate much of the country.

    Pipeline
bombings by the guerrillas cost the government nearly $500 million last
year ˜ a blow in a country where oil accounts for 25 percent of revenues.
The two main rebel groups, which view Occidental as a symbol of American
imperialism, have bombed the pipeline 948 times since the 1980’s, while
extorting oil royalty payments from local government officials.

    The Colombian
military has increased security recently, deploying five of the six battalions
in the 6,000-man 18th Brigade to pipeline protection, up from just two
battalions last year. As a result, the number of bombings has fallen to
30 this year, from 170 the year before, Colombian military officials say.
But the goal is to eliminate the bombings altogether, they say, and to
accomplish that they need help.

    “We have
been fighting here, but there are still so many things the Americans can
teach us,” said Lieutenant Zúñiga as he led a reporter on
patrol along the pipeline. “I think it is going to make us much better.”

    The final
product, officials say, will be an offensive-minded unit of Colombian counterinsurgency
analysts who will interpret intelligence data gathered from high-tech equipment
and informers and then deploy rapid-response forces stationed at strategic
points along the pipeline to thwart rebel attacks.

    “The
idea is to prepare troops for the war we are living,” said Gen. Carlos
Lemus, commander of the 18th Brigade, which will receive much of the training
here in Arauca Province. “We will be able to do so much more, with better
intelligence and helicopters. The idea is to find out when something is
going to happen and react.”

    The training
could not take place in a more dangerous area. Though the army base here
˜ with its neatly pruned hedges, modern barracks and billboard featuring
the fighting words of Gen. George S. Patton ˜ gives an air of familiarity
American soldiers might find comforting, Saravena itself sits in a war
zone.

    “What
they can expect is lead,” boasted a local commander for the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia, the country’s largest and most belligerent rebel
group. “What else? That and cadavers.”

    Indeed,
the rebels have flexed their muscles all year in Saravena, launching dozens
of homemade rockets that have destroyed the airport terminal, the city
hall, the town council chambers and the prosecutor’s office. Policemen
on patrol are frequently fired upon, and military officials say that despite
the new deployment of Colombian troops the pipeline is still exposed to
attack.

    “With
these bandits,” said Lt. Col. Emilio Torres, a local army commander, “if
you leave the pipeline alone even 24 hours, they can blow the tube.”

    Alert
to the dangers, American military officials said the trainers, Special
Forces soldiers from Fort Bragg, N.C., will be limited to 20 to 60 and
will be housed in specially fortified barracks.

   
Colombia’s new president, Álvaro Uribe, also declared Arauca one
of two security zones where military commanders can conduct searches without
warrants, impose curfews and usurp some powers from local government ˜
measures the United Nations says will erode civil rights.

    Bush
administration officials have said the reliable production of oil is imperative
if Colombia is to have the resources to combat the guerrillas and paramilitaries.
But oil is also critical to the national security planning of the United
States, which by 2020 will count on imported oil for 62 percent of its
oil needs, up from half today.

    Much
of that new oil will come from the Americas, which already supply the United
States with nearly 50 percent of its imported oil. Along with Venezuela
and Ecuador, the Andes now provides the United States with more than two
million barrels a day, about 20 percent of its imports.

    Colombia
will never be the sole solution to America’s voracious appetite for oil.
But the country is known for high-quality oil that is cheap to produce
and easy to refine, and is thought to have significant potential reserves
that could be rapidly exploited if the guerrillas and paramilitaries could
be brought under control.

    “We’re
becoming increasingly dependent on imported oil, therefore the strategic
goal of diversification has become more and more important,” said Michael
Klare, author of “Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict.”
“The Clinton administration and now the Bush administration have explicitly
stated that that one of the regions they have wanted to rely on in the
future is the Western Hemisphere.”

    Many
oil analysts say reliance on this region could greatly increase if the
major producer, Venezuela, increased its production capacity and if Colombia
˜ which shares many of the same geological features as Venezuela ˜ achieved
enough stability to allow widespread exploration.

    “We
don’t really know what’s there,” said Ed Corr, a former American diplomat
in Latin America and an expert on the strategic aspects of petroleum. “But
we certainly would be wise in getting the country in such a situation where
we can find out.”

    Washington’s
shift to counterinsurgency was made possible in July, when Congress rolled
back restrictions that had limited American aid to antidrug programs. The
drug war continues unabated, but the phasing out of those prohibition has
been warmly welcomed by energy companies, which have been pressing for
a wider role for the United States to improve the business climate.

    “You’ll
see more interest on the part of more companies,” Larry Meriage, spokesman
for Occidental, said in an interview. “Given the fact that there is a significant
amount of oil there, and the sheer mass of oil that remains under-explored,
there is considerable optimism.”

    Occidental,
well-versed in Colombia’s troubles by virtue of its two decades here, is
close to the Bush administration and has long lobbied for the United States
to be more involved in the conflict.

    According
to the Center for Public Integrity in Washington, the company contributed
$1.5 million to presidential and Congressional campaigns between 1995 and
2000. Occidental also spent nearly $8.7 million lobbying American officials
on Latin America policy, largely regarding Colombia, from 1996 to 2000,
according to disclosure forms filed with Congress.

    Other
oil and energy companies also spent handsomely to influence Colombia policy,
with Exxon Mobil Corporation, BP Amoco, the Unocal Corporation, Texaco
and Phillips Petroleum spending about $13 million among them on Colombia
in the same period.

    “We see
the oil companies leveraging their influence in Washington to move the
United States toward a counterinsurgency policy,” said Ted Lewis of Global
Exchange, a San Francisco human rights group that closely follows business
issues here.

    Mr. Meriage
counters that not taking strong action here could further weaken Colombia
and its neighbors, which are economically dependent on oil. “We have long
highlighted these problems,” he said. “You see the potential danger of
an entire Andean region being destabilized by the problems in Colombia.
That’s why this is important.”

    A tour
of the Occidental facilities here in Caño Limón oil fields
underscores the links between the company and Colombia’s military. The
300 or so troops stationed here wear patches featuring an oil drilling
rig. New motorcycle patrols zip down a network of roads, while antiguerrilla
patrols work their way through the jungle. Light tanks and heavily fortified
bunkers are strategically positioned along the pipeline to deter attacks.

    Two military
aircraft ˜ a helicopter and a Cessna ˜ patrol the pipeline with gasoline
paid for by Occidental, and military helicopters carrying troops on operations
often swing by here to fill their fuel tanks. Even the brigade commander,
General Lemus, drinks coffee from a mug bearing the Oxy logo.

    “This
is an island of security that we have here, thanks to the army,” said one
Occidental official.

    The company
is now producing nearly twice as much oil as last year at its 212 wells.
It has also signed contracts recently with the state oil company to explore
three additional blocs covering 9,325 square miles.

    “This
is the Colombians’ war to win, and they have to step up to the fight,”
said Brig. Gen. Galen Jackman, director of operations for American forces
in Latin America. “And they have to put their country on a footing to be
able to do that.”