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“Gulf War (2): Bloody Farce”

Leonard comments on the farcical nature of the first Gulf War through analogy to a staging of a play he attended (Noises Off) and the current thinking on “The Big Bang.” Doesn’t hang together as well as some of his other essays, but he does kick off the essay with a funny piece of farcical writing:

We…went to protest rallies but they didn’t count. After each…rally, the crazy generals on the networks explain that our qualms, which shouldn’t have been launched in the first place because the New World Order has argument superiority, were shot down anyway by anti-qualm patriot absolutes.

Sounds like they were about to break out into a version of “I Am The Very Model of Modern Major-General”.

New word: WIMPS = physicist talk meaning “weakly interacting yet massive particles” which could be the, as yet, undetected dark matter that makes up 99% of the universe.

New learning: The COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer also called Explorer 66) was lunched in 1989 and has been measuring cosmic background radiation ever since.

Cool picture of the Infra-red sky from COBE. Note the weird s-shaped cloud created by cosmic dust in our solar system.