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Mickey Z
Cool Observer
the Department of Homeland Security.
Tuesday, June 21, 2005
Shell-shocked Pete and the Downwinders
Shotgun Mouth has run “Old Guys I Knew,” another of my foul-mouthed autobiographical essays.
Excerpt:
A wide range of odd characters inhabited my old neighborhood. Shell-shocked Pete was a WWII vet who stuttered. The story went that he was never the same after the war. Back then, we called that being “shell shocked.” Today, it’s “post-traumatic stress syndrome.”
(shell shocked, 21st century style)
Pete was an easy target and we drove him batty. He hung out at the local drug store in the same hat and trench coat every day. On a school lunch break one day, we crossed the line with him.
To read the complete essay, please click here:
http://www.shotgunmouth.zoomshare.com/6.html
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Heading downwind:
WMD, American-style
It’s 60 Years since Alamogordo
It was in 1942, at the University of Chicago, that physicists working under Arthur Compton, Enrico Fermi, and others produced fission of the uranium isotope U-235. In other words: a nuclear chain reaction. With an ultra-secret $2.2 billion investment (the equivalent of $26 billion today), the Manhattan Project began that same year. Nearly 200,000 workers toiled in 37 installations in 19 states and Canada.
On July 16, 1945, an atomic bomb was successfully detonated at Alamogordo, New Mexico after which Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut called it “the most important thing in history since the birth of Jesus Christ.”
To read the complete article, please click here:
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/mickeyz06202005
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