Would you Visit a City Where 1,000 + people are often murdered each year?
WELCOME TO CHICAGO

Tho I now live in Southern California, Chicago's TV station, WGN comes in loud and clear. And lately, every time the Chicago newscast is on, the first 5 or 10 minutes is spent reporting the killings in Chicago. Often followed up by a video of a hurried get-together of concerned citizens from the neighborhood (together with the local priest or minister) they march around shouting at Mayor Daley to do something to stop the violence. The thing is, the picture that I'm watching day after day, it seems lately, is the same news, the same marching, the same hollaring at the same Mayor that I've been experiencing during the years I spent in Chicago.

Take a look at this newspaper page from the Chicago Tribune. It's from a few years back. Click on the photo and enlarge the page, and then read the names and ages. It's pathetic! Every name of everyone killed during one year is listed, from the tiniest, to the teenager, to the middle-aged, to the oldest. They're all there! Hundreds and hundreds of names.

Mayor Daley is letting the permits fly for the mammoth construction of buildings and the tearing down of dilapitated neighborhoods. But he just can''t seem to stem the tide of violence in the city. What gives? Others cities do.

July 5th 2008

Does all end with the

Hadron Collider at

FULL SPEED ???

A number of people on this planet are worried about the Hadron Collider to be switched on in August, 2008. Capable (some think) of destroying this planet ??? Well?

If it ain't one thing, it's another: man-made/cyclical warming, man-made/cyclical cooling! (COOLING was very in vogue back in the late 1950's, early 1960's...we were all going to FREEZE over soon). Then there is more garbage than the planet can survive with! (Go see WALL-E. No, on second thought, don't! Lousy environmental 'toon). However, this Collider business is probably close to the front of the line of 'one more of those things to worry over'!

Actually, the 'worriers' can back off a bit. It'll take up to three months for the giant collider to reach full ethreal steam. (Click on above photo to get a better idea of the enormous circular area the Collider stretches underground) By then it will either doom the magnetic field of Earth, create black holes that will consume us all, or simply blow up part of their buildings. Can there be a mishap? The Collider does create unstable things. Physics genius Stephen Hawking made a comment that if it really does create a black hole, at best the hole should just immediately up and vanish. But is the thought that a 1 in 80 million chance of something drastically going wrong (as some scientist has suggested) sufficient to ease the minds of the over-worried when you ponder the winner of a lottery with odds even higher?

But perhaps one of the most amazing discoveries that is hoped to be found is something called 

"super-symmetry." 

Super-symmetry is this: when we see an object in the mirror (which according to this experiment is in truth our daily reality) there is the actual object, the real object itself being reflected. The collider hopes to uncover this other dimension that reveals the true object. Now if that ain't scary, I don't know what is! "Hey Fred. You're not really...real! But maybe the collider will show us the REAL Fred!"

While in high-school (late 1950's), Russia was about to ignite a up-to-then unheard of 100+ megaton nuclear bomb as a test. Everyone worried that it would ignite the atmosphere and be the end of us all. Even tho there are lawyers trying to stop the present day Collider, and there are demonstrations happening and planned, it likely will be a 'GO!' for August. Sort of the same thing back in those 100+ megaton days. No lawyers then, but demonstrations. The bomb went off, and the atmosphere remained. However, we all worried again, this time more than a little when the large radiation cloud moved over Chicago. I'm sure there were prayer groups in Churches asking for weather intervention so that it wouldn't rain. It didn't!

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Back in 1974, I came out with 3 issues of a zing-zap mostly poetical stare at the space program. Came up with the name... 'Interplanetary New Paper Witness' while living in San Francisco and attending one of Bay-areas old science fiction clubs, held in Berkeley. The title really had no specific meaning except that it sounded pretty good back then. Stylized logo on the front page and large, LA Times newspaper format, was all a labor of madness. (click on photo to enlarge)

Set all the type on a table top contraption called a Vari-Typer, which was ponderous, made a lot of noise, and you had to type everything twice in order for the type in the columns to be even on the left and right sides. You pressed a single key, it made whirrling, zippy noises, and then you were ready for the second letter. Yowie! The 3 issues were all put together at an abandoned 2nd floor dentist office I rented for $50 across the street from the Colony movie theater, on the southwest side of Chicago. Spent 2 years writing there, and, except for the first issue which I printed myself, had the other two issues printed by a genuine newspaper printer.

So much going on now on the internet and elsewhere it sounds silly to even begin to think of starting it up again, but it's fun to...try! (Should begin with altering the title a wee bit? Sounds so ponderous now, like that Vari-Typer nowadays.)

July 5, 2008

Interplanetary New Paper Witness

(founded March, 1974)

Nard Kordell, editor

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July 5th, 2008

Astronomers In Japan Will Look For Intelligent Life in the cosmos, mid-2009. Unable to find much here, the prospects for something akin to reasonable care of the species is being sought elsewhere.

Shinya Narusawa heads the project at Nishi-Harima Astronomical Observatory in Sayo Town, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. Target will likely be extrasolar planet 'Gliese 880' in the Libra constellation.

The hope is discovering something like an artificial signal and transmission. But so what? 'Gliese 880' is likely more light years away in distance than our oldest history of long gone kings, rulers and societies. Should we discover such a signal and shout back, what then? Wait a thousand years or more for an answer?

Should our very Sun go out for some unheard-of, unexplainable and impossible cosmic event, we poor living Earth persons wouldn't sense a thing wrong for...nine minutes is it? Nine impossibly wrong minutes where nothing seemed amiss. Then blackness and the beginning of the end on Earth on the 10th minute.

Earth sits near the edge of our galaxy, The Milky Way. And the only reason why grand telescopes see other galaxies, even into farthest depths of the universe, and onto the very farthest, The Great Wall (as it's called), where pass that frontier wall (really in reverse) lies greater unknowns and mystery, is that we are...near the 'edge' of our galaxy. Should we have been birthed, instead, on an Earth near the center, the brightness of the stars of our own galaxy would obliterate any sense of anything beyond the immensely bright and starry sky that would practically hold no room for even the momentary blackness of something called space.

(If you read Japanese, then no problem. Otherwise, you can look at a couple pictures of the main telescope for the project, which is said to be capable of viewing stars of twentieth magnitude! Lingo for far, far, far away!):
type into finder~ http://www.nhao.go.jp/

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