7 Color Lagoon

Remember the galaxy in a jeweled cat collar in Men In Black? They remind me of each other. The Hubble Heritage Team (credit to A. Zezas & J. Huchra from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics) has shot the “sharpest image ever taken of the large “grand design” spiral galaxy M81″.

The picture of which they are justifiably proud was made from data assembled from 2004 through 2006. Astro-photography obviously does not base itself on 1/60th of a second. The composite image was made from blue, visible and infrared-sensitive images.

M81 is similar to our own Milky Way which gives us a chance to see the architecture of a spiral galaxy like our own. It may be 11.6 million light-years distant but it is tilted obliquely to Earth which allows for a good view. It is a bright galaxy from earth — one of the brightest with a magnitude of 6.8. The magnitude implies that it might be able to be seen by the naked eye. It is on the edge.

There are spiral arms made of younger stars of bluish hue. These are hot orbs that are only some few million years old. Hubble has become so sharp that it is able to see individual stars even at almost 12 million light-years (time traveling, we see what was a scant 12 million years ago). It can make out dust clouds of fluorescent gas and star clusters as well.

The “central bulge” of M81 is made of older stars, redder stars and is “significantly larger than the Milky Way’s bulge”. When I publish this

there could be a rash of spam aimed at increasing the size of your “central bulge”. But we will know that we can’t compete with M81.

It even has a bigger black hole at its center than our home galaxy. Fifteen times larger in mass. Hubble scientists had shown in the past that the size of the black hole is directly proportional to the size of the central bulge.

Scientists have also decided to study further the theory that the spiral arms are giving birth to a flood of new stars because M81 had a “close encounter” with another spiral galaxy (NGC3077) and a starburst galaxy (M82) about 300 million years ago

Hubble, the Space Telescope, is a cooperative venture of NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency).
Visit their sites and NASA for a lot more information on the contributions of the orbiting telescope and the way in which the information was collected.

I noted last night on Mexican TV news that Brazilian police staged a kidnap-rescue drill.

They were reported to have used live ammunition.

One small boy is dead.

There is a new wrinkle in what has become a national sport in a number of Latin American countries — kidnapping. The new fear is of “virtual kidnapping” which is becoming more prevalent in the normally crime ridden countries like Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Guatemala.

The usually violent, seldom solved (or rescued) crime is now also the fear-laden version of spam and phishing. Even Latino criminals are going digital. A news story about the new scheme started with the story of an office machine repairman in Mexico City who received a call on his cell with a child’s cry and a “Honey, it’s me, I’ve been kidnapped!”

Rodolfo Melchor called the cops and raced home. After those tense minutes to get to his family, he found that they were fine. He had managed to avoid being one of the new victims of “virtual kidnapping” where ransoms are collected without the criminals actually taking anyone (or, as is often the case in these societies, taking their lives) or handling weapons. It is a fiendish and dangerous scam far more worrisome than identity theft or those little notes from Nigerian bank officers who can’t wait to give away those lost millions.

A Guatemalan prison spokesman was quoted as saying “They make them believe they know everything they do, where their children study, where they work and all their daily movements.”

Many or most of these crimes do not become part of the statistics because the police note them as robberies or assaults since no one was really kidnapped. Many victims do not report the crime because, in these third world countries, “police are often unresponsive, inept or corrupt.” Many are too embarrassed at having fallen for a scam.

It is noted that this virtual version of the crime and kidnapping for real are a big business. Sao Paulo state in Brazil reported three thousand virtual kidnaps between the first of the year and 14 February. Mexico (a citizens’ group who used polling for their results) estimated 36,295 kidnappings in their country during 2004. They have not published newer figures yet.

There is also the fact that the world’s leading countries for kidnapping are Mexico, Haiti and Columbia. The victim’s family often do not report the crime because of the total lack of faith in their countries’ “authorities”.

“The mother of one Mexico City man missing since June 2005 embarrassed police by carrying out her own detective work that led to several arrests, and then paid for billboards offering rewards for information on other alleged kidnappers.”

This might be considered a bit of silliness with ransoms running $600 to $1200 in Guatemala and $50 to “the thousands” in Mexico. It is not silly, not spam. The office machine repairman did not pay the money. His family was unharmed. He was put under intense pressure and, when he reached his home, the police had gotten confused and told his wife that he had been kidnapped and she was hysterical with worry.

In Argentina at least one man died from a heart attack. He had paid $1000 to virtual kidnappers who purported to have taken his son.

Since many of these scams are run from prisons in Mexico and Guatemala, those countries have banned cell phones in prisons and tried to jam signals. Mexico set up a system to alert people when they are getting a call from a prison pay phone. However, given the traditional corruption of both police and prison workers, it would be unlikely that this ban would actually work.

I always enjoy learning something new. Still, I may have bitten off more than I needed if not more than I can chew when I decided to have my own web domain, http://7colorlagoon.com. Learning to use a web host’s server, to manage WordPress’ blogging system and trying to learn to make my own pages from close to scratch has taken more time and energy than I thought I would be using. It may turn out to have been worth it but it has been time consuming.

That is a warning for those who are considering the change from some program like Blogger or WordPress.com. It takes a lot, this WebMaster business. The unsung heroes of the Web.

I did begin some new scans and will be changing the Recent Scans Gallery and starting on a Bacalar/Laguna Bacalar Gallery. More to come.

During recent days of violence against journalists and protests against that violence, the blog, The Latin Americanist reported on a piece by Andres Oppenheimer about the perils that are increasing in Latin America for journalists. This is not quite the same as the filtering of the blogosphere in places like Pakistan and China. That is a worthy and important topic. But the Latin American version of filtering is to disappear or outright murder journalists. Press freedom may be touted in a number of countries south of the US but the reality is different. And it does not appear to be improving.

The Oppenheimer article was carried by the Orlando Sentinel under the apt title, “Latin America’s Press Not This Bullied In Decades.” Press freedom in the Americas hasn’t been so threatened by violent reprisals, death threats and murders as well as censorship since the heady days of the dictatorships of the 1970s. Those, too, were the days of the Ellsberg show, Presidential burglaries and troops shooting at students in Ohio. In the U.S. and other First World countries the powers-that-be and the military might like to disappear some journalists but seem to be holding to the rules of engagement in the free world. The pen may not be mightier but they know to keep their swords to themselves, mostly.

Down south by south these threats are the result of dictatorial regimes such as the Chavez government in Venezuela. In others, like Mexico, the new President is struggling to bring some order to violent chaos. His government promises to bring more safety for journalists.

In Cuba, says Reporters Without Borders from their Paris headquarters, censorship is reaching the level of a Kafka nightmare. The free lance journalist, Oscar Sanchez Madan, has been given a four year prison sentence t on the charge of “pre-criminal dangerousness.” They classify that nemesis island 90 miles south of the green flash of the setting sun where Hemingway contemplated the sharks of the Caribbean as “one of the world’s biggest prisons for journalists.”

It is said that some twenty-eight journalists are now in jail for doing their work. Some of these have gotten hit with sentences of up to twenty years in prison. (more…)

Normally the “Acknowledgments” section of a novel is of little interest. “Thank you, dear editor” stuff and something for the judges who gave Ms. Proulx a Pulitzer. This time we learn that the introductions to the book and each chapter — not T.S. Eliot poems beginning with Greek poems in Greek — are from a 1944 book, The Ashley Book of Knots, which she “… had the good fortune to find at a yard sale for a quarter…” This book-find helped her with her “thread of an idea.” Many of us built our own libraries on the thrift-store and library book sale. It is an indication of someone who loves both books and words – enough to follow their muse into the neverland of creating some.

These are wonderful little excerpts, the first of which is the definition of a “Quoyle: A coil of rope.” Her protagonist is named Quoyle. He is “Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clapped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence… He ate prodigiously, liked a ham knuckle, buttered spuds…”

“At thirty-six, bereft, brimming with grief and thwarted love, Quoyle steered away to Newfoundland, the rock that had generated his ancestors … A watery place. And Quoyle feared water, could not swim … A great damp loaf of a body … Head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair ruched back … Eyes the color of plastic. The monstrous chin, a freakish shelf jutting from the lower face…”

It is hard to resist the description of this character who is to be our guide into the world of those who seek and those who hide from this world. Now we are delivered to this Newfoundland shore where few of us have been. It seems “foreign” and not just a cold version of Cape Cod. Icebergs happen by and the people farm the sea. These are hard-edged fisher-folk with the bite of the winter chill in them.

Underneath the ice and in the lee of the storms comes the story of Quoyle and his little girls (Bunny and Sunshine Quoyle), the memories of his much-beloved wife who was killed while leaving him. Our poor, love-starved Quoyle has only his memory of an unrequited love and a woman who ignored and belittled, had sold his daughters to bankroll her exit. This is his experience of love. (more…)

Watercolor & gouache on Arches paper. 23 x 31 cm (9 x 12 in). ©Patricia Beringer.

Patricia was educated at The New School For Social Research and Bard College with graduate work at St. Martin’s School of Art in London. She exhibited in New York City and some work was acquired for private collections. We worked together on industrial and architectural photography.

The death of a brilliant, talented woman at the hands of violent thugs is a terrible fact. Terror and femicide become very real when the violence is directed against you, when the loss is so sharp. The murderers remain at liberty. Their family’s business which acted as the center of anti-Americanism in Bacalar remains.

This is the lead article. Please scroll down for the normal blog-view of newest entry first.

Arts
Mexico
Laguna Bacalar

This could have been a news report — “Man reads Stevphen King Novel and Survives”. I did both just recently. Stephen King, the maker of malevolent cars and wicked school girls with powers, vehicles attacking man and iconographic symbolism may not be great literature but he succeeds in doing what he sets out to do most of the time – he entertains.

I have read King and other pop writers right there in River City on the Hudson and now south of the border. I not only read them but sometimes I liked them. I have even read Koontz and Clancy, mysteries and science- fiction galore. There is a place and time or is it a place in time when they are the choice to make, comfort food for the eyes, the mind can wait for Dostoevsky.

This particular 1999 King, a slim volume appeared at a wonderful community book sale at the shopping center next door to my motel one morning in Miami. It was a dreary motel and rainy Sunday before boarding my ship on Monday. Then people exited a van with boxes of books to sell me after all those hours in fine bookstores weighted down by the mass of high prices.

The Stephen King I curled up on my couch with was The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. The story of a charming girl with a fistful of common sense as we find out. Her resourcefulness is perceived only after she has wandered from the path of the Appalachian Trail to find herself a little lost girl in the woods. There is a wolf, of sorts, a malevolent force that trails her and scents the innocence of small girls and is part of the dark forces of nature.

I am a firm believer in the study of first sentences of novels. They are, explained the writer, Robert Coover in a class back in college, the harbinger of the quality and direction of the work. “Call me Ismael,” wrote Melville, and swam into the collective mythology of fiction. Stephen King, for all my teasing, may create books by formula to please a mass audience but he does it with genius.

“The world had teeth and it could bite you with them anytime it wanted.”

This is the first line Trisha speaks as narrator and character, little girl and protagonist, the little victim of neglect and American marital woes. Trisha is young and wastes no time finding her problem and sets the path of the book through the woods of words and the forests of The Appalachians. “All because I needed to pee…”

She was distracted and took her bearings wrong. She looks for landmarks and tries to follow them back to the Trail but those landmark trees and rocks begin to look a lot alike, the path taken begins to fade as you take each step beyond. She begins a trek that will take her far from the path she left and, perhaps, far from the protected life of modern, American children. (more…)

The arch of the Mayan — this one at Labna on the Ruta Puuc south of Uxmal which is south of the city of Mèrida .

They had one with which to build. Did they develop it in total isolation from Europe? It worked. The arch in architecture means so much.

Photography
Mexico
Maya

This post is also on The Mayan World, a photoblog that has gotten forgotten with the “site” spread out among blogs with different addresses. I am making progress on that having, I think, finally chosen among dozens of web hosts, blogging software and photography gallery software (or narrowed that one down at least). Now the plunge and all the work that goes with it.

On my blog, Travel Dangers, today there is also a post on the conviction of an American man in Nicaragua to 30 years in prison on what appears to be xenophobic hysteria and Latin America’s version of justice. Or, perhaps, just anti-Americanism in general directed at a guy who got in the way of trouble. NPR has a page on their site with an embedded radio version of the interview and article. Fascinating and frightening.

Eric Voltz was imprisoned for the murder of Delores Jimenez who had been raped and then asphyxiated. The act was done by at least two men. She was killed while Volts was in Managua working on the magazine he had begun. There appears to be physical evidence of his presence in capital — according to his lawyer. There are phone records, witnesses — some of whom were not allowed to testify — and a phone call to an American associate.

A report from Nicaragua says that an American man has been sentenced to 30 years. There are indications that the sentence was reached in spite of evidence that he was in another city at the time of the murder. Nicaraquan authorities even prohibited the reporter in Nicaraqua to interview him for which he held a court order.

Eric Voltz was imprisoned for the murder of Delores Jimenez who had been raped and then asphyxiated. The act was done by at least two men. She was killed while Volts was in Managua working on the magazine he had begun. There appears to be physical evidence of his presence in capital — according to his lawyer. There are phone records, witnesses — some of whom were not allowed to testify — and a phone call to an American associate.

The map of Nicaragua is from the newly (and well) designed “World Fact Book” of the CIA .

There was no physical evidence placing him near the crime but the judge was “not interested” in that fact, says the excellent report and interview that NPR’s website accesses in audio.

Nicaragua
Crime

It has been reported that Monday saw 100 police in a number of police stations across Nuevo Laredo arrested by federal agents and the military.

The action is part of President Calderòn’s efforts to control the mushrooming violence of the war between drug organizations for turf and against the government which is increasing its efforts to control them.

Last year it is said that over 2000 people were killed in Mexico in this war. Monterrey had been free of this violence for some time but that has changed with over 50 people killed recently — many of them police officers.

The poorly paid police are not so difficult to influence by cartels with multi-million dollar incomes. Those who are not bought are targeted.

Monday also saw 20 victims of gang violence across the country. Cancun, as previously reported, had 5 people, 3 men and 2 women found murdered with their heads covered with plastic bags and their hands tied together. Quite an image for a prime tourist destination.

CNN reports today that the Mexican efforts under President Calderòn to fight the wave of violence and killings that has been spawned by increasingly violent and visible power struggles between rival Mexican cartels are paying off.

Mexican police arrested today 7 “alleged drug gang hit men” with assault weapons in Acapulco, a major tourist destination for both Mexicans and foreigners. The police confiscated 7 assault weapons, “several” pistols and a store of ammo.

The assistant secretary of public safety was quoted as saying that “”The escalation of violence we are seeing … [and] the power of these criminal gangs comes from the ease with which they get weapons” on the American border. “Their firepower is impressive.”

On 7 February the San Diego press reported on “Drug Violence in Acapulco Threatens Mexico’s Tourism Industry”. Hotel owners and businessmen are not pleased with the bloody drug wars and what had previously been a “live and let live” attitude by police.

One of the more blatant attacks by the gangs was at noon on Tuesday when assassins entered two state police station dressed as soldiers. They demanded the cops’ guns and then opened fire on them. Five police investigators were killed along with two secretaries. Witnesses noted that they videotaped their attack. Third World violence, drug wars and miscellaneous savagery is embracing Web 2.0 and becoming en-gadgeted.

The mayor told local business leaders at a breakfast in February, “I hope this does not affect the tourist image,” he said. “We realize that these events are unpleasant, but people know that they are separate events.” Given the slight wounding of 2 Canadian tourists in the lobby of their hotel on the tourist strip when shots were fired into the lobby, the $12 billion a year tourism industry in Mexico will, indeed, be threatened. America is reeling from its own massacre in Virginia and that was nothing compared to the level of violence that exists and is increasing in Mexico.

In my view some of the blame must lie with the US for permitting the wide distribution of firearms including assault weapons and drug laws that have made the drug business a dangerous, illegal and therefore wildly profitable enterprise enjoyed by the most violent segment of both societies. It is little different from the Prohibition of the 20s and 30s. Just watch a good movie from the period with Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart raking in the dough and finally shooting it out with cops or other bad guys. Plus ça change; plus ça la méme chose — the more things change; the more they are the same.

In researching a coming article on post-traumatic shock disorder I was just looking at web sites in the US (mainly) for gun shops, shows, dealers and NRA advocates. Assault weapons remain a good choice. I found AK-47 clones for as little as $569 on sophisticated sites with gun shop location guides — “find a gun store near you.” Interested in adding to your collection or just planning some fun? Start with 100 Top Gun Sites.

NPR published on-line a vivid audio-slideshow recently. Take a look and listen.

The gangs are said to be “branching out” into other nefarious trades as well — kidnapping, auto theft, and the trade in migrants and weapons. The secretary added that “These are very dynamic organizations.” Some blame was put on the easy availability of weapons from the US just over the northern border.

Today, Saturday 21 April, I made this post a few minutes ago at my blog 7 Color Lagoon . I wrote just last night (on my blog, Travel Dangers) about the arrest of 100 police in Acapulco, deaths in Cancun and the increasing success or effect of the crackdown by President Calderòn’s government.

It came home today. It came to my porton, the steel gate in the wall around my property on the shore of Laguna Bacalar in the southeastern frontier of Mexico.

I was called by strong (very strong) knocking on the gate which is always locked in this dangerous area. I was waiting for a carpenter and wondered why he had the audacity to sit atop the barda, the wall around the perimeter.

Then I noticed he had on a black ski mask and was not wielding a big hammer but an assault weapon and asked to come in as they had an “operation” in progress. Being the macho fool I am I both opened the little door in the porton and demanded to see their IDs. Logical unless you happen to be 60, have CHF, a pacing device and are unarmed. What, I wondered later, would I have done if they did not have police and military IDs? (more…)