December 30, 2003

FBI urges police to watch for people carrying almanacs.
posted by homunculus 20 years ago
  • *howls*
  • Tues. June 26. Today is a good day to lay crops, milk cows and create a dirty bomb. First, take your uranium... This is just... Ridiculous.
  • "it's just to help give them one more piece of information to raise their suspicions" ... "It helps make sure one more bad guy doesn't get away from a traffic stop..." Because we all know traffic stops are the breeding grounds of terrorism.
  • Any time I travel from now on, I am going to stand in line at the security checkpoint reading my almanac very closely with one hand and holding a screaming child with the other. Let's see who gives in first.
  • Hmm, Salon link. If you don't want to watch the ad, you can pick up a cookie here, but don't tell anyone where you got it. There'll be some kind of message saying that the server was not found
  • Hmm... Terrorists might write out their nefarious schemes using a pen and paper. Be leary of those with these items on their person.
  • I paraphrase from one of James Burke's audio books on the nature of learning and educational synthesis: Almanacs were one of the first ways that specialists (not just farmers, but doctors, policemen, alchemists & et. al.) shared information and started to collect a base of knowledge that no single member of their specialist communities could hope to compile. These journals provided the means to widely agreed-upon terms and techniques in these new professional communities. Perhaps most important was the writer's almanac, which advanced the art of writing, which, by standardizing and regulating the written word, helped to improve the informational content and form of all almanacs. To suggest that almanacs of all things would be the primary source of terrorist information -- above the highly indexed and categorized nature of the internet is... isss... aaagh... having... stroke... send he-uuurg. I think we're just being governed at random at this point in time.
  • Wolof That link doesn't work (bad formatting) Correct link.
  • I am a dope. Always write "http://" before your links, kids, or they screw up.
  • I don't think it's the ads for THE ROSICRUCIANS that merits interest from the FBI, but rather the astronomical data. E.g., moonrise and moonset, or the precise time of a particular phase.
  • Evildoers who bought this title also bought: Walkers Pet fish Vibrators Bongs
  • The day before this story broke, I picked up last year's World Almanac at my Public Library's Used Books rack for 25 cents. I am so busted.
  • I could go out the the local high bridge and cut a large piece out of the railroad tracks (hard, but not impossible for one person to do in a night), and I don't even need an almanac. I can think of a lot more things to do, but I won't do them because that's not the type of person I am. I sure hope the terrorists don't think of this idea of derailing trains.
  • Flotsam or jetsam, Once a terrorist gets 'em They say act just like TNT -- Such beer coolers have bombed, In backwaters becalmed Down they drift with the floating debris -- To imperil each stream and each shore and each pool and each lake through the land of the free.
  • The FBI finds such info divined from said almanacs terrorist fodder. Cities and States and Bridges and Lakes such choices befuddle and bother. Plus tunnels and land—marked as they say Can cops know who will hit when? Innocent or no, not annotated or so, watch out at them traffic stops. For a book or a look or skin like a crook, each hints of terrorist thoughts. So shadows of doubt thus spread all about and seek action suspicious and then …
  • Almanacs? They'll be reading encyclopedias next! That's it. Shut the Internet down.
  • Eek! they could kill us with a pen -cil or a pair of reading-glasses or a snapped credit card or a ticket and some boarding passes or a piece of sharpened hard cheese or many fiendish stratagems such as these!
  • Freethought: Good luck, that would be a b*tch of a job cutting those rails. Why don't you just put a penny on the track? >heavy knocking on door< Damn!! Cheese it, kids, it's Homeland Security. NewsFlash: Piggy banks are now weapons of mass destruction!
  • I read that story elsewhere - pathetic if it wasn't so scary.
  • Mmmmmmmm, Falafel! Let's sit down to a lovely meal of yoghert, cucumbers, Falafel and ... *heavy knocking on door Ah, here's the boys, just in time for dinner.
  • pass teh pepper spray?