Posts from — March 2010

When I saw the headline for the post from COLOURlovers show up in my RSS feed, I thought: “Ha, I bet @agentwool would like something like this:

It turns out, I was right. I have seen at least one of these in our house already. Can you guess which one?

(From “Print Blog / A Big List Of Coloring Books For Adults by COLOURlovers :: COLOURlovers“, via Cool Hunting.)

I felt the blast from a bit under four miles away. It was impressive. We heard it, and we felt it. We thought, in fact, that it must have been a shell landing inside the FOB. There’s nothing you can do if something like that happens. There might be another one on the way, but it will follow within seconds if it’s going to come at all. It could also have been a controlled demolition of ordnance that wasn’t announced over the public address system. So we didn’t really think much of it.

When the second one came I knew something significant was developing, something outside the FOB. I thought that it was probably just a short way down the road. Often a second bomb will be used to attack the people responding to the first one. In this incident, the attack was not organized like that, although it was a very complex attack. The follow-on attack against the first responders and the original victims took place at the hospital, a sign of the increasing derangement of the losing side in this conflict.

The wave of pressure, which we sensed as sound and whose effects we felt as a tremor, traveled in 17 seconds the space between the explosion and where I experienced it. Enough time for the badly wounded, who lay dying, to die. Strange to think that in those seconds we were chatting amiably and stirring our coffee idly.

The Iraqi police and army did not need the help of the US military that day, and I do not think that they will again.

(Via The BBC.)