Vile obscenity in this morning’s L.A. Times:

That’s a VP from Lockheed Martin, at an arms show in Singapore, expressing his excitement about selling weapons of death into the Asia/Pacific region.

Sipping champagne while contemplating which bomber to buy.

Obscenity.

He’s autistic. And he’s fantastic.

CNN via Crooks & Liars.

Behind as always.  Maybe 40 emails I need to answer.  Phone calls to return.  I seem to have an excess of actual life at the moment. 

I’d like to post a few underwater pics of mantas for the Friday pudublog (neglected badly of late, with my apologies), but I don’t think I’ll have them developed in time.  (Mantas and pudus actually have several things in common: adorable, quiet, weirdly gorgeous, nearly defenseless.  Manta rays are a little like underwater pudus 15 feet long and covered in mucus.  A little.)

I’d catch up on all the freshest crap from our government, but it’s pretty much the same as always: more lies, more selling out of the national interest, more avoidance of admitting any individual responsibility for catastrophic incompetence, and more signs that the ill-prepared, dishonest, unnecessary, and illegal occupation of Iraq is leading into a spiral of violence of terrifying scope.

Nothing we haven’t already learned to expect on a near-daily basis.

Home from Kona, catching up. 

A few minutes ago I start hearing loud buzzing whoppity-whoppity noises outside my window.  And then more, and  more, and then more on top.  A whole swarm of helicopters suddenly forming.  What the…?

So I look out, and there are no fewer than seven helicopters in view, all facing a construction crane about a half-mile from here, down in Century City.  OK, I think to myself, must be a car crash or a roof collapse or some other passing calamity that can make the hair and teeth all breathless between ads for investment firms.

Sure enough, some guy you don’t know is being rescued from a crane, an event which has no conceivable news value or impact on your life whatsoever.  And so of course it’s being covered by everyone with a camera and a helicopter.

These riveting, dramatic pictures, the anchortools say.  Of course, if the guy is being rescued six feet off the ground, there’s no news here.  These riveting pictures are only dramatic because somebody might fall or die on live TV.  It’s a hoped-for snuff film in progress.  Nothing else. 

Sadly for the "news" producers across America, the guy was rescued and whisked away directly, with a relative minimum of riveting, dramatic fuss.  Off went the rescue chopper.

And then the half-dozen bottle flies, attracted by the smell of potential shit, all flew away, too.

I’ve gotten a surprising amount of mail on this.  Neat.  Days later, I’m still thinking about these giant yet gentle and nearly-defenseless beasts.

I should say, rather, that they’re defenseless as far as I can tell.  No sign of fangs or claws or exoskeleton or stinging tail.  No spitting of poison, no toxic breath, no electic zappy ability.  In fact, merely touching them will cause injury.  (This is another way in which swimming with mantas resembles a lap dance: eyes good, hands bad.)  But then, mantas can weigh roughly a ton.  So maybe if you really tick them off they can gang-squish you or something.  But I doubt it.

One letter was from the director of the Manta Pacific Research Foundation, a research and conservation group working to study and protect the giant manta rays.  They’re also working to make it illegal to intentionally harm or kill manta rays in Hawaiian waters, and they’ve even got a petition you can sign if you want to help them show the government there’s real public support for getting mantas some protection.  I’d like to thank her and her group right here for her letter and their good work, which I encourage you to support.

Their site also has a little write-up of how mantas wound up hanging out in Kona, and even a set of thumbnails of the 100 or so male and female mantas who have so far been identified as enjoying the local chow.  There were two mantas in the water when I went; one of them spent most of its time near the surface and gave me the full-body loop easily more than a dozen times.  I’m pretty sure I recognize Weniki as the manta I spent large chunks of an hour with.

Meanwhile, these are the folks I went to sea with.  There are other companies which do similar stuff, but I can’t imagine it could be easier, friendlier, or more convenient.  The link also leads to a short Quicktime movie which gives you some sense of what being in the water with mantas is like.