08 August 2007

TFOA


They stopped the game for ten minutes after Barry Bonds smacked the record-breaker out of AT&T Park in San Francisco last night. The white sphere arced to the very deepest point of the field of play, well over four hundred feet away from the plate. Then it fell from the sky and the record was broken; Henry Aaron's mark has been surpassed and Bonds is the King.

A twenty-two year old man managed to grab it, and the thing from the sky is going to change his life. Hopefully it will be for the better, though there have been dark rumors that he will have to declare the record breaking ball as ordinary income on his tax return, even before he sells it.

He is lucky. Things fall out of the sky all the time. If you thought about it, you would be looking up all the time. I'm sure you have heard the creepy stories of big chunks of Blue Ice that appear on lawns, or crash through the roofs of unsuspecting homeowners. It happens often enough that there is a technical term for aerial flotsam and jetsam. The Federal Aviation Administration calls the objects “Things Falling Off Airplanes,” or TFOA.

It makes it sound very official, and not at all like a random Act of God, which is actually a legal term for TFOA. It is very empowering. Bond's triumph was muted only slightly by the fact that our own Washington Nationals went on to win the game, home run and TFOA aside, and with any luck the controversy will subside and we can get back to the more important things we have to worry about.

I made a list of them. The terrorists are on there, of course, though I place the climate change and the weak dollar higher in importance. I am much more likely to die in a weather-related event than the detonation of an IED. The weak dollar is a much more personal issue, almost as intimate as the heat that makes the sweat roll down the inside on my wilted suit.

It is going to be another very hot day in Washington. Those entrusted with the public health have deemed the air to be in Code Orange condition, and unhealthy; the misery index will be well into triple digits. I dread the travel I must do today, north of the Beltway and then inside it, uncomfortably near some nests of spies that have been threatened by the terrorists.

I will not let the warmth or threat from overseas deter me from my appointed rounds.

The swelter means that people are cranky. The Administration's point man on the revision of the FISA legislation, DNI Mike McConnell, has seen the honeymoon of his relationship with the press end aruptly. Having successfully shepherded the bill through the House and Senate, he is now being vilified as a political figure.

It is too bad, since I know he is not. Moreover, he did not want even want this particularly thankless job. He turned it down twice that I know of, and think he would prefer to be in the air conditioning at his country home, rather that doing what he has had to do. They summoned him to the ranch in Texas and the President of the United States told him he had to take the job. For his country.

That is a tough bullet to dodge. I think he was probably thinking of that, sitting in the back of the black official sedan rolling through the shimmering heat on the way between his office at Bolling Air Force Base and the offices in the gray buildings on Capitol Hill. The South Capital Street Bridge is closed, too, making the commute that much more challenging.

I'm glad they are fixing it before it falls down. The pavement was buckled and chunks of cement were falling into the brown water below.

The heat is getting to everyone. Russians jets apparently got lost near the airspace of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia last week and accidentally flew into it. In another accident, probably related to the heat, a missile seemed to have become separated from one of the aircraft and fell into the garden of a house in the village of Shavshvebi. They did not say if it was a heat-seeking missile, though with it being so warm you would think it would be the opposite.

The Russians deny the whole event even happened, not even bothering to claim it was just TFOA, which is what we did when something with our squadron's identification was found in somebody's truck patch.

They are nothing if not bold, our Russian friends. Naturally the Georgian incident was a distraction, and you can understand their being brusque about it. Their attention was pointed north, rather than south. The expedition that planted the titanium flag of the Russian Federation on the seafloor below the North Pole returned to Moscow. They arrived at Vnukovo airport to the sound of marching bands and massed formations of kids from Mr. Putin's new patriotic youth movement. The flowers that the girls in folk-costumes presented were wilted in the heat, and at least one of the members of the delegation collapsed from the waves of heat.

Apparently it was the contrast of the heat wave in Moscow to the arctic weather that did it. With the icecaps melting, I expect there is going to be a lot more of that going around in the future. It could lead to some fevered competition in the northern latitudes. The Canadians are talking about deploying an armed arctic fleet to defend their territory. The Russians already have eighteen hardy ice-breakers ready for operations.

The Americans have only three, and two of them are disintegrating. It will be interesting to watch how the new gold rush to cooler climes unfolds. It may be the smart place to spend the summers. I just hope the heated competition for resources does not wind up with accidental consequences.

There is enough TFOA as it is.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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