Every iceberg is afire

Europe going swimming these days. Parts of Germany, Austria, Russia and the gorgeous city of Prague are struggling to literally keep their heads above water.

Heard on NPR today that the flood in Prague is something like a once-a-century thing, but some scientists are speculating these events may become for common.

Pictures of Europe underwater.

Stories from the front and feedback from around the world

What may be behind the massive floods.

On another note

Why can't the U.S. play nicely with others? Hmm. Maybe this is why?

Infectious agent

Forget West Nile Virus. Ideas, rumors and speculation multiply faster than any bug. Case in point: From my lurking point in Salon's message boards, I watched as a group either broke a major Bush Administration human rights violation or were caught up in an elaborate hoax. The jury is still out (as of this writing) if the whole deal is real, but it was quite interesting to see the denizens of an anti-Bush message board first accept the data, panic about it, question it, then wonder if it was a hoax...all the time letting paranoia run away with them.

It's an interesting experiment in logic vs. emotion, political partisanship vs. objective analysis. Like most content in Salon's White House message board, it's one part verbal smackdown, one part detective work, one part wild guessing.

Watch the whole thing unfold here.

French Word of the Day

ecritoire (eh kree twahr): writing desk

Alpha-Release Fiction Snip of the Day

The clothes he was wearing when he was carted into the emergency room were torn and tossed by the attendants, not worth cleaning or salvaging. His gear, his threads, his armor...gone into some biohazard bag where his blood-stained rags where mingling with the TB-tinged vomit and AIDS diarrhea from a hundred other wandering souls who had to be brought back from death's door.

He was given clothes, though. Something was arranged from a donation pile, leftovers from the children of walled-off communities who just couldn't bear to be out of fashion. The nurse guessed his sized and tossed him a bundle of corporate-rule disinfected clothing.

They so weren't him. As soon as he put them on, he was mentally planning how to get wheeled back into the ER for a new set of clothes. Tan pants. An orange rugby shirt. Shoes with the hologram of some European sportscopter. These weren't clothes to stand in the concert pit with, getting soaked with khat spit or T-LID smoke. These clothes invited you to get your ass kicked without reservation. Yeah, these clothes opened up a "kick my ass" soup line.

He dressed anyway, little option left to him. When he pulled the curtain back and made eye contact with Raylene, who came back to see how he was doing, his orange shirt glowed under the phosphorescent lamps, shining up on his skin and making it look like he had scurvy. Or cholera, he hoped. That would be cool, he thought, and get me back in the ER in no time.

Raylene closed her shocked, goofy-grim of a mouth before his eyes met hers. Even though he was scrubbed, examined and had mostly fresh clothes, he looked disheveled and angry in a betrayed way, stripped of his credibility when he clothes vanished. He looked like a cat doused with cold water, claws out and ready to hate everyone just a little more.