The Raven

Monday, May 12, 2003

What You Don't See

Just might kill you. That's how it looks this morning. The stories are all about hidden dangers and concealed threats—the monsters from the ID, if you like. For instance, in Atlanta, we've got another road rage incident, and police are frantically searching for the driver of a blue Ford pickup who "engaged" the driver of a white Chevy Blazer. The Blazer driver lost his life as a result of the ensuing "high-speed chase."

Could've been you. Jump in the car, head to the store for a six-pack, and the next thing you know your vehicle is airborne at 90 mph. Paranoia may destroy you, but it's looking like a fundamental strategy in the quest for ongoing survival.

Leggo My Stego

Steganographic cypher, that is. You might remember steganography as an occasional form of encrypting messages popular in the early 90s. Works like this: You take any given jpeg image, use a stego-application to merge unused pixels in the photo with a text file, and bingo—you can e-mail the coded photo to a pal. Very hard to detect.

Turns out investigators in Italy have uncovered a large cache of coded images from computers seized from an Italian mosque, including pictures of the twin towers as well as your standard porno, that contain messages al Qaeda cell members like Abdelkader Mahmoud Es Sayed (aka: Abu Saleh) were using to communicate with each other.

Although the investigators were able to determine how the images were manipulated, they have not yet been able to decode the messages that might have been conveyed by those manipulations.

A related article on steganography, which means "covered writing," explains the origin of the term:

"It actually goes back to Roman times when they used to shave the head of messengers, and tattoo secret messages on their scalp."

The Scent of a Woman

In this case, it was overpowering: Wife arrested in aroma assault. In Stuart, Florida, 36-year-old Lynda Taylor was fuming over the terms of her divorce settlement with ex-hubby David Taylor. Seems that David had netted $150,000 in a recent workers compensation suit stemming from his on-the-job exposure to chemicals, an injury that left him with severe allergies to almost any kind of scented materials. When he refused to give her half of that cash, she went on the warpath:

"Lynda came in the kitchen wearing perfume and applied some to (her daughter). Then went around the house spraying Lysol and even sprayed some in my face," David Taylor wrote in his complaint.

Then she hosed down the house with bug killer and lit up a bunch of scented candles. Lynda's been charged with aggravated battery. Eau de humanity!

Free at Last

Streetwalkers in Iraq are celebrating their new-found freedom to ply mankind's oldest profession. The London Times has a focus article on Marwa, a Baghdad prostitute, who rejoices in the spirit of liberty. She says things are so much better now that Saddam's out of the picture:

"He made life very difficult. First there were the terrible crackdowns. Then the police would harass us or, worse, steal our money," she said as she watched out for customers. "Now we can do as we like."

To the untrained eye, spotting one of these women is a real trick: "It is not like the West, where they wear miniskirts and boots," says Marwa. "Here they often cover themselves in a black shawl like a religious woman, but have dyed blond hair and wear jeans under their robes."

Lest we sound flippant, her case is a common one: injured in war, a widow, there's practically nothing else she can do to survive.

A Day in the Life

But probably not your life. This is the Unseen America project, organized by photographers and journalists who distributed a couple thousand cameras to janitors, nannies, clerks, and day laborers, asking them to record images of their own lives.

The idea comes from Esther Cohen, a labor organizer in New York City, who noticed that the people who make America work rarely turn up in the pages of Vanity Fair.

"Initially, I would go to each class with a large stack of newspapers and magazines and say to the workers in the class, 'Find yourselves in these publications,'" she says. "In no class were they ever able to do that."

You can view the Dept. of Labor gallery exhibit at the Bread and Roses Website. The Raven noticed that, unlike the photos you usually see of America's underclass, in these pictures the subjects are often smiling. Something here for anyone who likes underground photography.

Can I See Some ID?

That's what store clerks in the Golden State will have to ask children if this law goes through: Lawsuit seeks to ban sale of Oreos to children in California. Attorney Stephen Joseph, who's made a career out of abusing the criminal justice system, is targeting the Nabisco corporation due to the high trans-fat content in Oreo cookies. We need this law, he says, because we're all stupid an' stuff:

"Tobacco is well known as an unsafe product. Trans fat is not the same thing at all. Very few people know about it," he said.

The implications here are rather worrisome. It isn't so much that children ought to eat well, but that people like Joseph would prefer the government to enforce the idea. I have no Oreos and I must scream.

10:53:38 AM