Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time.

Air Raid Siren Monthly Test Anomaly

original image manipulation


Every month, almost, the air raid sirens go off.  This started happening around 2004 or 2005, maybe earlier.  I don't remember -- but I know it was after the US-led invasion of Iraq.  This happens every month, a phenomenon I find disquieting, to say the least; in addition, it changes sometimes between noon on the first Thursday and noon on the first Wednesday. More disquieting.


Perhaps the variability is protection against the inherent risk of a regular, predictable schedule of drills for a siren capable of warning against terrorist attack.  Perhaps.  But before now, with only one exception (a random normal-length set just after nine AM whose eerie piercing wails woke me up, scared the crap out of me, and led to a call to the police to verify that it wasn't WWIII), they have gone off at noon sharp.







Today, Wednesday, May 4, they went off at 12:17.

Hmm.




































And instead of the regular back-to-back Pavlovian nuclear-annihilation-nightmare-fear memory-triggering sheeple-quieting global-war-on-terror-justifying extended barrage of four or five or six, there were only two.
 


UPDATE:


Mr. Corporanon ventures: "Maybe it was a special Bin Laden is Dead celebratory edition nuclear-annihilation air raid siren.  The reason there were two is that we are entering Round Two of the Global War On Terror."


Ahh.





Be seeing you.






UPDATE