Caught In The Net

In Caught In The Net’s day kids were happy to make things out of squeezy bottles and sticky-back plastic, but not anymore. No, they have to be all smarty-smart and construct nuclear fusion reactors from parts salvaged from junkyards and charity shops.
“The reactor sat on a table with an attached vacuum pump wheezing away,” says the man from The Desert Morning News who was sent to the University of Utah to look at Craig Wallace’s thingamajig.
“A television monitor showed what was inside: a glowing ball of gas surrounded by a metal helix. The ball is, literally, a small sun, where an electric field forces deuteron ions – a form of hydrogen – to gather, bang together and occasionally fuse, spitting out a neutron each time fusion occurs.”
We’re sure the hundreds of people who are being stopped every day at American airports simply because they look Arabic will be delighted that a white middle-class kid is being allowed to play nuclear physicist. You can find out more at www.deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,510054502,00.html
Which brings us neatly to The Memory Hole, an American site which invites “insiders, whistleblowers, researchers, collectors and others to send important, controversial documents” to www.thememoryhole.org
Along with a running log and photo gallery of US military personnel wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan – not a popular topic in the mainstream media – there are articles by Robert Fisk and John Pilger, the latest declassified CIA and FBI documents and loads of fascinating stuff that’s been obtained under the Freedom Of Information Act.
Homesick Brazilians longing for a read of the Sao Paulo Jornal de Tarde should make a beeline for The Washington Newseum site which carries the front-pages of 253 daily papers from 34 countries. You can find the thumbnails at www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages A word of warning: it’s addictive!
Which just leaves time for visits to www.english.pravda.ru/war/2003/03/12/44264.html (the top 10 of Mad Dictators); www.yuckos.com (they’re dogs, not people!); and www.avonpage.com/BeaverLiquors/BLindex.html (it’s not just the English who love their double entendres).