Imperious Caesar, Dead and Turn'd to Clay, Might Stop a Hole to Keep the Wind Away:

Slather on the makeup, light up a clove cigarette, and put on your best all-black-outfit, because today's entry is about death.

We'll start out with some writings about death on a grand scale.  The latest issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (home of the Doomsday Clock) has an article called Rethinking Doomsday, in which various possible vectors of terrorist attacks are examined to determine just how worried people should be about them.  The conclusion is fairly obvious (a nuclear attack is the most likely to succeed, and any chemical, biological, or nanobot (!!) attacks are likely to be largely ineffective, and even then a nuclear attack by a terrorist group is far less worrying than the prospect of an accidental launch by a nuclear state), but there's still some interesting information in it.  For example, the Tokyo subway attack that's always brought up as an example of terrorists using chemical weapons, used 5 seperate packages and killed a grand total of 12 people, and that was in an enclosed area with a large number of people.  (Even more interesting: "Shoko Asahara, the leader of the group, aspired either to be Japan's prime minister or to kill as many of his countrymen as possible."  Talk about being a sore loser…)

Or how about smallpox? Remember all the hubbub about smallpox?  Well, it turns out that the vast majority of people who were vacinnated between 25 to 75 years ago remain immune.  And the vaccine shortage?  Well, somehow 80 million doses of unknown origin have been mysteriously discovered.  (Which, of course, raises the question:  just how do you lose 80 million doses of anything?)

Here's something else interesting, which comes from a related article about possible terrorist attacks coming from within the US:  "U.S. District Judge James Cohn rules that Jordi [ex-US Ranger who plotted to bomb abortion clinics, gay bars, and certain churches] is not a terrorist because federal laws require that plots have an international component to be considered terrorism."  How's that for odd?

Moving on to death on a more personal level, I recently discovered thanatos.net's gallery of death masks.  There's a large collection, including ones from as far back as 2300 BCE, along with chimps,  poets, philosophers, criminals, authors, revolutionaries (both famous and infamous), and some people for whom a death mask just seems fitting.  The death mask for Mary, Queen of Scots, is particularly interesting, as it looks less like a bust, and more like the head to a china doll.  And, since I've got to make the title on topic somehow, there're also these two.

As a final note to this long-winded and rambling entry (at least, more so than normal): I'm positive that CBC must have gone digging through their archive of Putin photos just to find the perfect "Evil Overlord" photo to accompany this article.