Literary Interlude: Hardboiled Edition

      A door squeaked behind me. I whirled, but I needn't have bothered. A hard voice, about as English as Amos and Andy, said: "Put 'em up, bud."
     The butler, the very English butler, stood there in the doorway, a gun in his hand, tight-lipped. The girl turned her wrist and shot him just kind of casually, in the shoulder or something. He squealed like a stuck pig.
"Go away, you're intruding.", she said coldly.
He ran. We heard his steps running.
"He's going to fall", she said.
    I was wearing my Luger in my right hand now, a little late in the season as usual. I came around with it. Old man Jeeter was holding on to the table, his face gray as a paving block. His knees were giving. George stood cynically, holding a handkerchief around his bleeding wrist, watching him.
"Let him fall," I said. "Down is where he belongs."

• Raymond Chandler, "Trouble is my Business" (1939)

United States of Space

I love conspiracy theories!

Two former participants in the CIA’s Mars visitation program of the early 1980’s have confirmed that U.S. President Barack H. Obama was enrolled in their Mars training class in 1980 and was among the young Americans from the program who they later encountered on the Martian surface after reaching Mars via “jump room.”



Andrew D. Basiago , 50, a lawyer in Washington State who served in DARPA’s time travel program Project Pegasus in the 1970’s, and fellow chrononaut William B. Stillings, 44, who was tapped by the Mars program for his technical genius, have publicly confirmed that Obama was enrolled in their Mars training class in 1980 and that each later encountered Obama during visits to rudimentary U.S. facilities on Mars that took place from 1981 to 1983.

http://m.examiner.com/exSeattle/pm_76001/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=UniWuhAE