Lighting out For ‘The Woods’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

We called it “The Woods.” Well, I did. Sometimes, I referred to it as a “forest,” which it most certainly was not. Our backyard ended at a line of trees and dross beneath them; the lightly manicured, suburban lawn did not grow beyond that line, despite my teen-aged lawn mowing efforts to expand the lawn by clearing the dead leaves and branches away. That tight boundary made The Woods appear all the more elemental, foreign, forbidding, and, of course, inviting.

There was nothing truly elemental or extra natural about The Woods, though; it was not even a particularly non-developed land that surrounded our development. High tension power lines that fed electricity to our thousand-house neighborhood ran along an unpaved road about three football fields away from our back door; thus, the three-hundred-yard-deep stretch of trees that ran the entire backside of the neighborhood, from the Metro-North train tracks along the Hudson River on up and away from the river, merely existed to separate us from the taller-than-average power poles.
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#OpFOQ Fights on, Despite Attacks

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Some of these … U.S. Anons have spent the last 24 hours trying to make sure that an Anon op fails. Its name is #OpFOQ.”—a statement from Raymond Johansen, #OpFOQ’s public coordinator, March 28, 2017

In the last twenty-four hours, #OpFOQ has come under fire. #OpFOQ is a campaign to focus attention on a mass kidnapping in Iraq, to force the government of Iran to divulge what it knows about the whereabouts and health of two dozen Qatari hostages, to bring this case to forefront of the world’s consciousness, and to earn the freedom of the hostages.

Raymond Johansen, #OpFOQ’s public coordinator, released this statement to The Gad About Town an hour ago, which I run verbatim:
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#OpFOQ Learns One Hostage Is Alive

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

BREAKING, March 27: In the three days since the launch of #OpFOQ, a human rights effort to secure the release of two dozen Qatari hostages held (it is believed) in Iraq or at least to learn if the hostages are alive and well, there is progress to report.

At this hour, it was learned that one of the Qatari hostages, seen below, is alive.

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