continuity of parks

From Fanciful Notion to Album of the Year:
Thank Heavens It's Just a Metaphor!


Nov. '51, Operation BusterFirst let's consider Garner's Usage Quotation of the Day, 6 February 06:

Most new words are absorbed gradually into language, but there are exceptions. An awesome example is the phrase 'atomic bomb.' When it crossed the desk of a Merriam-Webster editor back in 1917 (it had been clipped from a sentence at The Yale Review, which read, 'When you can drop just one atomic bomb and wipe out Paris or Berlin, war will have become monstrous and impossible'), it drew the penciled comment: 'Fanciful.' During the Thirties, the phrases 'atomic energy' and 'atomic ray' warranted dictionary listings, but 'atomic bomb' remained in the realm of the improbable. It was not until 1945 that it exploded into print, when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

- From Mark Tolchin, "About: New Words," N.Y. Times, 8 Sept. 1957
(as quoted in The Ordeal of American English (Babcock ed., 1961)).

Peace ActivistThree days later, on 9 February 2006, a Google search for Atomic Bomb returned 15,500,000 results. Of the top thirty, none promised information re: the Grammys but rather re: what had happened fifty years previous, before and after that particular Monday morning in 1945. The top two returns, for example:

1) ATOMIC BOMB: DECISION (Hiroshima-Nagasaki); Official American documents and personal accounts on the decision to use atomic..., etc.; then

2) a site registered in Japan entitled A-Bomb WWW Museum ~ June,1995 ("Little Boy" is the nick name [sic] given to the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. It was Monday morning. Little Boy was dropped from the Enola...)

One of the last postings from the A-Bomb WWW Museum ran as follows:

HIROSHIMA, JAPAN - July 6, 2000 - Every year, in Hiroshima, Japan, people float lanterns with prayers, thoughts, and messages of peace down the rivers in commemoration of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Until this year, the only way to join this celebration was to go to Hiroshima personally, but now a group of volunteers have started a website that will allow people from around the world to join in. The site, URL, allows visitors to both write in messages and view messages that others have left from across the planet. On August 6th, during the Lantern Floating Festival, the messages will be printed out and assembled into a series of lanterns that will be floated down the rivers. This will be shown live on the same website:

Hiroshima Peace Message 2000 New...

Which link nearly six years later appeared to be dead. We thought perhaps we should try to find it.

Instead we found our way to what looks like the homepage of the City of Hiroshima. It was all in Japanese. Luckily there were icons to help us navigate: a baby bottle, a church (we made assumptions based on twin romanesque towers), a man (in pants) and a woman (in skirt), a school?, a wheelchair, etc. It appeared that there were still people living in the city. The English version of the site had different icons: a dove and water. Among the articles there on offer:

Devotion of Hiroshima to the Cause of Peace updated
The reality of the A-bomb disasters
The current status of nuclear weapons
Statements about Peace by the Mayor
Peace Declaration
Protest against Nuclear Tests


Stock PhotoMeanwhile, back to the night of 9 February 2006, when the lead singer of an Irish rock-and-roll band named after an outdated U.S. Military spy plane explained to the AP about his father and the meaning of "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb," album of the year: "He was the atomic bomb in question and when he died, set off kind of a chain reaction in me, and I've been shoutin' about him and giving off about him and complaining about him, screaming about him, for the last few years. And maybe, maybe, tonight is the time to stop."