Securing the subways. (Getty)

The Fire Department’s promotional exams may be the most challenging civil service tests in the city. The guys who take them certainly think so. “The fire exam is definitely the toughest there is, ten times harder than cops or anything else,” Captain Joe Loftus told The Observer recently.

In the past few years, a cottage industry has sprung up to help firefighters study for the exams that allow them to rise through the ranks. Capt. Loftus and a group of his colleagues were at the forefront three years ago when they launched LtQuestions.com, a simple Wordpress site that offers fellow firefighters sample tests—16 for only $96.

Unfortunately, LtQuestions.com and similar sites meant to help firefighters better serve the city also appear to be imperiling it at the same time.

Ah, the Internet. It makes life easier, it makes life harder. Like this, hate that. Share baby photos, kiddie porn, revolutionary Tweets, fatwas, bomb plans. All from the convenience of a keyboard.

Convenience is key in our frenetic modern lives, and the same goes for New York’s Bravest. These sites were created to help firefighters study for the various departmental exams that can make or break a career in the department. Along with an officer’s guide and testimonials, the site provides free downloads of the hundreds of books and other relevant study materials.

Since LtQuestions.com appeared, imitators, each with a different study system, have sprung up, as well. All feature a trove of FDNY documents, some 3,000 pages in total, long available at firehouses around the city. Stacked up, the books reach past a stout fireman’s bellybutton—worse than any grad student’s workload.

While these sites are condoned by the Fire Department as useful study aides, all of them publish a number of sensitive documents that would be invaluable not only to would-be brass but also to anyone with the desire to do the city or its residents harm, from a terrorist cell to a disgruntled citizen. Among the documents the site makes available to anyone with an Internet connection are detailed plans and schematics for highly sensitive parts of the city’s infrastructure, the subway system, the airports, the electrical grid, and the sewer and gas systems, to name a few. There is an irony, perhaps, in the fact that such detailed intelligence enables an attacker to strike not only at innocent civilians but also the first responders rushing in to save them.

The Fire Department insists the materials are harmless, and that much of it has been available in various forms for decades. “I’ve asked around, and nobody seems to think there is anything very serious in there,” said FDNY spokesman Frank Gribbons.

But a number of current and former fire, counter-terrorism and city sources with whom The Observer shared the documents expressed concerns that in the wrong hands, they could pose a threat to the city’s infrastructure.

“How much of a threat is it?” asked Professor Joseph King, a counter-terrorism expert at John Jay College. “I think if someone wanted to blow up a subway tunnel, know exactly the longest route, the worst spot, they could find this and use it. Would it give them access to the tunnel? Would it show them the secondary route so they could get everyone who goes in after them, and blow them up, too? I think it could.”

As the information age continues to jostle with the post-9/11 mindset, as frivolous cartoons and videos lead to riots around the world, as planes are grounded and shoes removed because of nonexistent bomb scares, just how cautious should the city be? What is the right balance between access and anxiety?

Study buddies.

Capt. Loftus knows his site and others may be throwing off the grading curve. “I bet there are some guys out there now who are screwed because of us, because they have to work harder now, but that’s good for the city, don’t you think?” noted Captain Joseph Loftus, the creator of LtQuestions.com. He was speaking by phone from his home on Long Island. His daughter could be heard giggling in the background.

LtQuestions.com began improbably enough. Like most firefighters, Capt. Loftus was working with a group of study buddies, preparing for the upcoming exam. He and four other guys would regularly get together, each firefighter responsible for crafting 30 questions for the group. While studying for the captain’s test, Capt. Loftus’ wife, who is Swiss, fell ill. She moved back to Switzerland for a time to receive medical care, and Capt. Loftus and the kids went with her.

“I could barely think about the test, it was so scary, but my buddies, they would still send me the questions over email,” Capt. Loftus said. “When I got back, I realized, even with everything that was going on, I was pretty well prepared. I said, ‘You know guys, I think we’re onto something.’”

Every year, thousands of firefighters compete for a couple hundred spots within the upper ranks of the  New York City Fire Department. They spend months, even years, studying to move from lieutenant to captain, from captain to battalion chief, from battalion chief to battalion commander to deputy division chief to division chief, and so on. “If you’d studied to become deputy chief, you could have been a doctor,” Capt. Loftus said. “That’s eight years of your life right there spent studying in the library.

“I was thinking the Fire Department was one of those family jobs, but if you want to move up the ranks, you can throw that out the window,” he added. “That’s the idea with our site, you can do it at 11 at night from the comfort of your own home.”

The Observer took one of the sample tests and scored a 60 out of 100—not half bad for a first-timer, but we never would have made rank (never mind passing the physical exam). Each week during the study season, a new set of questions appears, written by the site’s administrators, a mix of captains and lieutenants with one battalion chief. The service functions a bit like a virtual study group, even pitting participants against one another, just like on the real exam, where only the top scorers move up.

“Thank you and ALL the LtQ team for your dedication to your students,” reads one testimonial on the site. “LtQ each week let me know where I stood against my competition and how much I’ve learned. More importantly, how much i had to step it up at certain times.” Another: “Thank you all again, from the bottom of my heart, awesome job!!!”

Over the years, there have been a number of brick and mortar civil service academies in the city, most notably the Delehanty Institute, which trained thousands of students a year from the 1920s through the 1980s. More recently, FireTech, with four locations in firefighter-friendly precincts (Howard Beach, Rockland, Beth Page, Staten Island), has become the go-to trainer. But their courses cost hundreds of dollars a 13-class session.

The online route seems to be growing in popularity, though. LtQuestions.com has graduated 700 users, and since the site launched, at least two others have appeared with varying approaches and prices.

“But ours is still the most popular,” Capt. Loftus said.

The Buckeye Pipeline in Queens. Seems safe enough. (Wikimedia Commons)

One thing all these sites have in common is a reliance on the FDNY manuals.

Like LtQuestions.com, FireTestTaking.com has a revolving bank of questions, sort of virtual flashcards, which cost $24.95 a month, or $150 for the year. Randomized tests of 10, 15, 25, 50 or 100 questions are available. As on LtQuestions.com, a log-in is required only to access the tests themselves, not the documents behind them, and anyone can sign up for a log-in.

Fire C.A.P.T.A.I.N. NYC is arguably the most advanced. Short for Computer Aided Promotional Tools with Advanced Integrated Networking, the ice-blue, Tron-like site provides access to a special program designed by two tech-savvy firemen, captains Vincent Moore and Alan Macleod. Among the options the program offers is “multicolor highlighting, in-line notes, ‘hot buttons’ (user-defined highlighted keywords).” There are also the standard practice tests with progress tracking and an online chat function.

“I hate studying!” Mr. Macleod wrote in an article Fire Engineering magazine in March, explaining his inspiration for the site. “It’s the reason I’m not an astronaut.”

A new web-based app for mobile users just launched.

The vast majority of information contained on these sites is mundane. They all deal with some aspect of the job, from the routine (“EV18 Hoist Portable Ladder to the Roof,” “Haz-Mat 7 Decontamination Procedures”) to the obscure (“AUC 207a12 Airtrain System,” "306 'Fire Cap' Children's Assistance Program").

Still, plenty of sensitive material is available. For instance, the sites publish access plans and rescue procedures for the subway tunnels running under the East River. There are maps of gas pipes, including those serving JFK Airport. Remember the Buckeye Pipeline, which a group of would-be terrorists tried to attack in 2007? It’s there, along with maps of the Con Edison facilities at Hunter’s Point, also served by a gas line.All a click away, without even a credit card or a background check.

Capt. Loftus said his team notified the Fire Department before starting his site. Capt. Macleod told The Observer he had not directly reached out, but people knew about it. No one at FireTestTaking.com could be reached.

So how threatening is this material? “It’s out there,” Captain Macleod said. “You think we’re handing it over to them in an easier fashion? I don’t really think so. Maybe we could insist on some proof that you’re a firefighter.”

Professor King had a simple solution. “Really, all these guys need to do is put it behind a paywall,” he said. “Maybe they could require these guys’ FDNY PINs, make sure they work for the department.”

Capt. Loftus, while appreciating the gravity of the situation, chuckled at the idea.

“Behind a paywall?” he said. “What’s that gonna do, the guy can still get it. I’ve got $96 from a terrorist, though. I’d feel terrible for that. Honestly, that never crossed my mind. We just thought of the access, because you know, the books are all over the place. Any guy could go buy the books. You want the books, to buy them, you don’t have to show an ID to buy them. It’s like a hundred bucks.”

“You know, the way I look at things, where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Peter Romaniuk, a fellow at the Center on Global Terrorism Cooperation and a professor at John Jay stressed the difficult balancing act faced by governments in this day and age. "Generally in this field, people acknowledge it's impossible to reduce this vulnerability to zero," he said. "That would impose constraints on a society that a democracy wouldn't want to tolerate. The trick becomes managing the risk, and certainly the record in terms of attacks is quite good in the post-9/11 period."

This is the position of the Fire Department. Mr. Gribbons, the FDNY spokesman, recalled the days when people used to photocopy the materials to save on them. He also noted that the department has shared its study materials with other departments. The message was, this information is everywhere, it is out there, not just online. If someone wants it, they can get it.

Not that any of this poses any real threat in the eyes of the department. “These books, as far as I know, there’s nothing top-secret in them,” he said.

That said, when The Observer contacted Mr. Gribbons a second time to see if anything had been done, he said attorneys were asking the sites to remove the materials (which, after all, belong to the city). A day later, though, the information was still online. To borrow the phrase, is this a case of familiarity breeding complacency?

“It’s a trade-off,” Professor King said. “You want your firefighters to know this stuff, but that also means the information is out there for other people to use.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that with a 60 out of 100 on a sample test, The Observer would have been lucky to have made the rank of sergeant. There is no such rank in the Fire Department. We regret the error.

The idea that a site can wildly succeed as a meme factory, a listicle aggregator, and as of recently, a serious news operation rubs some folks the wrong way.  The most recent source of attack was the web presence of McSweeney's, the San Francisco-based publishing house (and internet humor destination widely known for—but of course—their lists).

McSweeney's recently published a list by one Jory John entitled "Suggested Buzzfeed Articles." Among the titles were "15 Ways to Obliterate a Tree" and "3 Opera Singers Covered in Day-Old Newspapers," both of which made this braindead, heat-stroked writer chuckle (as a McSweeney's list will sometimes do), the joke being: Here is the extreme version lampooning the extent to which Buzzfeed will go to make a list for their website, for which sometimes they can be found reaching.

So Buzzfeed answered them, by actually creating the articles Mr. Jory jokingly suggested, explaining:

McSweeneys was kind enough to suggest some articles for us and here, we make those suggestions a reality! If you've got a suggestion for an article we should do, send it to suggestedarticles@buzzfeed.com, and we'll do our best to make it happen!

The "suggestions" they chose were:

• 11 Political Lessons We Learned From "Gilmore Girls"
• 29 Reasons to Hate Your Life
• Elvis Presley's 42 Sweatiest Moments
• 3 Raccoons That Will Kill You And Your Family
• 50 Photos of Bill Clinton's Forehead
• 18 Things To Scream At A Cow
• 10 Peaches That Resemble Pat Sajak
• 4 Inspiring Lance Bass Quotations
• The World's 13 Laziest Salmon
• 25 Numbers Bigger Than 2
• 16 Beautiful Photos From Underneath A Bed
• 8 Surprising Uses For An Orange
• 10 Grizzly Bears Doffing Newsboy Caps

Yes. They actually made all of those.

For the lists that seem unlikely to be even remotely possible—like the Pat Sajak one, for example—they simply photoshopped the meme into reality. Others, like the 50 Pictures of Bill Clinton's forehead, they aggregated into reality. It is as funny, canny, and absolutely as frightening a response they could muster. For all the wiseass moxie employed in making this a reality—which they appeared to start working on yesterday—there is an utterly odd and somewhat disconcerting boast at the heart of this: That anything can be turned into a meme or a list, no matter how absurd, uninteresting, or fictitious. Challenge this, and you're daring them to excavate heretofore unmolested depths of Internet Ephemera, and bring them to the surface of the collective consciousness in response. Let this be a lesson to us all.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek 

Well now, Shell's getting it, too.

An "Arctic Ready" site of "Shell" is currently making the rounds on the Internet. It looks like it's by Shell, it's written in corporate rhetoric, and it has all of the features of a corporate attempt at social media (like a 'make your own postcard' section, and a game for kids).

Except, a closer look reveals something else: In the "game" for kids, you defend an oil rig from icebergs. On a page where "Shell" touts an arctic drilling platform, they explain:

On the slight chance that something does go wrong, Shell's spill cleanup plan is second to none. No one has yet fully determined how to clean up an oil spill in pack ice or broken ice—but that too is exactly the sort of challenge we love.

But best of all are the social media "postcards" that they created and that people are spreading around the web.

For example:

Or:

Or:

On a first look, they appear like something Shell put out, but an actual read would make you question if a company like Shell would have the gall to actually put out something like that.

Which gets you clicking. And so goes a canny awareness campaign like this. If successful activism takes more than just a message, now, these activists appear to most certainly have whatever that "extra something" is (which in this case, looks like astute and brilliant impersonation skills).

Check out what Shell's actual homepage looks like:

And the Arctic Ready homepage:

The real Shell site "help" page:

And the Arctic Ready "Shell" help page:

The entire thing is immaculately executed, and fairly hilarious, too. It's clearly some environmental group doing this, though the web registry only points to a privacy-proxy for a domain:

c/o ARCTICREADY.COM
P.O. Box 821650
Vancouver, WA 98682
US

Whoever it is, they're already fooling more than a few people, and are bound to upset the corporate PR brass at Shell. Something like this is bound to spread quickly, and fuel a little (misinformed) populist outrage along the way. So far, Shell's only issued this terse statement, hidden on their Alaska page:

Last week groups that oppose Shell’s plans in offshore Alaska posted a video that purports to show Shell employees at an event at the Seattle Space Needle. Shell did not host, nor participate in an event at the Space Needle and the video does not involve Shell or any of its employees. A fake press release claiming that Shell is considering legal action following the launch of the video was also distributed to the media. Most recently the group sponsored a contest on a website asking people to create fake advertisements which appear to be from Shell. The ads, and a contest to create more of the ads, are not associated with Shell. We continue to focus on a safe exploration season in 2012.

New York City has entire armies of so-called social media are marketing consultancies that likely can't yield results like this after years of trying everything in their playbooks. Maybe they could take a page from these guys', whoever they are.

UPDATE: It looks like it's the work of Greenpeace, in conjunction with activist group The Yes Men.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Webby Awards announced (WebbyAwards.com)

The Webby Awards, which is in its 16th year of honoring the best of the web with five words allotted for winning speeches, announced their nominees today.

The websites and individuals honored are determined by the  International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, with the actual ceremony closing out New York's Internet Week on May 21. Past hosts have included B.J. Novak and last year's Lisa Kudrow, and this year marks a return to the standup scene as geek god Patton Oswalt takes the stage as the M.C.

Though categories range from the serious (Religion and Spirituality, Politics, Pharmaceuticals) to the self-promotional (Personal Blog/Website, Self Promotion/Portfolio, Art), the Webby Awards hooks in non-Internet nerds by styling itself as a comedy show:

The Linternet.

With his electric basketball playing, Jeremy Lin has moved the needle on the term "Linsanity." It's gone from an epithet for actress Lindsay Lohan to a term for the interest he engenders in the Knicks. A new site, the Jeremy Lin Word Generator, has generated new terms for Jeremania (see what we did there?). These terms include:

• Lintriguing
• Linsurgency
• Linspiration
• Lindomitable
• Linsurgent

And surely many more, if the breadth of words beginning with the prefix "in-" can serve as guide. If Mr. Lin's fame continues, he'll become a part of our sub-lin-inal thoughts! (Sorry, that joke was too linsidery.)

From the looks of the new verified account logo, the author of The Satanic Verses has driven the squatter off his digital property, and is now tweeting from the @SalmanRushdie account.  Friends include Mia Farrow, Bret Easton Ellis, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman. His last tweet from two hours ago:

Luckily, there is no fatwā on Mr. Rushdie in Middle Earth.

Update: Mr. Rushdie has responded to The New York Observer regarding his new status: "I'm happy to have lost my 1.”

Molly Young.

What makes a Molly?

Molly Lambert.

They were three exemplars of the value of a well-constructed personal brand, and each is now more than merely Internet-famous. Ms. Young contributes regularly to New York after leaving a job at the Daily; Ms. Lambert works for Grantland, where she now sticks images of celebrities between her paragraphs on ESPN’s dime; Ms. McAleer launched a women’s-interest site, HelloGiggles, with the actress Zooey Deschanel, and is a writer for the new CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls.

 

Molly McAleer.

I Gchatted a friend who works in finance to tell her I’d been assigned to write a piece on “the Mollys.” She replied “write it in the p.o.v. of edith z.” The Hairpin blogger Edith Zimmerman may be the Molliest of Mollys. She wrote bizarre and fantastical fake letters from women’s magazines for The Awl and ghost stories on her personal blog. She brought that brand of flustered, wacky pixieishness first to The Hairpin, the women’s interest site she edits, then to a GQ cover profile of Chris Evans. The piece, which was controversial even among the magazine’s editors, was more revelatory of Ms. Zimmerman’s half-self-deprecating exultation of her L.A. exploits than of anything Captain America had to say, in the same way that Molly Young’s New York articles sneak in turns of phrase like “weenie-tuggers” and “girl crush," and Molly Lambert smuggles fan-fic footnotes about how Kate Moss is like “the cool best friend who knows all the good shows and parties to go to and brings you” onto Grantland. Another freelance writer, Marisa Meltzer, posted a photo of herself doing the “hand-heart” gesture on her Tumblr after publishing a piece on the phenomenon in the New York Times Styles section; she also posted a picture of her bedroom, suggesting that she considered submitting it to a blog of teenage bedrooms though she is “aged way the fuck out” now. Mollyish writing hinges on a cute mashup of ingratiating cuteness (hand-heart! Weenie-tuggers!) and hard ambition (the Times! New York!), starring a narrator in on the joke.

Such is the appeal of Mollyism—especially to straight, male dude-itors—that the literary eye-lash batting generally manages to survive the delicate transition from personal blog to print. (Whether Ms. McAleer’s voice will make the trickier leap to TV remains to be seen, but examples like that of Ms. Zimmerman and Ms. Meltzer indicates that the blog voice can thrive in print.)

According to Wired editor Bill Wasik, the Mollys are doing what writers have always done. “It's pretty common and always been common that you start with voicier writing in less established organs,” said  “and you move to better- established organs that pay better and you bring the writing, but you show that you can report out and structure and bulletproof a magazine feature.”

But voicey is one thing. The Mollys have taken to a whole other level. The intimacies of Tumblr have vastly amplified the confessional mode. As Maud Newton noted in a recent essay in the Times Magazine (which briefly employed Ms. Zimmerman as a web columnist), there’s a frantically conversational tone on social media: “‘Oh, hi,’ people say at the start of sentences on blogs, Twitter and Tumblr these days, both acknowledging and jokily feigning surprise at the presence of the readers who have turned up there.” Ms. Newton phrased this as a universal concern--perhaps we're all a little bit Molly.

Tumblr happens to be a nearly perfect platform for showcasing a writer’s wry take or sharp attitude while requiring minimal effort. “Sometimes, you see a blogger where they’ve only written two sentences, but they’re really witty,” said Jezebel editor Jessica Coen. “Tumblr’s really easy to read and you can go through 100 entries in ten minutes.”

The coquettish particularities of Tumblr as a platform—which encourages a sort of literary fan dance, in which a writer’s identity remains largely hidden even as she’s laying bare her interior monologue—invite a certain amount of projection from readers. Choire Sicha, proprietor of The Awl and a keen observer of the Molly phenomenon, noted over Gchat that “my problem is that digital presence is weirdly so obscuring? it's like, you look at someone's tumblr and you're like, what the fuck is your name? what's your email? where DO YOU WORK, HOW OLD ARE YOU?”

Near instant reader feedback also encourages a certain style of writing. “I remember the days of Tumblarity,” said Maura Johnston, music editor of the Village Voice, recalling an early feature of the platform that ranked users based on their readers’ devotion. “If I write something, I do hit the reload button to see if people have responded to it… it’s the blogger’s dilemma: you can work really hard on something that’s thought out and reasoned or you can post about ‘I fell in love today and this is why’—and that greeting card-ready stuff will triumph.”

“One of the things that’s been lost in this new, fast publishing age,” Ms. Johnston added, “is this grooming period for a lot of young writers thrown into the deep end after school. You see things like Thought Catalog”—the website full of glum young boys and girls curating confessions about themselves in a super-breezy tone—“and you don’t have people thinking about things. There are a lot of lazy constructions or lazy ideas.”

Which is not to say that there’s not considerable drive behind the cozy bed-head tics—just that the ambition is tempered by an appealingly easygoing quality. “Mollys just want to have fun,” Mr. Sicha pointed out. “That’s why they’re so endearing, even when they’re glum or emo or sincere… But they’re full of kicks.”

Mr. Wasik said that the kicks are hardly going to damage the writers’ credibility: “We're entering an era where it's not as if, if you want to write an essay for The New Yorker, they’re going to be freaked out by the fact that you have this Tumblr devoted to being funny or being silly. People get that writers have different sides to their personality.”

That presumes people can tell the Mollys apart. Ms. McAleer, the 2 Broke Girls writer, said: “It happens to me all the time—people say, ‘I read your stuff on Grantland every day.’” Molly is a memorable name, so people will assume that it’s all the same person.” She and Ms. Lambert, both of whom live in Los Angeles, are friends.

“We’ve all gotten emails for the other Mollys,” said Ms. Lambert. “It’ll go back and forth a few times before you realize it’s meant for someone else.”

Ms. Young, who lives in New York, stands apart, and declined an interview request. She told The Observer via email: “I just don't think that anyone gives a shit about me, even if I share a name with these cool people.” Super Mollyish thing to say.

And there’s always an up-and-comer. “No molly list now is complete with[out] molly oswaks,” Mr. Sicha told us via Gchat, of a writer whose work (“Mad Men’s Betty Draper Is A Real Bummer,” “The Melodrama of Miley Cyrus”) has been featured on Thought Catalog and in The Believer. “THERE’S A NEW MOLLY,” he told us. “MOVE OVER MOLLIES.”

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

Mr. Sorkin's hatred of bloggers stems from an incident during his West Wing days, when he took to a Television Without Pity message board to defend himself against criticism, and was given a harsh shellacking on the board and in the press for doing so. He channeled this into a particularly wonderful episode of The West Wing. Since then, he's taken every chance he can to sideswipe the matter of these pesky bloggers who blog things (it's often argued that he wrote an entire film about his distaste for the democratizing nature of the internet, let alone the press he did for it), forgetting the fact that he still often takes to those same blogs to communicate with the hoi polloi whenever it's called for.

But even for him, this—from an Interview magazine Q & A with David Carr, a New York Times media reporter and the primary Times staffer featured in Page One, the documentary about the Times—is a particularly bad look.

Mr. Sorkin is discussing with Mr. Carr the matter of Brian Stelter, the other Page One protagonist who was hired by theTimes' media desk in 2007 after the acquisition of his television industry news blog TV Newser, all while he was still in college. A blogger, hired at the Times! One would think Mr. Sorkin, once considered a wunderkind of sorts for his play A Few Good Men, could relate.

And then, this happens:

SORKIN: And The New York Times felt that [Stelter] should be working there?

CARR: Yeah, which seemed like a pretty weird idea at the time. But he has become such an asset. We collaborate a lot. The robot part is that he moves his elbow and content comes out. While he’s chatting, he’s also tweeting and blogging—and, you know, I’ll think that’s cute, and then the next day he’ll be on the front page with a synthetic piece about the analytics of television or new media, which he also covers. If Brian wasn’t such a decent guy, I would actually slip something into his food or quietly suffocate him with a pillow.

SORKIN: I’m glad to hear he’s a decent guy who has the respect of his co-workers. So then I’ll speak to this idea more generally: I know when I read something in The New York Times that whoever wrote it had to be very good to get the job that they have. But I don’t know anything about the person who is blogging online. It’s an easy job to get. Anybody can be a blogger—you just set up a site and blog. But there isn’t the same kind of accountability. I mean, The New York Times makes mistakes—Jayson Blair, Judith Miller—but when it does, it’s a very big deal.

Not so much, but that—like Mr. Sorkin's erroneous and wide-reaching assessment of the action of blogging as the mating call of the bottom feeders of the entire internet and not as another format of writing (one quite celebrated at the Times), or his complete misunderstanding of the concept of "citizen journalism" by comparing it to "citizen medicine" —is, of course,  a different story, though not one Mr. Sorkin will ever read, since, of course, he's not so big on reading bloggers.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

A fellow named Sohaib Athar, who's an IT consultant in Abbottabad, Pakistan - where Bin Laden was killed - Tweeted about hearing a blast and a helicopter hovering over Abbottabad, which Mr. Athar considered to be a rare event. It was apparently a slightly irritating one at that, as he threatened to take out his "giant swatter" to get the helicopter to leave the area.

":-/" indeed. Little did he know: that helicopter very well might've ended up carting the body of the world's most infamous terrorist out of town. Someone found him on Twitter after this evening's news, and of course, quoteth Mr. Athar:

"Uh oh, now I'm the guy who liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it. and here come the mails from the mainstream media... *sigh*"

Such are the perils of Twitter, and American forces finding the most wanted terrorist in the world not too far from you. It happens. Mr. Athar was even kind enough to provide his new friends with a picture of sunny Abbottabad late Sunday evening (Monday afternoon in Pakistan) where Mr. Bin Laden was killed:

It looks like the San Fernando valley. If it is indeed anything like the San Fernando valley, those who take pleasure in that kind of thing will be glad to know Mr. Bin Laden suffered a particularly torturous death. 

[h/t Eric Spiegelman]