Cross-Atlantic travel via Zeppeliner ended, ignominiously, with the spark, or the assumption of a spark whose existence now as theoretical as quantum events, and the merry joining of nitrogen and oxygen - that great harbinger of life - against a bright Jersey sky.
The efforts for many years, which repeat with a number of decades between, to find a more tolerable or "humane" method of execution this weekend kicked into gear with Alabama's final call, in this call which never seems to reach finality until curves, as well as bodies, have been flatlined, to end the life of 35-year-in-wait Kenneth Smith by means of oxygen deprivation, as it might well be called rather than the seemingly more sinister nitrogen asphyxiation, putting emphasis on the substance which, while not toxic, best not be enjoyed with 100 % purity (as so many things).
This effort, to find the medicalised, painless death . In Utah, the longstanding preference for blood - the cleaver, or the bullet, compromised by the quotidian hanging, but only as an option - was rekindled with the medical profession's unwillingness , and the decidedly inhumane, but questionably in-
