Home, Sweet, Impregnable Fortress Home

Zhang Cheng and his 1,300 mile-per-hour choice of office decor has reignited my long forgotten desire to create my own fortress of doom.

Decade old changes in military purchasing habits have opened avenues for regular folk and paranoid fruitcakes alike. In the age of 'global' terror, your puny house alarm is only likely give provide sample-fodder for super-burglars mixing beats in their stolen iPod Nanos. So what could I do to protect my junk from techno-pirates and annoying little sh*ts that may or may not live down my street?

(For the benefit of those waiting for the missile-silo bubble to burst, we'll pretend I've got a fully-loaded island in the sun, complete with volcano).

Starting outside, the perimeter of mi casa should be free of all surveillance platforms and rival gangs. Advanced optics and specialized audio equipment placed around the gaff should provide me with ample warning of approaching homemade UAVs. Of course, you could also create your own air coverage like Bin Laden, or just buy real time satellite imagery if you're lazy.

Walls don't really go with the volcano, so Isla Snell features laser fencing to detect any possible intruder. Guard dogs are too low-tech, so in the age of genetic modification I've created my own protection: glow-in-the-dark guard pigs. Depending on my set up, speakers/sirens could also nauseate the intruder with my rendition of "I Fought the Law" whilst riot-slime causes hilarious slip'n'slide movements.

Surplus light armour is available to move from one side of the yard to the other and the spy car will patrol the areas my guard pigs don't. If you're lucky enough to survive the pigs/slime, please feel free to ring the buzzer. Biometrics would secure all doors and windows but I've opted for the alternative, of course.

For today's wealthy agoraphobes, a modest $10,000 could provide features such as candle-stick activating doorways and revolving fireplaces. Naturally all electrics are connected by a central system, but my modesty shots are kept off-site. Robotic agents patrol the corridors feeding video to the Tablet PC alerting me to any food delivery. A thermal camera would help me avoid creditors meaning I could make a quick getaway in my submarine. Any attempt to gain underwater access would be detected by the robo-fish, of course.

Some among you may argue that fear has clouded reason and that paranoia has led to the 21st century version of bomb shelter hysteria, that we don't actually need used military equipment and high-tech 'home-alone' protection. But with the balls/idiocy of todays 'crim-orrists' (or terr-inals), now might be the time to spruce up the old homestead and -- let's face it -- play with some of the coolest inventions since Porno Pez.

Now, if I only had room in the tub...

-- Steven Snell

G.I. Journos' Killer War Doc

A little more than two years ago, filmmaker Deborah Scranton got an offer to embed with the New Hampshire National Guard as they headed to Iraq. She turned it down. Instead, Scranton gave cameras to ten soldiers -- and let them shoot the movie. The result, The War Tapes, premiered this weekend in New York, at the Tribeca Film Festival. It's not only the best documentary to date about the conflict in Iraq. But it just might change the face of journalism in the process.

Most movies about Iraq, so far, have been pretty thin, with little insight into the guys fighting this war, and minimal combat footage. That's largely because the filmmakers didn't have the acess -- or the patience -- to get to the war's meatiest material.

Scranton leapfrogged that problem by letting the soldiers become her cameramen. Shooting over a thousand hours, in the field and back at home, they took the time to cpature their unit's unguarded moments, both literal and metaphorical. The laugh-out-loud moments come almost as often as the IED attacks: the ode to guarding septic trucks; the Tarantino-esque debate over whether a severed limb "resembles hamburger, ground up but uncooked.. [or] like a raw pot roast"; the scorpion-spider cage match; the verge-of-breakup moments with girlfriends; the young Iraqi, who stepped into an American convoy a moment too soon.

The War Tapes benefits from a strong dose of luck. Scranton could've cast a thousand GIs, and not gotten three soldiers as sharp, as articulate, and as funny as Stephen Pink, Zack Bazzi, and Mike Moriarty, the movie's main characters. And she couldn't have known how much action these guys would see -- Al-Anbar province in 2004 saw some of the most ferocious fighting of the counterinsurgency.

But an even larger helping of editorial prowess makes The War Tapes a success. Condensing a thousand hours into two hours is tough. Condensing into two hours with a narrative and emotional arc this strong is damn-near-impossible.

In recent years, there's been a ridiculously cantankerous debate over the benefits of professional journalists versus citizen-reporters. The pros are seen as biased and clueless; the amateurs as, well, amateurish, without the seasoned eye to pick the truly telling moments from the torrent of experience. Take the blogs from frontline troops, for example. The views are a refreshing alternative to what you read in the mainstream press; their anecdotes vital. But getting to that good stuff, sorting out the proverbial wheat from blogosphere chaff, takes forever. Most readers, I've found, just give up.

Documentaries like The War Tapes -- and Grizzly Man, and, to a lesser extent, Capturing the Friedmans -- have found the happy medium between the old- and new-school approaches to news. The citizen-journos collect the facts. The pros craft a story from 'em. The result may not be what the news-gathers expected -- Zack Bazzi was surprised how much of his political views wound up in The War Tapes' final cut. But, in this case at least, it's satisfying and truthful and raw. And it's the kind of journalism we ought to have. With some luck, it may be the kind we get, moving ahead.

Kneel Before the Centaur

Like a lot of us, former Navy electrician Dennis Buller is worried about our troops over in Iraq -- specifically, about the amount of gear they have to lug around. But unlike the rest of us, he's built a machine to do something about it.

Think of it as a Segway for grunts. Except you kneel down on it, instead of ride upright. "After seeing the Chronicles of Narnia, I want to call it the Centaur," Buller writes in. (Don't worry, George, he doesn't mean literally breeding animals with humans.) "See the movie and you will know what I mean."

This thing will scurry an infantryman around at twenty miles an hour, enable him to carry enough armor to make small arms obsolete, keep him warm, cool, and allow him to open a door and waste someone with extreme prejudice...

I built this because I know how hard it is for non-Technical [sic] people to understand what is in my head. Plus I cannot draw...

Dennis' prototype is about 3 1/2 feet long, and travels about eight miles an hour (the next one, he promises, will go twice as fast). The Centaur's small size makes it a better option for troops in urban battlefields than a Humvee, which "cannot pear [sic] around a corner, take cover in a house or dodge an RPG round." Dennis wants to pair later versions up with technology from the IBOT electric wheelchair, so the Centaur can climb stairs.

This first model is quite crude. But it works better than the first motorcycle, or the first ATV, or the first snowmobile. Not bad considering I made it in my shed.