Paul Boutin

Alert masthead readers (who knew they existed?) have caught on that I’m now an official Slate contributor, named in the same breath as Mickey Kaus and Christopher Hitchens on the staff page. I feel a bit like Jethro Bodine moving into Beverly Hills. After publishing forty articles for Slate in the past year and a half, I’ve got a new contract to appear three times a month. Between that, Wired, and the occasional piece for MSN or Cargo, I’ve got plenty of work to do. Hence the long silences here. Eh, go read BoingBoing instead.

No no, it’s not Scott McClellan. The Air Force Research laboratory’s prototype Active Denial System, built by Raytheon, is a non-lethal weapon that fires a beam of millimeter-wavelength radiation, somewhere between infrared light and microwaves. According to a report from the Sacramento Bee:

No one has withstood the pain it produces for more than three seconds. People who volunteered to stand in front of the directed energy beam say they felt as if they were on fire. When they stepped aside, the pain disappeared instantly.

As the Bee notes, it sounds like a great interrogation tool. Military spokespeople are trying to downplay that possibility and point out its potential for dispersing riots - an option somewhere between a bullhorn and a bullet, as one said.

Car and Driver, the first magazine I ever wanted to write for back in the 70s, offers wisecracking praise from John Pearley Huffman for Beemer’s new 6-series convertible. Or, as Huffman calls it, “the best damn Camaro $78,295 can buy.”

Mickey Kaus found it: A transcript of Reagan’s TV spot for Barry Goldwater’s campaign from 1964.