Wild Houses

At Fort Polk, La., the Pentagon has created elaborate, Hollywood-like sets of buildings and homes but representing village scenes in Iraq and Afghanistan under realistic conditions of war, to train soldiers preparing for deployment. Among the fine details (according to a January Harper's magazine report): hiring amputees and using fake blood to simulate horrific injuries; piping in the scent of vomit and other emblems of battlefield chaos; bringing in U.S.-residing Iraqi natives to heckle soldiers in Arabic; conducting press briefings before hostile reporters; and at one venue, fighting in modern city blocks of buildings, presumably for guerilla wars of the future. A 75-unit apartment has house opened in Seattle, funded by grants from the local, state and federal governments, as free housing for what the city considers its most incorrigible drunks, on the theory that keeping an eye on them would be less costly than leaving them free to cause mischief and overuse emergency rooms. Australia's Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, has announced that terrorist suspects being held under house arrest would routinely be sent to anger management classes, to help them address their alienation. Obsessed executi have always taken business home at night, but increasingly they take it into the bathroom, with laptop computers, high-speed connections, flat-panel televisions and speaker phones, according to a Wall Street Journal report. (Said one, "I'm beside myself when I can't get my e-mails.") However, there are problems, e.g., "sound-chamber" sound (the hollow voice created by typical bathroom acoustics usually gives away one's location) and the "BlackBerry dunk" (with one Houston repair shop saying it gets a half-dozen jobs a day of portable devices accidentally dropped into the sink or tub, "or worse").