"It’s as safe as Dawn dishwashing liquid.” That’s what Jamie Griffin says the BP man told her about the smelly, rainbow-streaked gunk coating the floor of the “floating hotel” where Griffin was feeding hundreds of cleanup workers during the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, the workers were tracking the gunk inside on their boots. Griffin, as chief cook and maid, was trying to clean it. But even boiling water didn’t work.

“The BP representative said, ‘Jamie, just mop it like you’d mop any other dirty floor,’” Griffin recalls in her Louisiana drawl.

WEST, TEXAS—Long before a seismic explosion at the local fertilizer plant leveled dozens of homes and killed 14 people, including nine first responders, many residents of this small traditional Czech community felt as if they were living next to a ticking time bomb.

“Everybody has thought about it for years,” says Gary Horton, who lost his home in last week’s blast. “It’s always been a possibility. We talked about people making bombs in Oklahoma City, but there was a big bomb right across the street. It don’t take nothin’ but a spark.”

The mosque on Kotrova Street in the capital of Dagestan is abuzz with passionate discussions. Here in the northern Caucasus, Muslim revolutionaries are fighting to break away from Russia and create a Salafi “emirate” akin to the caliphate yearned for by Al Qaeda. So people are used to talk about “terrorism.” But they are not used to hearing it linked to words like “Boston” and “marathon.” And they are trying to square what they’re hearing now with their memories of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the elder of the two brothers at the center of the atrocity in the United States, who was killed last Friday in a Boston suburb.

The men at the mosque on Kotrova Street saw a lot of Tsarnaev last summer and so, it appears, did the local security forces. The FSB, the successor to the KGB, allegedly even had a case file on him, according to one well-placed security source. Tamerlan Tsarnaev was dossier 1713. He was allegedly in the constant company of another Salafist, later killed, whom the FSB believed to have ties to the rebels in Caucasus. The Russian and Dagestani cops were allegedly “watching him closely for five months and three weeks,” according to this source. (The Russians had asked the FBI to take a close look at Tsarnaev in 2011, but the FBI had found nothing on him that they thought worth pursuing.)

It was easy amid the dramatic video of flash bangs and gunshots to forget the sweet little face of 8-year-old Martin Richard.

I'm embarrassed to say I did.

“Where does 4/20 actually come from?” I ask Washington state’s pot czar, Mark Kleiman, over dinner recently.

“To be honest, I’m not sure,” he says, unashamed. “There’s some story from California, but I don’t know the specific details.” Bright, clever, and highly equipped for his new position as head of the state’s pot legalization program, I’m surprised to hear it. If the pot czar himself doesn’t know the story behind marijuana’s holy day, who does?

The naming of two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing and the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was captured alive last night, have made the nightmare scenario for many American Muslims come true. The Tsarnaev brothers will forever be the poster children for a particularly American fear, reflected in everything from blockbuster films to popular fiction: that the English-speaking, dark-haired young men with unpronounceable names, who wear baseball caps, win scholarships, and garner wrestling trophies, are also the ones who could blow you up.

 News media are already marking the Boston bombings as a turning point, the moment when homegrown jihadists truly came into the open and declared their desire to destroy America from within. And unlike the spectacular plans for bringing down an airliner over Detroit or leaving a car bomb in Times Square, the weapons of this jihadist war require only trips to a hardware store and a sporting goods shop. “We give him a green card and he comes to hate America,” said Fox News’s Megyn Kelly on Friday.

While most of us were sound asleep, Andrew “You can call me Kitz” Kitzenberg took to Twitter to chronicle the most intensely watched news event in the world—all from his Massachusetts home.

12:55 a.m. Shoot out outside my room in Watertown. 62 Laurel st.

First off—who are these young men? 

From what I’ve been able to gather about the Tsarnaev brothers, only one direct link to Chechnya has emerged. Anzor Tsarnaev, their father—who claims to have spoken with one of his sons the day after the Marathon attacks—lives in Makhachkala, Dagestan, a small region of the Russian Federation that borders Chechnya on the Black Sea. The father has said that his elder son, Tamerlan, now dead, visited “relatives” in Chechnya last year. (U.S. officials report that Tamerlan flew to Moscow in January, 2012, and returned to the U.S. six months later.)

The young men’s father is said to be an ethnic Chechen, but born and raised in Kyrgyzstan—a former Soviet republic in Central Asia. (On Red Army Day in the winter of 1944, Stalin deported hundreds of thousands Chechens from their homeland—many died, but many who survived the journey resettled in Central Asia.) The Tsarnaevs' mother, who does not have a traditional Chechen first name, is said to be from Dagestan.  Tamerlan, the older brother, was reportedly born in Dagestan, while his younger brother, Dzhokhar, was born in 1993—in Kyrgyzstan. So it would seem—at this early point—that their ties to Chechnya were tenuous. It remains to be seen, if in fact Tamerlan Tsarnaev visited Chechnya last year, what he did during his time there.

As information trickles out about the two brothers named primary suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, some in the media are starting to observe that 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed Thursday night in a chaotic shootout with police, may be named after one of history’s most ferocious conquerors.

Amir Temur, also known as Tamerlane, was a Central Asian ruler and warlord who lived in the 14th and 15th centuries. Scholars estimate that his military campaigns throughout Central Asia, Africa, Europe, and the modern Middle East killed about 17 million people, or 5 percent of the world’s population at the time.

The killing of one suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings and the ongoing hunt for another have focused attention on the motivations and background of the suspects themselves. The revelation that the brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev are of ethnic Chechen origin has led commentators to look to culture and history for clues about the sources of this week’s attack.

This angle is misguided, at least at this stage of the investigation and still-ongoing manhunt. In fact, any “Chechnya angle” to the story is overshadowed by the American one. The Tsarnaevs look much more like other homegrown terrorists—animal-rights extremists, white supremacists, anarchists, and lone-wolf ideologues—than like religious warriors fighting on a faraway and exotic frontier.