Spying Balloons as Artistic Muse Some stories strike a chord with readers. And these days it is easy to share your thoughts on most of the things we publish here on The New York Times Web site. Most of that feedback comes in the form of comments - the letters to the editor of the modern era. But one story out of Afghanistan published last week inspired a different kind of tribute. It started with a story by Graham Bowley, who wrote about spy dirigibles, white surveillance balloons, called aerostats by the military, which have become constant features in the skies over Kabul and Kandahar, and anywhere else American troops are concentrated or interested in. Mr. Bowley writes: The unblinking eye in the sky. Locals nervously avoid its line of sight. But they know they are always under watch. Mr. Bowley quotes Rahmat Shah, 28, a secondhand car seller: "I notice it all the time," he said. And that nervousness was mixed with Aghans" brooding pronouncements about foreign surveillance they fear will never end even after the American forces withdraw. They have also created names for the balloons. In Kandahar, they call them "frogs" and in Helmand Province they call them "milk fish" because of their fins and milky color. Enter Sarah Loffler, a reader who is a graphic designer who works for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in the La Jolla section of San Diego. Ms. Loffler said, in an e-mail: I read the story, put the paper down, and found a block of wood to express in paint the feeling of what I had just read. I started with a red, white and blue sky, because that of course is the backdrop for these "milk fish." I thought about how lovely the words milk fish sound, and that it took a creative, artistic sensibility to come up with such a name for such hideous, intrusive objects. I mean, they look like floating, rotund missiles! I think my intention was to capture the whimsy of the words milk fish and crowd the ominous sky with them. Here is Ms. Loffler's artistic rendition: For comparison, here is the image that ran with the story: In an e-mail to Mr. Bowley, Ms. Loffler said she felt compelled to paint after reading the article. "I imagined the feeling of looking up into the sky - a place where I often look for hope, for respite, for peace, just as they must - and seeing an Orwellian blimp hovering over me, watching me," she said. "To cope with this presence, perhaps to make them more palatable since they have no power to remove them, the people creatively call them "milk fish.""