He’s got big ones

No Elephant Sex, Please, We’re British: the Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire has fired a herd of African elephants who have become a little too, shall we say, frisky. Where will they go where their sexual antics will be tolerated? France, of course. The Guardian does not say precisely what the elephants have been doing--I assumed the obvious until the last sentence: “workers involved with the elephants will be offered alternative positions at Longleat Safari Park.”

A British radio station held a contest offering tickets to a concert by a former Spice Girl to whoever could sit on dry ice the longest. Three of the contestants missed the festival because they spent 8 to 10 weeks in hospital with severe ass injuries (their nerves froze first so they didn’t realize there was a problem; also, their brains were very very small).

The Senate has quietly struck out of the budget funding for John Poindexter’s Big Brother program and the registration of enemy aliens. Also dead, Bush’s idea of letting states limit trips to the ER on Medicaid. On the other side, Bush plans to let federal housing money be used to build places of worship, ‘cuz Jesus needs a place to live too, I guess.

I saw on the BBC news, but not I think anywhere else, that this week the Israeli Supreme Court approved the use of human shields by the military.

An interesting piece on the op-ed pages of Saturday’s NY Times on the Kennedy administration’s efforts to impose inspections of the nuclear facilities of Israel, which fooled inspectors every time. Although the article doesn’t say it, Israel’s tactics were more like North Korea’s, demanding throughout the 1960s ever-escalating bribes in terms of aid & military hardware in exchange for not building nukes, which it did anyway.

With the shortage of oil imports due to Venezuela’s little local difficulties, the US has been greatly increasing its oil imports from, would you believe, Iraq.

I haven’t had the time to pay as much attention as I’d like to the Israeli elections, which sound like fun. The Likud defense minister went on walk-about yesterday while his handlers went ahead of him calling out “He’s got big ones, he’s got big ones,” meaning exactly what you think it means. Today, the secular party held a rally--today being the sabbath. A prominent Orthodox rabbi, a rabbi mind you, said that he hoped the party’s leader would burn to a cinder--said that about a man who survived Nazi concentration camps.