Duplicity, senility

And you can decide which is which:

Item the first: Yesterday Hong Kong held its probable last-ever commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Amazingly, it was covered by the Chinese media. Oh, of course they reported that it was a celebration of the end of British colonialism, but they did cover it...

Item the second: Strom Thurmond, 3rd in line to the presidency, wrote the foreword to a book which says that all of recent American technology was adapted from the crashed Roswell UFO. The author, who evidently participated in this program while in the military, was an aide to Thurmond, now chair of the armed services committee, so he must be in on it too. Which explains the hair.

The truth is out there.

Paula Jones's lawyer is running for Virginia attorney general, which I'd never have known if I just read the NY Times. He recently got into trouble when one of his former clients reported (or had a tape of? I've already forgotten) him suggesting she pose for Playboy. He excused himself by saying that it was after he'd had a couple of drinks. So that's ok then.

Frank Rich in today's column says that the AMA's sudden switch to support of the bill banning late-term abortions is not without precedent. In 1964 the AMA opposed putting warning labels on cigarettes, trying to get Southern congresscritters to support its opposition to the establishment of Medicare.

After Palestine said that selling land to Jews now carries the death penalty, there was a lot of coverage of the 2 people assassinated, but none of the fact that 12 people have so far been arrested under this law. Which Palestine just extended to cover all Palestinians living in Israel, marking the first time, I believe, it has tried to claim sovereignty over the whole area of Israel.

Speaking of enlightened acts, Israel just sentenced a right-wing Jew under the Prevention of Terrorism Act for having put a curse on Rabin a month before the assassination. It was news to me that Jews even had curses, just like gypsies. Anyone care to speculate on what a Jewish curse would be like?

Just saw the Clinton-Blair summit on tv. I had to turn the "smarm" knob way down.

Blair's "spiritual mentor" at public school turns out to have been a major pedophile.

Your fact of the day: the phrase Peeping Tom comes from the one guy in Coventry who peeped at Lady Godiva. Which makes the term several hundred years old. I just read this in a 1849 book.

Tony Blair may not be reversing any of the disastrous policies of the Thatcher-Major years, but he is setting up a review of the cases of the 307 soldiers executed during World War I for cowardice.

A NY Times story on the many executions in Texas says that the last meal cannot include liquor, cigarettes or bubble gum, as these are against the rules. And no dirt either. Evidently someone once asked. He ate yogurt instead.

Everyone has noticed that the new dictator of Zaire has banned political parties and demonstrations, but I haven't seen much coverage of the Taliban-style decrees banning women from wearing pants and short skirts.

The commerce secretary is trying to get fast-track authority from Congress to add Chile to NAFTA. To do it, he's willing to drop those pesky labor and environmental provisions. By the way, there was supposed to be a report on the environmental impact of the existing NAFTA by now, but Mexico wanted a veto.

A company has denied lead-free, environmentally-friendly bullets. Now when you dump that corpse in the river, you won't be poisoning the water supply. Not with lead, anyway.

The former East German spy chief Markus Wolf, who the government keeps trying to put in jail, is about to publish his memoirs. First revelation: the US offered him $1 million to come on over in 1990. Just like '45 all over again.

Someone copyrighted the phrase "Summer of Love."

Why can't a woman be more like a gay man?

That air force pilot was discussed on Politically Incorrect tonight. Harvey Fierstein says that while she's being court-martialled for lying, gay men are supposed to. So she'd have been ok if she slept with a married woman, but not a married man.

Also, Reagan's son Michael insisted that Bill Clinton's friends all die of gangland-style killings, but he's not drawing any conclusions.

Why can't a woman be more like a man?

Does anyone else think that the court martial of the woman B-52 pilot is actually an elaborate practical joke? I mean, I thought it was amusing that they were charging an unmarried woman with adultery, but today's NY Times says that another part of the charge is conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

Speaking of conduct unbecoming, there's a new biography out of Viscount Melbourne, the British prime minister 1834-41. Evidently he beat up his wife and his mistresses pretty regularly, but really got off on whipping children. He encouraged his friends and relatives to leave their children with him so he could "educate" them. He actually had discussions with young Queen Victoria about this. She thought that the practice of beating school boys was degrading, while he said that Eton hadn't flogged him enough. This was before the birth of Victoria's children, so she may have changed her mind later. Edward could probably have benefited from a good paddling in his 50s.

Speaking of mad, bad and dangerous to know (actually originally said about Lord Byron, whose mistress Melbourne's wife had once been--he beat her up too--and who wrote the first vampire literature in the English language)(ok, it's not a great segue, but it's still a segue), Romania has lately taken up Vlad Draculya as a national hero and is quite pissed off at all the fuss over the 100th anniversary of Bram Stoker's little book.

Speaking of not treating your citizens very well at all, it seems that 5,000 Russian soldiers are now dying each year. 1,000 are suicides, the rest are, well, hazing. Really really bad hazing.

And speaking of soldiers behaving badly, I trust you are all following the newly-released British intercepts of German radio messages in 1941, indicating that it was not the SS but ordinary German police (well, occupation police, but still police) who killed most of the Jews in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, starting at the very beginning of the invasion of Russia. This could bring those Holocaust figures up another million.

Bribery made easy

Singapore sentenced a 16-year old to 2 yrs for the crime of possessing a pack of cigarettes. Think all those Southerners who were so enamored of caning are paying attention?

Just what beautiful downtown Ashkhabad (the capital of Turkmenistan, but of course you all knew that) needed: a 240-foot tower topped by a 40-foot revolving statue of President Niyazev. Yup, I knew that skyline needed something.

A followup to my e-mail of December 3:

Secondly, a heart-warming story from the NY Times: a 14-year old girl sets fire to her house after years of physical and sexual abuse such that one could only be sorry she hadn't taken out more of her family. Her father has never visited her in jail but did send a picture of the burned-out house on her birthday. Naturally, the state of Indiana put her in a maximum-security prison ($25,000 a year) instead of the juvenile treatment center ($82k) the judge begged the state to put her in. You're waiting for the punchline, well I've got two: she has found a new mom in the joint, or "the closest thing to a mom I ever had" in another murderer, and second, she has been ordered not to talk about being abused in group therapy sessions because her fellow inmates in the special-needs unit are upset by her stories, since they all abused or killed their children.

The Indiana Court of Appeals now says incarcerating her with adults violates the state Constitution.

The British Parliament is shy 2 members, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness, elected for Sinn Fein from Ulster. They can't take an oath of loyalty to the Queen, so they can't take their seats. On a historical note, the first woman elected to Parliament was also a Sinn Feiner, and therefore was not technically the first woman MP, who was another damn foreigner, Nancy Astor. I don't know why they couldn't just take the oath with their fingers crossed; after all, Labour MP Tony Banks did...

I don't expect much from Tony Blair, although if Scotland gets its own Parliament again it may be worth it. I especially don't expect much on the civil rights front, given that the new Home Secretary Jack Straw is as rabid as the last one, about whom more anon, in the same way that Janet Reno is a worse Attorney General than whoever held that job under Bush (I know she's worse since I can't remember his name). But there might be some improvement on immigration. Amazingly, the Tories were sending 97% of Algerian asylum-seekers back. One just got killed, so that's been suspended. And everyone's favorite sob story, a Nepalese boy brought into Britain by a millionaire whose life was saved in the Himalayas by the boy's father, who died a bit later, only to be ordered out of the country years later by Michael Howard, has also been reversed.

But my favorite soap opera is the Tory leadership fight. The front-runner to replace Major was Michael Portillo, who lost a safe seat at the general election (to one of the 2 new gay MPs). The new front-runner Michael Heseltine withdrew from his hospital bed when his heart acted up again. The current front-runner may be William Hague, who is 36. The theory is that he may be too young now, but by the time his party has any chance at all of regaining power, he should be 45 or so. Or it may be Michael Howard, the ex-Home Sec. Neither is close to electable, so I'd be happy with either. Howard right now is facing charges that he misled Parliament about the circumstances in which he fired the head of the prison service a couple of years back. This used to be a serious matter when there were still standards in British public life, before sleaze or sex scandals became the Tory equivalent of a bar mitzvah, like a statutory rape charge is for a Kennedy. The charge is coming from the former Prison Minister Anne Widdecombe, so Howard's people are responding with a really offensive sexist smear campaign, suggesting that the fired guy wooed Widdecombe over to his side by sending her chocolate and flowers, the inference being that a 49-year old spinster (her term) is so starved for affection....

Finally, a quote from Jonathan Swift: "The bulk of mankind is as well qualified for flying as for thinking."

Paper or plastic: In Afghanistan, only the latter is now an option. See, the recycled paper in paper bags may be recycled from the Koran...

John Redwood, the right-wing candidate for next leader of the Tory party, announced his candidacy in a press conference at the Goring Hotel.

A disappointing headline

The story "Heroin found hidden in elephant" turned out to be about a wooden elephant.

I've watched way too much of the BBC coverage of the British elections this week. I know this because right now I can't get Labour's crappy pop song theme music "Things can only get better" out of my head. It's only marginally less annoying than Clinton's "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow."

Last night I woke up from a dream that inspired a great joke I was going to pass on to you all today when I finally got up. As I recall it went like this: "Gpiyrb sadter3t dafsgertgre dzxm ewrerdf sd3hjgv." Ha ha!

An article in today's NY Times says an unnoticed provision of the Welfare Act allows AFDC money to go to, get this, for-profit orphanages. There is one chain of these started by the founder of Jiffy Lube. Any takers on coming up with a suitable joke based on that fact?

"Bob Dole is lending Newt Gingrich the $300,000 to pay off his ethics fine. You know, most Republicans talk about taking money from the sick and old -- but only Newt actually does something about it."
-Bill Maher on "Politically Incorrect"

Happy 60th Saddam. What the wacky dictator really wants, though, is a clone. Evidently he got really excited by the sheep thing.

Does anyone know anything about Pat Robertson's finances? There was a story that a few years ago his tax-exempt organization sent planes to Zaire allegedly for humanitarian aid but actually to work in his diamond mines there. Diamond mines?

Japan finally sent compensation for the Indonesian "comfort women," but the Indonesian government decided to keep it instead of handing it out. They say they'll use it for old folks' homes and the like.

A Chinese amusement park called Flying Dragon World Park, tried to set the world record for locking people in a room with thousands of poisonous snakes. 100 days. The Guiness World Book of Records says it no longer keeps those sorts of records (marathons). Boy, if you were to imagine what a Chinese amusement park would be like, that's about what you'd come up with, right? Now what would North Korea's be like?

Montana passes a law to allow chemical castration of rapists and incestists (or whatever the noun is). Yeah, there just aren't enough pissed-off guys in Montana, are there?

Speaking of which, there was a segment on the Daily Show today about a group called NORM (Norm!) which stands for something something Regaining Manhood. These are people who don't like the fact that they were circumcised, and are determined to recreate their foreskin. It involves a lot of pulling and stuff I don't think any of us wish to know about. Sorry I brought it...up.

Stupid virtual pet tricks

Silliest Web idea of the week: a site in which a virtual monkey typing on a virtual keyboard to try to reproduce Hamlet's solloloquy.

Evidence of the existence of God: the vacation home of the president of RJ Reynolds was burned down due to a discarded cigarette.

Two items from the with-Democrats-like-Clinton-who-needs-a-Republican-Party-anyway file:

1) Some Cuban jazz musician who's evidently famous is turned down for citizenship under the existing Cold War rules of the INS because he joined the Communist party in order to effectuate his defection.

2) Social Security Admin ordered its administrative judges to ignore all Federal court precedents (below the level of the Supreme Court) and enforce only agency policies.

A judge in San Diego reduced a murder conviction to manslaughter, saying that the deceased, a neighborhood bully, was a "jerk" who got what was coming to him. Boy, that judge! What a jerk, huh?

A man in Merced tried to rob two banks by pointing his finger at the teller, you know, in the shape of a gun.

Also: a British Royal Marine survives his court martial. He was on a stakeout of a car-smuggling operation in Hong Kong, and shot at a rat.

Russia's press is now experiencing Western style freedoms, where censorship is by corporations linked to the state, rather than by the state. Izvestia, which accused PM Chernomyrdin of making billions off his connection with the gas industry, which he used to run, found itself bought up by an oil company, which plans to make a few changes...

Irony

Responding to the German court decision that Iranian officials ordered assassinations of Kurdish leaders in Berlin, demonstrators in Teheran have been chanting, "Death to Zionist Germany".

Gladstone & Disraeli revisited

Ok, background: you will remember the man in the chicken suit who followed Bush around when he was stalling on debates. The Tories have stolen the idea. As it turns out, the guy hired for the job isn't even a Tory himself. Read this one to the end, it just keeps getting weirder.

UK News Electronic Telegraph Friday 4 April 1997

Cries of foul over headless chicken
By Robert Shrimsley, Jon Hibbs and Rachel Sylvester

THE Tory chicken had the stuffing knocked out of it yesterday when a teenage girl tore off its head in Scotland.

Tories said the young woman who decapitated their creature was a "Labour thug" who "set upon our brave chicken to stop him asking difficult questions".

The chicken was waiting in Port Street, Stirling, to tackle Tony Blair on devolution and his refusal to join a television debate with John Major. A Tory activist said Labour supporters surrounded the bird, shouting abuse at it. Suddenly, the girl burst out of the crowd, grabbed its head and ran off down the street to loud cheers.

Fortunately for Noel Flanagan, the man in the chicken suit, the head was recovered in one piece by Scottish police. In the words of one Tory press spokesman: "The chicken goes on."

Police refused to comment on the incident but it is understood that the offender was released with only a telling off. Labour denied that any of its workers was responsible for the incident.

A spokesman for Mr Blair said the chicken had been invited to dinner but had flown back to London.

Mr Flanagan, hired to highlight Tory claims that Mr Blair was running away from a television debate, had flown to Stirling. He shared the shuttle with George Robertson, the shadow Scottish secretary.

The chicken was to follow the Labour leader, who was campaigning in the marginal Tory seat held by Michael Forsyth, the Scottish Secretary. However, his efforts to henpeck Mr Blair were hampered by a man from the Scottish Daily Mirror dressed as Freddy the Fox, who blocked his path during a 15-minute walkabout.

As Mr Blair approached, the chicken was seen to stumble and was pushed to the back of the crowd surrounding the Labour leader, where it waved a placard before skulking off. A jubilant Freddy observed: "I had him for dinner. I stopped him getting anywhere near Tony. Tony shook my hand and thanked me for it."

However, Mr Blair's guardian refused to identify himself, saying: "The whole thing is embarrassing enough as it is." The incident came at the end of a traumatic day for the Tory chicken. Earlier, he got into a nasty fight with a rival chicken with a detachable head, sent by the Mirror newspaper, as he strutted across College Green in Westminster.

He was also pursued across London by another fox, two teddy bears and a plastic rhinoceros.

The scuffle with the Mirror chicken, carrying its head under its wing, came as he returned to Conservative Central Office. The two birds war-danced around Smith Square "pecking at each other very aggressively", according to one witness. As the confrontation turned nasty one of the Tory media minders crossed the road to separate the two.

Alex Aiken, the Conservative head of regional press, wrestled the Mirror's chicken to the ground and told his own bird to return to the Central Office coop.

But the Mirror chicken was furious. "He threw me against a wall and took my head off," he said. The Tory minder had "mad eyes" and was "quite burly", he added.

The bespectacled Mr Aiken, who is actually far from burly, denied excessive violence, saying: "It was a Labour stooge chicken."

John Major defended the stunt, saying: "We are just attempting to egg Mr Blair into a debate."

After the fracas, Mr Flanagan flew straight to Scotland, disappointing two men in teddy bear suits who said they were the Teddy Bears' Alliance. They camped outside the Labour launch to challenge the Tory chicken to a debate.

The chicken also missed the man in a huge grey plastic rhino outfit who greeted Mr Blair outside a west London shopping centre.

Rhino man refused to give his identity but said he wanted to protest at the way "the level of debate in the political campaign seems to have become ludicrously cheap with a lot of people dressing up as animals".

An article in Slate suggests that Clinton's re-election strategy of spending huge amounts of money, garnered from anywhere, for large media buys, was advocated by Dick Morris partly because he was getting a percentage of the money so spent.

Twofer

The Tory holding the safest Tory seat in Scotland resigns his seat after a Tory twofer, committing adultery with a woman he met in rehab. Last year he lost his government job when he threatened a road protester with a pickaxe. How we'll miss the Tories.

Especially since Tony Blair's favorite, excuse me, favourite, Dr. Who is Jon Pertwee. I mean really.