It should be noted that the Ulster Loyalist shot to death in his cell yesterday, a man who rejoiced in the name King Rat, was in the Maze Prison, the same one from which a Nat escaped earlier this month dressed in women's clothes. Security, anyone?

Sentence of the day, From the Guardian: "The Prince of Wales would also probably not have met the Spice Girls in public had a sense of crisis not prevailed."

Sloppy headline of the week: "Brazil man kills wife for meager Christmas meal."

Hawaii's domestic partners law, 4 months old, is a miserable failure, with only 296 couples signed up. And not all of those are gay, since while it doesn't apply to hetero couples, it does apply to siblings, widows & adult children, etc. Kinky.

A Republican Xmas story: Michigan state Rep. Jack Horton (R-1950s) says that mothers shouldn't work, so he fires an employee of seven years who has just adopted. He says he's following his principles, which is not a word usually applied to misogyny. Naturally, he is a supporter of forcing mothers on welfare to work 20 hours a week.

Clinton has issued his annual pardons, which do not amazingly enough include anyone on his staff or immediate family, but do include some guy who was court-martialed in 1947 for stealing 4 pounds of butter, and someone who stole a bunch of spark plugs and is thankful that Clinton has restored his civil rights: he can now be a gun-owner again.

Finally, a cheery holiday thought: Russia has ended its pledge of no first use of nuclear weapons.

In the past 5 years, while the homicide rate in the US has dropped 22%, that on Indian reservations has increased 87%. Does anyone know why? A recent spill of classified info shows that it is possible for governments to keep secrets for long periods of time, always a valuable reminder:

JFK was, as has been generally believed, ordering a withdrawal of troops from Vietnam before he died. And the US developed and deployed baby nukes, 1 kiloton devices designed for mining harbors and such, carried by parachutists and divers. Also the "Davy Crockett" nuclear bazooka. If you're doing any last-minute shopping.... Also, the head of the KGB 1961-67 says that the plot that deposed Khruschev was only bloodless because he refused Brezhnev's request that he assassinate Mr. K. Also, a couple of people from State under Carter, including Richard Holbrooke, have a piece in today's NY Times to the effect that Kim Dae Jung was expected to be executed in 1980, but that South Korea was waiting until before Reagan's inauguration, figuring that Reagan would let them get away with what Carter wouldn't. So Holbrooke contacted RR's nominee to head NSC, Richard Allen, and had him contact Seoul. Also, the CIA crippled Taiwan's secret nuclear program with a spy who defected to the US in 1987, taking all the papers with him. I'd say we need juries second-guessing tv casting decisions like we need pregnant "vixens". The story is so silly that no one's complaining about the 1st Amendment aspect. Bosnian Serb elections are in and the fascist wins over the fascist.

The holiday season is upon us and that can mean only one thing: secret executions in Japan. Probably tomorrow, a whole bunch of people will be taken out of their cells and hanged. Didn't know that Japan had the death penalty, did you? That's cause it's all done in secret. Even the executees don't know who they are yet, and certainly not their lawyers, cause it's a secret until they are, as I said, taken out of their cells and hanged. Whatever happened to a lump of coal in a stocking?

The shortest president in American history was James Madison, 5'4" and under 100 pounds.

More in my continuing coverage of sterilization of the retarded: Australia is still doing it, although it's illegal now.

Fun fact of the day: the moon is 15,654,023,458 inches from the earth, give or take an inch. A very expensive project just bounced a laser off the moon, because you really need to have that distance accurate to within an inch, just like you can never have too many digits in pi.

Latest black conspiracy theory: Ron Brown was assassinated. Oh I know his plane crashed, but evidently he was shot to death as well, either before or after the crash. Alan Keyes and Congresscritter Maxine Waters want an investigation.

Did the New York Times really think that the predominance in public suggestions that the new White House dog be named "Fudge" was because of his coloring? One former White House aide, I forget who, wrote a piece in the Times last week suggesting that the dog should watch its back, given what happens to the unconditionally loyal in this administration. Last month there was a big fuss in Britain over the disappearance of the Downing St. cat Humphrey (named after Sir Humphrey Appleby of the tv series Yes Minister), whose kidney ailments have made him an embarrassment, shall we say. There were suggestions that he was put down because Cherie Blair hates cats. It turns out that this was a lie put out by the Conservative Party Central Office. And some cable company just hired 3 strippers to surprise Tory leader William Hague, who is getting married tomorrow. Humphrey's exile should be a lesson to Socks and Buddy: don't pee on anything, or you may "disappear." After all, you don't see Warren Christopher around anymore.

Sometimes I get a wild urge to relieve my bladder over it, splattingly on the ant-like crowds

Alan Clark, the famous British politician and adulterer, is suing the Evening Standard for satirical diary entries in his style, saying it detracts from his reputation as a man of letters. Here is an excerpt from his real diaries:

"I travelled down by train, and a plump young lady came into my compartment at Waterloo. She was not wearing a bra, and her delightful globes bounced prominently ... I gave her a huge grin; I couldn't help it." (18/2/84)

"Palace Hotel, Helsinki, Saturday, 27 September: God knows what's going to happen tomorrow. A kind of 'getting to know you' day has been laid on, with fishing on the lakes, drinking schnapps and (I don't like the sound of this at all) a sauna. Doesn't everybody wander about sweating, but naked?

"But I don't in the least bit mind letting girls see my penis. I suppose it's because I fear - for quite extraneous physical reasons - becoming lightly, or indeed heavily, tumescent and attracting the attention of other men."

"Department of Employment, Thursday June 23, 1983: there is a tiny balcon, a gutter really, with a very low parapet, below knee height. Certain death on the Victoria Street pavement eight floors below. Sometimes I get a wild urge to relieve my bladder over it, splattingly on the ant-like crowds."

"British Embassy, Sofia, Wednesday April 13, 1988: far too many people seem to know that today is my birthday, which of course I don't like at all as it makes it more difficult to ignore the fact that I am 60. I refuse to be 60. 'Mirror, mirror on the wall ...' etc. And the Bulgarians are threatening to sing Happy Birthday."

The bit about the dead resumé-enhancing ambassador I most enjoy is that he used his "military record" to overcome Republican objections to his being completely unqualified to be ambassador to Switzerland, and to evidently thinking that Switz. was a NATO ally. Does anyone else remember Reagan lying about his non-existent war record, or Dan Quayle claiming to be a "Vietnam era veteran"?

In 2350 BC, the great civilizations of Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia all collapsed at once. The cause seems to have been massive meteor strikes. They'll be back in 3000 A.D. Keep watching the skies.

Emissaries of the Taliban spent the week in Texas, signing a $3 billion deal with Unocal to build a pipeline across Afghanistan, backed by the US government.

This week, the day before Gerry Adams met Tony Blair at No. 10, an IRA prisoner escaped. This from the Sunday Times:

Asked to explain how a man dressed in a badly fitting wig, inexpertly applied make-up and a home-made frock managed to walk out of a maximum security jail in Northern Ireland, a source close to the governor said: "Well it's hardly our fault. I mean we have Mo Mowlam in and out of here all the time."

That Israeli Mossad official who made up his Syrian source used to teach at the Mossad spy school--a course on "The Lie as Art."

The cold war is over. Germany will sooner or later move its capital to Berlin, where the government always used to make its best decisions. And Kazakhstan just this week moved its capital to Akmola. Mosquitos in the summer, -40 degrees in the winter, hundreds of people dying of cold each year because the gas and power supply is less than reliable.

Two records in Britain: their oldest person just died at 114, which means she was 18 when Queen Victoria died. She is not the oldest person ever to live in Britain, if you count Thomas Parr, who died in 1635 at the age of 152. Well, that's what it says in those ads for Parr's Life Pills I keep seeing in newspapers from the 1840s.

And someone set the traffic ticket record, for speeding at 154 MPH. An Aston Martin, if you're wondering.

We'll see if I'm right, but this may be the next Christian right-wing scandal after gays in Disneyland and Ellen DeGeneres: the Mass. Supreme Court has ruled that a divorced father who has recently found god may not teach his children about it, and certainly may not take them to his church where they are likely to be told that non-Christians like their mother, an Orthodox Jew, are going to burn in hell.

The Supreme Court just made an important decision on double jeopardy. The previous standard, since 1989, states that civil penalties can only be assessed separately from criminal ones if the amount involved is to compensate the government for injury caused, and not if they are so high as to constitute an actual punishment. Which seems reasonable. This has been reversed, 9-0 yet, which means that, what, 4 or 5 people must have changed their minds since 1989. The definition of whether a fine is civil rather than criminal is--whatever Congress says it is when it enacts the fine.

Now I'll repeat my question of last week since nobody answered it: SINCE WHEN DO WE HAVE TRIAL IN ABSENTIA IN THIS COUNTRY?

First sentence of a book review in the American Historical Review: "The study of ancient Greek music is a curious one, in that we have little idea how it sounded."

Another academic book for everyone on your xmas list: “A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance”. 20 bucks at finer bookstore everywhere. 372 pages, believe it or not.

You might check out the web site of the Museum of Bad Art.

The sooner they get Yeltsin out of office and into his own Pizza Hut contract, the better. The amazing thing is that only a day or two after his presumably drunken offer to cut nuclear warheads by one-third was disavowed by his handlers, his new offer to cut his ground and naval forces by 40% was actually reported as a serious news story.

No mention yet in American papers of Arafat's promise of a couple of days ago to declare independence in 1999 and NetanYAHOOOOO's threat to send in the troops.

Incidentally, the coverage of the Israeli Cabinet's fake commitment to withdraw an unspecified number of troops from an unspecified section of the West Bank at an unspecified date in the future got coverage almost as uncynical as Yeltsin's promises have been getting. If I were the Serbs or Saddam Hussein, I'd be issuing press releases during Free Ride Week.

As Nazi looted gold talks continue, little mention is being made of gypsies. A disproportionate amount of gold was taken from them, since gypsies are traditionally not great believers in bank accounts. Some of that gold was sent by the Catholics who ran camps in Croatia, where 28,000 gypsies were killed, to the Vatican.

There is a great battle going on as to who is the current Emperor of France, the inheritor of Napoleon's title (actually, Prince, but what the hell). The late Prince Louis Napoleon disinherited his son for marrying a commoner, and without permission yet. So lawyers for the grandson, age 11, are fighting it out with the disinherited Prince Charles. Say what you will, it's still probably of greater significance than the debate over whether Janet Reno should have appointed a special prosecutor over the burning question of which telephone Al Gore used.

In Maryland, lawyers are soliciting business by mail from people who are wanted by the police, but who do not necessarily know until then that they are wanted by the police.

Back to Israel: we'll see how this plays out, since Israeli censorship is pretty good at keeping information from the US as well as its own citizens, but it seems that last year a senior Mossad official almost started a war with Syria. For years he had used a fake Syrian source (or possibly a real source he just hadn't spoken to in years) to claim that Syria had no interest in peace. Last summer this right-wing loon decided to kill any possible pull-out from the Golan Heights by claiming that Syria was about to launch a military strike. Israel deployed its tanks, but didn't go over the edge. We'll see whether this gets any coverage in the US, where there has been almost none given to information from the Kremlin archives showing that the world was very close to a nuclear war in 1983.

A question for the lawyers: since when does this country convict people in absentia? France just refused to extradite someone convicted of murder in Pennsylvania, who would not have gotten a proper retrial.

Another lovely trend: an organization in L.A. is paying drug addicts $200 to be sterilized.

An interesting demographics story in today's Post and elsewhere observes that black male life expectancy in the District of Columbia is now 57.9 years, although a Sioux reservation has lower, while black men just over the border in Virginia live 14 years longer, and Asian women in upstate NJ live 97.7 years. Men of all races live 63 years in Baltimore (but it seems longer), which is lower than in Russia, while those in 2 Utah counties live 77.5 years (but it seems longer). There is thus a 40-yr gap in life expectancy between different groups in this country. By coincidence, British health figures in tomorrow's papers make a comparison possible. There is no racial breakdown, but the figures otherwise are much more closely grouped. Men in Cambridge live 7 years longer than those in Manchester or Liverpool, and the longest-lived women (by health district) live 12 years longer than the shortest-lived men, but that's hardly 40 years. No region deviates more than 5 years from the average male or female life expectancy. The NHS lives.

Plus ça change: a Supreme Court ruling said that it is time that blacks cease "to be the special favorite of the laws, and his rights as a citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by which other men's rights are protected." This was in an 1883 decision striking down the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed equal access to restaurants, rail cars, etc.

Speaking of protection, a fed district court, I believe, refused to let a class-action suit go ahead on behalf of inmates the LA County Jail fails to release when their sentences are up. This happens hundreds if not thousands of times a year because they're a little slow processing paperwork. They can sue on an individual basis which, since the average over-stay is 2 or 3 days, should ensure the cases are not worth a lawyer's time to handle.

Quote of the day: "Masturbation is the thinking man's television." Christopher Hampton

LA Times headline: "Survey of Top Students Reveals Many Cheat on Tests, Ignore Cigarette Ads"

The DEA is threatening to go after the licenses of doctors who follow the new Oregon assisted suicide law.

A story in the Daily Cal highlights the most screwed-over people at Berkeley: people assigned to gay-theme dorms who are not themselves actually gay. In a masterpiece of bad editing, the article says that members of the dorms participate in weekly meetings and go on group outings.

The Supreme Court let stand a ruling supporting strip searches of second graders.

Iraqis are gathering voluntarily (cough) to be human shields to protect the presidential palace. Not to protect the president, who would certainly not be so stupid as to hang out at ground zero, so just to protect his palace.

There was to be a vote in the Senate on the ability of senators to put holds on nominees anonymously, but the vote was killed, anonymously.

Reports leaked to Israeli tv say that Shin Bet hired a right-wing loon to infiltrate the right-wing loons, and he did so so effectively that he was the one who convinced Yigal Amir to assassinate Yitzak Rabin.

A House-Senate conference committee dropped a provision in the intelligence budget that would have allowed employees to whistle-blow about illegal activities, to only those members of Congress on intelligence oversight committees. Clinton had threatened to veto the bills if this provision was included.

Pakistan, continuing its slow-motion Talibanization, has banned the unseemly showing of women without scarves on tv, removing certain shampoo, soap and toothpaste commercials. Presumably if you don't see them, they don't have to be clean either. On the Cartoon Network, they have censored a scene of the cat kissing a dog. I'd love to know where that one is prohibited in the Koran.

Anyone interested in the new Seymour Hersh book about JFK should check today's London Sunday Times, which has an excerpt.

Disgusting story of the week: You've heard of snuff films. The big new thing is squish films: women in high heels step on baby chicks and hamsters. In Germany this has progressed to cats and dogs. And Scientologists. Charming. This is European and American.

Clinton, speaking out against job discrimination against homosexuals: "Being gay, the last time I thought about it, seemed to have nothing to do with the ability to read a balance book, fix a broken bone or change a sparkplug." Joke 1: that's because when you last thought about it, you were thinking about two chicks doing it. Joke 2: not about changing a sparkplug? Have you ever met a lesbian? Joke 3: sure, it's about the ability to decorate an interior, to dress a hair, to...

By the way, at the event he met Ellen deGeneres, but that photo has not been released, just like when he met Salman Rushdie.

Follow-up: That judge who lied about being the brother of the kid who was killed in Alabama has said that he somehow mixed up in his mind the news event with the similar killing of his sister. Well, guess what--that didn't happen either. We should hardly be surprised as a black Republican is by definition lying to himself. By the way, what the hell was Clinton doing appointing a Republican to the 9th Circuit anyway?

Words to live by: "One man's trash is another man's dissertation." -- director of the George Bush Library, Museum, and Bungee-Jump Centre.

It'll never happen, of course, but the Lord Chancellor of Britain is threatening the venerable tradition of barristers wearing wigs. He is evidently fed up with his own rather more elaborate costume, which is the height of 17th-century fashion. He wants to change it so that he no longer looks like a pirate. He is such a susceptible chan-ce-lor.

Most Americans believe Congress needs a brain scan performed by a proctologist."

Election '97: none of the women, including the incumbent, won in the Jordanian parliamentary elections.

Maybe we could send them Christine Todd Whitman.

Chechnya has declared itself an Islamic republic. I forgot, why were we supporting independence for these people?

What does it say for your democracy, as in Uttar Pradesh, which if you didn't know is a state in the World's Largest Democracy, 50 years old this year, that in the state assembly building they have had to nail down all the chairs and remove all the paperweights and other throwable objects?

So Clinton's nominee to the 9th Circuit has to withdraw because for years he has been telling this story about being the brother of a black 13-year old shot dead in Birmingham after the 1963 church bombing, and no one ever thought to check.

Quote of the week: Rep. James A. Traficant Jr. (R-Ohio) during a House debate last week on immigration policy: "Let us look at the law, because most Americans believe Congress needs a brain scan performed by a proctologist."

Officers of the LAPD have been told to return the bayonets issued to them. The mind boggles.

Rumor says that Bob Dole has had a face lift. Anyone seen a recent picture?

A record 17 women are running for the Jordanian parliament in tomorrow's elections (against 535 men). The first and only woman MP was elected in 1993 and has been subject to a soupçon of harassment, most notably her husband being forced to divorce her.

Nelson Mandela met both Khadafi and the Spice Girls last week. Anyone have a joke on that?

Article in today's LA Times on forfeiture laws. The Justice Dept is due to argue before the Supreme Court that it's legal for the gov. to seize money taken in or out of the country but not reported, even when it was acquired perfectly legally. As I understand it, it is the money that is being punished for criminal activity, not the owner of the money.

From the London Sunday Times:

Garden guerrillas go to war on the gnome front
by Kirsty Lang

THE kidnappers pounce without warning, striking terror into suburban France. Their victims reappear far from home, abandoned in dense woodland or floating down rivers on rafts.

Last Friday, however, four members of the Gnome Liberation Front (GLF) were brought before a crowded courtroom in Bithune, northern France, to answer more than 150 charges of seizing garden gnomes, a miniature tea set and windmill, and a plastic toadstool.

Their lawyers defended their cause with passion. "Your honour, have you never heard the cries of anguished garden gnomes screaming with cold and the indignity of being treated as lamp posts by passing dogs?" said Bruno Dubout, a defence advocate, his face red with suppressed laughter. He suggested the word "gnome" was politically incorrect and should be replaced by "vertically challenged figurine".

The prosecutor refused to be diverted. "We are discussing stolen objects and the violation of people's gardens," she reminded the court sternly, demanding that the GLF leaders be sentenced to 80 hours' community service with the forestry commission. "This is a free country and people should have the right to keep gnomes even if others consider it to be in bad taste." The case was adjourned for two weeks.

Although the judge struggled to keep a straight face, the 10 victims of the new-wave terrorists were not amused. "This is nothing but a show trial," cried Louis Maille, a retired supermarket security guard. "Next time someone tries to steal my gnomes I won't bother going to the police. I'll be ready with my shotgun."

Maille demanded compensation of #500 for the loss of 10 gnomes. When the judge challenged the figure, he explained that they were "deluxe, glass-fibre gnomes" from Belgium.

Hundreds of people have fallen foul of the GLF, which was initially set up last year by a group of art students in Normandy as a "protest against bad taste", but prompted copy-cat raids throughout much of the country. GLF attack squads leave calling cards informing targets: "Your gnomes have now been liberated so they can live in peace in the forest."

Until the "Bithune Four" were captured last August, members had evaded detection. The Alengon branch in Normandy even held a press conference with their faces obscured by balaclavas. "We mean no harm to gnome owners," they explained solemnly. "We just feel these little creatures would be happier in their natural habitat instead of being imprisoned behind a garden fence."

The founder of the GLF, an elusive figure known only as "Le Prof", his nom de guerre, said last week he had become disturbed by the recent invasion of garden gnomes imported from Germany and Britain.

Speaking from a telephone box at an undisclosed location, he said: "Gnomes are the ultimate symbol of bad taste and kitsch. I find them offensive to my visual sensibilities." He admitted he had been surprised at the way the movement had taken off. "We obviously struck a nerve in France," he said.

So widespread are the GLF's operations now that many owners have been forced to bring their gnomes indoors at night or to buy guard dogs to protect them. Some have even organised themselves into gnome defence associations.

"The police don't take this issue seriously. This is not about liberation, it's about theft," complained Corinne Helga, of the Friends of Garden Gnomes Association in Strasbourg. Helga, a songwriter, has formed a pop group called the Gnomes which has made two singles singing their praises.

"Our aim is not to make money, but to make gnome owners more assertive and proud of their hobby," said Helga, who has 20 gnomes and a magic grotto in her garden. "I don't understand why they attract all this hatred. Gnomes are kind protectors of the earth."

Fritz Friedmann, of the International Association for the Protection of Garden Gnomes, based in Basel, Switzerland, believes the anti-gnome sentiment in France is a deeply sinister development. "The Nazis were the first people who tried to ban gnomes, but as soon as the second world war was over, people rushed out to buy them again," said Friedmann, 80, who publishes the Gnome Gazette.

French commentators have seized earnestly on the phenomenon as a manifestation of growing class divisions. "This is about the ruling classes having fun at the expense of working people," said Jean-Claude Kaufmann, a sociologist. Jean-Yves Jouannais, an art critic, has devoted an entire book to the subject of class, taste and the garden gnome.

Le Prof, however, vehemently denies being a member of the sneering classes. "There are several members from working-class backgrounds in the Gnome Liberation Front," he said. There is also a chubby skeleton in his closet: "My own parents have a gnome in their garden," he revealed, "which I've painted green and gold to make it look less offensive."

Much to the chagrin of Le Prof, the publicity generated by the GLF has prompted a sharp rise in the sale of garden gnomes in France.

A spokesman for Gardena France, the gnome market leader, said its sales had increased tenfold. "It's all very depressing," admitted Le Prof. "People just haven't got the point."

Today's LA Times has a story about the massive increase in deportations of aliens since last year. They don't bother doing the math, so I had to: for the increase in Nigerian 25-year olds with 15 years of residence in the US deported for joy-riding, not to mention all those druggies, divided into the increase in the bits of the INS budget for deportation & incarceration, we are paying $6,315 for each new deportation. But the largest part of the increase is in non-criminals being deported.

A new batch of Nixon tapes is out. Check out the Washington Post coverage in today's paper, an article on the front page & several more in the A section. Most amusing comparison with current scandals is that N. personally thanked a Greek tycoon--in the Oval Office--for providing hush money for the plumbers, but there is also info on his shake down of the milk industry (his phrase, by the way) and the exact price tag on ambassadorships.

Orrin Hatch puts a "hold" on nominee to head Justice Dept's civil rights division. Well first, can we knock off the Senatorial hostage-taking already? One reason this obnoxious tactic is so over-used is that the name of the senator doing it is only released if s/he feels like it. About this one, Hatch wants a promise that there will be no court challenge to the California anti-affirmative action proposition. This is especially obnoxious because he is not trying to change a political policy, but a constitutional interpretation.

About the line-item veto: isn't the whole point of the thing to force Congress to vote on their pork on an individual basis? Then why is it that the Senate just voted to overturn Clinton's veto of the 38 items in the military building bill as a group, instead of individually? Doesn't that just allow the same old horse-trading

Zambia thwarts one of the sillier coup attempts of recent years, by a "Captain Solo" who was told by an angel to stamp out corruption.

Afghanistan is now an emirate. Thought you'd want to know.

In one of those jokes-made-real news stories, an Australian lawyer escapes a shark attack.

Saudi Arabia says that consulting fortune-tellers and practicing witchcraft constitute polytheism, which is punishable by death (what isn't in Saudi?)

But Chelsea gets to go to Stanford

Lee Hoi Chang was once considered the front-runner for South Korea's December presidential elections. Then it was discovered that both of his sons evaded the draft, seemingly, by losing a lot of weight--a lot--before they were called up. Now, in atonement, Lee has sent the oldest son (34) to work at a leper colony.