Some days ago, the Animal Liberation Front in Britain (come to think of it, I have one of their t-shirts somewhere) released 3,000 minks from a mink farm. The British papers have been full ever since of stories about how minks are really the most vicious animals on the face of the earth, and attack anything that moves. The locals are not happy.


Till dress us do part

Athens: A bride-to-be suffered a nervous breakdown the night before her wedding on the Greek island of Crete when she took friends to the couple's new home to see the wedding dress - only to find the groom wearing it and in a passionate embrace with his best man. The wedding was called off, an Athens news agency reported. (Reuters)

The Nevis referendum on independence from St. Kitts failed to win the necessary 2/3.

Hillary Clinton says that it's just anti-Arkansas prejudice fueling the attacks on husband Bill (if your idea of a good time is oral sex from the chubby much younger intern, you just might be a redneck) Clinton.

Sony accidentally invented and sold the #1 item on the wish list of teenage boys everywhere, the x-ray specs. Their camcorder's night vision filter (for filming sleeping babies and philandering husbands) can pretty much see through clothing in the right light.

Somebody from the Carter Center was showing a bunch of Chinese visitors how democracy worked by taking them along while he voted in the Georgia primaries. Where he was promptly refused a ballot in his own party, as they kept insisting he was a Republican. The Chinese, according to the Washington Post, were baffled. When it was finally straightened out, the guy voted in the Democratic primaries, in which there was only one candidate for governor. The Post doesn't say, but one presumes the Chinese were less baffled by that.

The Post has an article on welfare reform which says that a major cause of the shrinking rolls is not people being kicked off, but hurdles being put in the way of people ever getting on to begin with. Sometimes they get one-time payments, which may be all they need. Some are made to go after 40 job opportunities first, which may work. Oregon gives people one-way tickets to California, which works for Oregon. But mostly this has a sense of being number-mongering, that civil servants are now being made to go after lower welfare caseloads based strictly on numbers, in the same way that the lowering crime rate is partly based on police departments, under pressure to get those numbers, downgrading crimes, and of course Robert MacNamara's famous body-counts. A civil servant with a quota of people to screw over makes the spine shiver even more than "I'm from the government, I'm here to help." No one knows how many just give up when they realize there will just be more stupid hurdles endlessly. One civil servant saw nothing wrong with forcing people to rely on relatives, which should ensure that the really poor drag down the not-quite-so-poor.

Speaking of unfortunate relatives, Mark Thatcher, idiot son of Margaret, who made his money in illegal arms deals in the 1980s and security services in the US in the 1990s, has a new career: loan-sharking to the underpaid police and civil servants of South Africa, where he now lives.

Finally, for Bay Area residents: Channel 20's new owners are ditching the dogs. Boooo!

Magic shoes

China hails sole survivor

Beijing: A Chinese soldier thrown high into the air when he stepped on a landmine near China's border with Vietnam survived unscathed thanks to the experimental boots he was wearing, the People's Daily said. A Chinese military university is testing the special protective footwear for mine clearers in the southwestern province of Yunnan, the site of thousands of mines left over from China's 1979 border war with Vietnam. (Reuters)

This story just baffles me. What sort of shoes are these? I'm picturing giant springs.

Fri, 7 Aug 1998

There's a story in tomorrow's London Times about a World War I soldier who got caught in a French town behind German lines and spent four years hiding in a cupboard.

Israel has banned the practice of posthumous circumcision.

A joint US/Russian military exercise that was supposed to involve a Marine landing at Vladivostok is halted, scared off by a bunch of old communists with red flags. Where is Tom Hanks when you need him?

Chanel no. 1

Daily Telegraph:
A ZIMBABWEAN man has been jailed for a month for bottling his urine and selling it as perfume.

Evidently dead people who haven't already been circumcised can't get into Jewish cemeteries (perhaps this is only in Israel), unless, of course, someone circumcises the corpse.

Among the Chinese of Indonesia, the latest big fashion accessory is the chastity belt, in preparation for the next round of rape 'n' riot. There must be a good reason why this is a bad idea, or surely someone would have done it before?

The Vietnamese police official from the famous 1968 photo in which he executed a VC prisoner dies peacefully in Virginia, where he ran a pizza parlor, leading ineluctably to the question: what the fuck was he doing in this country all these years? This is why the US opposes a war crimes tribunal.

China has 30 times as many deaths per automobile as the US, 70,000 traffic deaths in 1997.

China reverses its ban on Amway. Not that these two stories are in any way related.

From an LA Times story: "Emmy Award-winning effects supervisor Ron Thornton said his best work last year was creating a computer-animated, 9-foot tall, three-legged alien for UPN network's "Star Trek: Voyager." But another assignment kept him tied up for a couple of days digitally removing armpit stains from an actor who had been perspiring heavily."

Iran hangs a Bahai for converting a Muslim.

A Federal judge strikes down NJ's law against pornography at the state prison for chronic sex offenders.

Stupid medical idea of the week: a company in Britain is charging 300 pounds for home paternity testing. Just send off a sample of the DNA from your alleged offspring and find out if you're really the father.

Today, our news is all military. Everyone should read the series (a bit long for me to mail out) in the Washington Post on the role of US special forces in training all sorts of scummy armies abroad. It's much more extensive than I had realized, including every single Latin American country. Under the guise of training them in fighting drug traffic, we are giving them the same old counter-insurgency training, including countries that were supposed to be under US sanction.

On Salon today, Christopher Hitchens, famous for trashing Mother Theresa, goes after the Dalai Lama, who is evidently a shit. And supports India's nuclear policy, by the way.

British tv says that in January 1995 Russia's hi-tech early warning system (a couple of guys with binoculars would be my guess) figured that they were under nuclear missile attack by the US (actually a Norwegian weather research rocket) and Yeltsin initiated all but the last step in launching a retaliation.

I'll leave you on that thought while I'm on vacation. I'm going to a wedding in Redondo Beach, which I think means that there'll be a Best Dude. Should be like totally bitchin'.

Dollywood is getting a new roller coaster, in the shape of....

A member of the Russian Duma has been demanding an investigation of reports that Yeltsin was replaced by a double two years ago. OK, nobody believed me when I said that two years ago I saw someone in the hospital who looked exactly like Yeltsin, but boy am I vindicated now.

Speaking of the former super-power, the next launch of a crew to the Mir (motto: don't laugh, it's paid for) has been delayed 10 days because the space agency failed to pay its electricity bills.

From a Village Voice review of "Armageddon": "Like being yelled at by idiots for 144 minutes"

It won't stand a week, but a panel of the 10th circuit court forbids prosecutors giving leniency to witnesses in exchange for testimony under the federal bribery laws. I approve wholeheartedly, at least until defense attorneys have the same ability to hand get-out-jail-free cards to potential witnesses.

Nice to see just how long outrage at India and Pakistan lasted. Right up until the Iowa wheat harvest came in.

Mon, 6 Jul 1998

There is a story on the BBC, playing even as I write, about sexual harassment in the Canadian military. Someone is heard to suggest that the cases should be handled by the police. Oh yeah, sexual harassment investigated by the "Mounties".

Clinton's lawyer Robert Bennett is also representing the Zapruder family, which wants the government to pay it $70 million for those 26 seconds of film. Bennett compares the film to the original manuscript of the Declaration of Independence. Right.

The London Times also has a story tomorrow about this subject, which focuses on the accusation that Pete Wilson and Dan Lungren have let the incredible violence at Corcoran, detailed in the LA Times article below, go on and on and obstructed the investigation, which has been basically run by the prison guards' union, which happens to be a big campaign supporter of both of them, and has ensured that the only guard punished was the whistle blower. The Times, being naive in matters American, thinks that this will be a problem for Lungren's campaign. Knowing Lungren, I'll bet we're gonna see ads with him taking credit for prisoners being raped and strangled. And I'll bet somewhere in the Republican party platform there's something about bringing back Gladiator Nights at Corcoran and putting it on pay per view and using the funds brought in to reduce the car tax. How much would you pay to see a fight to the death between Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan?

The USDA approves a new vegetable for federally-funded school lunches: salsa. But not ketchup.

The word on the street (well, the unpaved dirt road) in Nigeria is that Abacha actually died from an overdose of Viagra.

I just celebrated the 4th by watching "1984". At least we didn't wind up being ruled by Big Brother but by Bob's Big Boy.

Clinton keeps talking about China entering the 21st century. Of course, by the Chinese calendar, that would be 698 B.C.

Yesterday, Kenneth Starr argued in Federal appeals court about whether lawyer-client privilege was more important than getting at the truth. Some of the truth which his people have been trying to get out, include these questions to Sidney Blumenthal before the grand jury: did you and Hillary Clinton ever discuss whether Bill had a sex addiction? does Bill believe that oral sex is sex? does his religion include sexual intercourse?

The Post Office is to give some of its workers the day off in honor of Nixon's funeral, 4 years late. These were the people who already had the day off that day, and so didn't get the day off that the people who didn't have the day off got off. Head...hurts.

Speaking of Nixon, I saw a Nixon scholar on C-SPAN saying that the technology now exists to recover the missing 18 1/2 minutes, but a) it would cost about $10,000, b) the archives won't let anyone do that sort of thing to the originals.

Kentucky is to stop letting people below the age of 16 get married.

The Northern Irish Assembly has been elected. Of 108 members, 14 will be women and 8 will be terrorists. 3 will be survivors of terrorist attacks. Buckle your seatbelts.

Just when you thought Texas would execute anyone at all, they spare the life of a guy for one of the 600 murders he's confessed to. Seems he was at the other end of the country at the time. Not that that's ever stopped Texas before.

One present the Chinese presented Clinton with, that seems to have gone unremarked in the US press: the execution of a Chinese who killed an American tourist.

If, like me, you read the NY Times and Washington Post and actually expect to get the news, you've been driven crazy by reports that John McCain told a joke that no one in either paper is willing to print, although they're all willing to talk about it. So here it is: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Janet Reno is her father." Big deal.

I knew that story about the military using sarin gas against defectors in the Vietnam war was too good to be true.

So there was a Polish Jewish family whose land was expropriated by the Nazis. Decades later they try to reclaim their land, only to find out that, hey, they own Auschwitz.

Last week, Trent Lott, the former cheerleader, a) killed the tobacco bill, b) said that homosexuals need treatment for their addiction. Right. So, take that penis out of your mouth and try a cigarette instead. (Or, if the penis in question is like mine, a cigar.)

The US is pushing Colombia to use a chemical to kill coca crops that its manufacturer, Dow Chemical, the good people who brought you Agent Orange, says really shouldn't be used in Colombia and will certainly contaminate the ground water.

Somewhere in the Senate legislative process, the tobacco bill has lost all its funding to help smokers quit smoking, keep people from starting and keeping children from buying cigarettes.

Christopher Hitchens was on C-SPAN last night. One of the things he said was that the president of Pakistan had written to Clinton and Albright weeks before the Indian nuclear tests warning of their imminence and asking what the US was going to do about it. The US never replied. When asked what happened to the letters, State & White House said that they passed them on to the CIA. Which was then blamed for not warning the White House. Hitchens thinks the story of an "intelligence failure" was accepted a little too readily, when complicity seems more likely.

Some British teenage hackers got into the Indian nuclear computers and erased a bunch of files and told them exactly what they thought of nuclear weapons.

Kenneth Starr finally admits that he regularly leaks to the press, but says it is necessary "to engender confidence in the work of this office." The interviews are of course on a not-for-attribution basis. I feel more confident already.

A racist party does very well indeed in the Queensland elections, as I'm sure you've all been following.

The US government finally apologizes and pays off those Japanese we kidnapped out of Latin American countries during World War II. Of course they only get one-fourth what Japanese-Americans got, and only when the latter are paid off, if there's any money left. But, hell, they were illegal aliens.

Jewish settlers on the West Bank are now to be allowed to form their own armed civil guard units.

Creepy medical procedure of the week: babies with two mommies for real. You take nutrient from the egg of a young woman and mix it in with the egg of an older woman, ensuring that 50-year olds can give birth, like that's a good idea. No one's quite sure how much of the DNA from the donor gets mixed in, but some of it definitely does. 2 women are pregnant by this technique now.

Republicans in the Senate are blocking a judge (big news there, huh?), one Sonia Sotomayor, a hispanic woman, for the 2nd Circuit. They can't find anything in her record to object to, but they're afraid that if she gets this slot, she'll be appointed to the Supreme Court by Clinton or Gore, and they don't want Dems to have any viable options for the Stevens seat (or whomever), especially a hispanic woman.

The Flemish regional government has voted to give state aid to Nazi collaborators on the same basis as war victims.

Ireland still has a list of banned books: H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, The Second Sex, Marie Stopes, etc etc. That may change this week.

Is everybody ready for another Balkans war? I thought not.

There are so many brushfire wars these days, I can't keep track of them all. Whatever happened to the Namibia-Botswana border dispute? What's going on in Kashmir? Start looking out now for the next one, Cyprus, due to commence sometime in July.
That offer everyone reported from that nice Mr. Habibie to give autonomy to East Timor? The price tag was that the UN, Portugal and everyone have to recognize that Indonesia owns it. No thanks.