Hail to the chief

Turkmenistan president Niyazov, already hailed as Chief of the Turkmens in one of those Central Asian leadership cults that always seem so unearned, has been promoted, if indeed there can be a promotion from Chief of the Turkmens. He is now being called by his spokesmen a national prophet with divine abilities.

Also, Jeremy Irons has painted his 15th-century castle in western Cork peach. The natives are not happy.

Monica (remember her?) wants The Dress returned to her. She says she won't sell it.

You won't have missed this story, but let's make sure (at least one of you currently being out of the country):
The Taliban plan to make all Hindus resident in Afghanistan wear a yellow star, or some such symbol. Oddly, the women will still have to wear Islamic clothing.

So when Al Gore uses his office for fund-raising, it's a crime against humanity, but when Cheney uses the vice-presidential residence to host large donors, it's a "thank-you" and
certainly not a fund-raiser.

Margaret Thatcher accuses Labour of being arrogant. She actually endorsed Hague for prime minister, which is more than Ted Heath is willing to do.

Headline of the day: British Diet May Be Cause of Depression. Because it is deficient in selenium, not because it is crap.

The Official Monster Raving Loony Party has come out with its manifesto: 4 blank pages. You can surely read them online.

http://freespace.virgin.net/raving.loony should do it. Their actual promises include smaller class sizes by making the kids stand closer together, draining Loch Ness to see if there's a monster, and ending the north/side divide by making it a square root.

I don't believe I've mentioned the conviction in South Carolina for homicide of a woman who smoked crack while pregnant. So that's homicide, and an 18-year term, for a fetus.

Colin Powell asked the Israelis not to do something stupid in response to, oh, whatever the last Palestinian atrocity was. Israel immediately sent in the war planes. American war planes. Bought from the US. Which are supposed to be used for defensive purposes only. So can we have them back, please?

Al Capone's lawyer just died, aged 107. Read the obit if you can.

I mentioned that deputy PM John Prescott punched out a protester yesterday. For wall-to-wall coverage that simply has to be seen to be believed, check out the Friday London Times.

For an actual gallery of photos commemorating the event, click here.

Also, more boxing and egg jokes than you would credit. Blair says he won't fire Prescott. Meanwhile, Sky TV is making this the most repeated footage since Elian was seized in Miami. Times sketch writer Matthew Parris says that William Hague was struggling to be interesting enough for anyone to want to hit him.

On Bush the Usurper's argument that those pesky gas prices can be taken care of by cutting taxes to help (wealthy) people pay for gas, Bill Maher asks why the government doesn't just write a check directly to Exxon and cut out the middle-man.

Favorite start to a news story today:

An actress has claimed an opera company sexually discriminated against her after it turned her down for the part of a virgin because she would be heavily pregnant by the end of the show's run.

Israeli official death squads yesterday killed 5 Palestinian cops. At first they said the cops were shooting at them. Then they downgraded that to behaving suspiciously. Then it turns out that 1 of them was cooking suspiciously while 2 were sleeping suspiciously when they were shot in the head at close-range--execution-style, as they say on Law and Order. Israel admits this was an intelligence mistake and says that it might even apologize.

The British elections are moving along nicely. The deputy prime minister was hit with eggs today. He responded by hitting the guy. Which The Times helpfully points out is illegal. Meanwhile a Liberal Party candidate drops out. While canvassing door to door he met a dog, which he sprayed with (illegal) pepper spray, and then ran to his car to make a quick getaway, unfortunately dragging an old woman, I believe the dog's owner, along the road.
Home Secretary Jack Straw was heavily heckled while making claims about having improved crime and the morale of the police. It was the police who were heckling him. Ian Paisley declares line dancing to be sinful. Which may be the only intelligent thing he's ever said. The Tories reveal a party political broadcast in which they blame Labour for 2 rapes, Willie Horton style, by criminals in a home detention curfew scheme.

The Irish Prime Minister--and how things have changed--has been issuing official invitations which include on them the name of his girlfriend (he is separated). The cardinal was not best pleased.

Russia's defence minister says he can understood why a colonel strangled an 18-year old girl in Chechnya, calls him a "victim of circumstances" (he was pissed off because of snipers).

The Egyptian censor came down hard on a proposed song with the lyrics, "I don't like Israel." No, no, he said, change that to "I hate Israel." The song reached #1.

Attorney General Ashcroft holds a Bible study every day, which certainly isn't mandatory for any Justice Department employees wishing to advance their careers, no sirree bob.

The Italian electorate votes into power media magnate and Mafia stooge Berlusconi, again. He plans to run the country like a business. The good news/bad news is that the near-fascist regional separatist party the Northern League has seen its electoral support collapse. This is bad news in that if it had
been part of Berlusconi's government coalition, it would have been easy to treat Italy as the pariah state that Austria was last year (Belgium already threatened to do so).

The British elections are humming along nicely. William Hague, sporting his new Bruce Willis haircut (if I shave it maybe no one will realize I'm bald), was in Wales to launch the Tory party's Welsh manifesto. Which had to be scrapped because it was so badly translated. The slogan behind him was also wrong. Some smartass local reporter asked him to pronounce it, but he refused. I should say that this man was once the Welsh Secretary. And his wife is Welsh. Sad really. The British Politics e-mail discussion group is currently debating why Hague is portrayed as such a loser. The consensus is that he is a loser. Also that his voice is terrible. He sounds like a 13-year old trying to deepen his voice in order to buy cigarettes.

Finally, a sentence one simply does not read every day: AN exercise involving 27,000 American and Australian commandos was temporarily halted last week when a US Marine shot dead an emu.

The state of Alabama (motto: "You shure got a purty mouth") has raised the age of marriage from 14 to 16.

Oregon has recalled a list of helpful hints to welfare recipients on how to cut down their expenses by shopping at thrift stores, clipping coupons and rooting through dumpsters.

The Observer has a story on Japan's practice of tying aid to small countries to its votes on the International Whaling Commission. You have to wonder why this is so important to them.

Douglas Adams, a man who truly knew where his towel was, has died at 49. Good news: he just completed the movie script for Hitchhiker's Guide.

The House has voted to punish the UN for its free vote to exclude seat-holder-for-life US from the Human Rights Commission. They'd also like Powell to figure out who didn't vote for us. Remember, humans have rights, small nations will do whatever the hell we tell them to, or else.

Molly Ivins uses a phrase for the Texas justice system I need to pass on before finding a context in which to steal it, because I don't want to forget it: the cowboy gulag.

Mother Jones's Bushwatch section on its website has a link to a Monday LA Times story, not picked up by either the NY Times or Washington Post, about the US's suspiciously fast expulsion of a Honduran diplomat and former general who could tell the truth about John Negroponte--Bush's designee as ambassador to the UN--and his role as Reagan's ambassador to Honduras in covering up death squad activities.

There was an interesting convergence of rhetoric this week in two very different (one would have thought) policy arenas. John Walters, Bush's nominee as True Czar of All the Drugs, does not believe in drug treatment, which he considers part of a liberal
"therapeutic state in which government serves as the agent of personal rehabilitation." Dick Cheney said something similar about conservation only being to make people feel good about their personal virtue.

I think the link here is the continuing Republican vendetta against the 1960s, despite the fact that environmentalism is a movement against reckless consumption and drug-use is in fact reckless consumption.

At Walters's confirmation hearing, I'd love for someone to ask him, if rehab only works in prison, shouldn't the same apply to alcohol, and shouldn't your boss have been sent away? Bush the Younger's alcohol use wasn't even a victimless crime, since he tended to drink and drive.

As bad an idea as school uniforms are in the US, there are other places where they should be a complete non-starter. The leader of the German Christian Democrats calls for school uniforms, saying they improve the children's sense of belonging and community. I think we've all really had enough of Germans' sense of belonging and community.

From the New Statesman, a competition.

Definitions of a 21st-century gentleman:

A gentleman is someone who only wipes his nose on his sleeve in private. [does doing it while driving your car count?]

A gentleman never argues with a lady in public. If she infers from this that she is being patronised and hits him over the head with her handbag, he will not hit her back.

A gentleman is a man who can play the tuba but does not--at least in public.

A gentleman is someone who stands and gives up his seat for a lap-dancer.

Switches off his mobile during sex, unless he can answer it without disrupting his performance.

Apologizes before he farts.

The Nation's Name the President contest results:
1. Governor Bush (6,625 votes) 2. Spurious George (4,949) 3. President* (4,564) 4. President Select (2,436) 5. Boy George (2,095). The also-rans were His Illegititude (1,789), President per curiam (888), pResident (790).

NY Times headline: "White House Picks Chairman of SEC: A Representative of Industries Will Now Regulate Them." The 2nd phrase is sort of a generic, I think.

There seem to be no more stories on Bush's daughter's drinking. We need a proper tabloid press like the British have. The Sun just flew Ronnie Biggs back to face justice and suck all the news coverage away from the general election that Blair should be announcing today. Ronnie Biggs, if you don't know, once (and by once I mean on the day I was born) helped rob a train. It was either a really great train or a really great robbery, I'm not sure which. He escaped from prison in 1965 and has been living in Brazil most of that time, most recently earning his living by letting Brits come and have tea with him (robbery proceeds last just so long). The British government, which has been rabid about getting this guy back for a rather long time for some reason, naturally expedited his passport, once he said he wanted to return, but the Tories are still accusing the government of doing so as an election stunt. I'm planning to enjoy this particular circus as much as I can. I must check if the Sun is online, I think it is.

I got off track. I meant to try to work into the bit about Jenna Bush a line I'm stealing from a Martin Amis novel about all rich kids going through a cocaine phase--at birth their parents set their names down for the posh drying-out spots.

Still, it's not as weird as trying to sneak into Japan on a fake passport to go to Disneyland.

In its ongoing efforts to start a new cold war, the US yesterday resumed spy plane flights off China's coast, and Rummy Rumsfeld said he'd really like to put offensive weapons into outer space.

If I were the Chinese, I'd break the spy plane down into 1.3 billion pieces and parcel it out amongst the populace. Like the Berlin Wall.

fun and games

I just realized that I completely forgot all about the English department's marathon reading Friday of Beowulf. Shit (to use an appropriately Anglo-Saxon term).

Some scholar type claims that Columbus actually first visited the New World in 1485 on a secret mission from the pope.

According to a New Yorker article I haven't seen, that might not be out yet (although they have a web site now, don't they?), FBI director Louis Freeh, who has just announced his early retirement after just long enough a period that it won't look partisan, loathed and refused to speak to Clinton. More needs to be known about this.

NY Times headline: Increasingly Schools Move to Restrict Dodgeball. Well that should make it easier to hit the little kid with glasses and asthma, shouldn't it?

TV movie with the most tv-movieish title I've ever seen: Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear

Energize, Mr Scott

www.chick.com for those hilariously over-the-top Christian comics

The Louisiana Legislature denounces Charles Darwin as a racist.

Bush: But I also made it clear to [Vladimir Putin] that it's important to think beyond the old days of when we had the concept that if we blew each other up, the world would be safe."--Washington, D.C., May 1, 2001

The magic of networking

Funny web-page, features computers should have:
http://www.rita.thegourmet.com/computers.html

A Minneapolis fire chief has been demoted for posing for a photograph with his arm around the charred body of a woman. Captain John Caston has been demoted to firefighter for conduct unbecoming an officer, but will not be stopped from working his way back up the ranks.

The House votes to make harming a fetus a crime, as part of the long-term strategy to re-criminalize abortion. A bunch of Dems voted for it, showing how deft they aren't over this issue,
and how well the R's are playing it, with "partial-birth" abortion and now this. When the R's refused to support upping the penalties on harming a pregnant woman, which would have the same legal effect, the D's should have walked and trumpeted that the R's rejection of the Lofgren measure showed that they were only interested in establishing a separate legal status for feti.

Meanwhile, the Scottish Parliament is planning to decriminalize gay group sex. Plan your vacations accordingly.

And the British military pays for a dozen servicewomen a year to get breast implants. It makes them happier, more contented soldiers.

The Supreme Court ruled that because federal law only protects people from pervasive sexual discrimination in the workplace and not isolated sexual harassment, it doesn't protect people
who complain about the latter from being fired for it. Way to go,
Supes.

It also said that people who don't wear a seat belt or spit on the sidewalk or whatever can be handcuffed, arrested, and made to post a bond substantially bigger than the fine for their infraction. And oh yes, arresting people also means you can make warrantless searches. The Supes didn't think that this might lead to abuses of any sort.

A pleasant thought from the NY Times: If you can't get a song out of your head, it could be the sign that you have a brain aneuryism. Fun thing to do for the next day or so: try to get the theme song to MASH out of your head now that I have told you not to think about it, or to think about the possibility of your imminent demise. Remember: brain aneuryism is painless, it brings on many changes...

(Note to Googlers: the reason you arrived here is that you misspelled your search term, as I did in this post. The American spelling is aneurism, the British spelling is aneurysm.)

Today Israeli troops shot people at the funeral of someone shot by Israeli troops a couple of days ago, if I'm not mistaken at another funeral... Guns don't kill people, funerals kill people.

Bushism of the Day: "It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade, there's more commerce."--Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

It'll be fun watching the CIA, Peru and the missionaries trading charges over the next few days. I've been saying for years that the drug wars were becoming Vietnam, or at least El Salvador in the '80s, all over again, and if it takes a couple of dead missionaries to put the brakes on, well, I don't much like missionaries to "primitive people" (in the words of the father of the guy in the plane, himself a missionary) to begin with.

The British have discovered bugs in the walls of the Ministry of Defense. They think it's... the French. French arms companies, to be precise.

Follow-up:

THE Austrian province of Vorarlberg will [31]ban the practice
of blowing up dead cows with explosives on its Alpine meadows,
state television ORF said yesterday.

What is the world coming to:

THE outwardly placid world of Belgian pigeon racing has been shaken by the seizure of substantial quantities of suspected performance-enhancing drugs.


Horrifying medical story of the week: A woman died in Britain a couple of years ago of a heart attack a couple of hours after a surgeon operated on the wrong lung. What just came out is that it was the patient herself, under local anesthesia, who pointed it out to him.

The guy who invented the Zip code just died.

So did the guy who invented the smiley face in the '60s. :)

When I suggested that Bush apologize and then take it back, I didn't think he'd actually do it.

The press's weak grasp of matters espionagic has been ongoing, with none bothering to educate themselves throughout the last week and a half as to what the spy planes were monitoring. Since spy satellites are so much more efficient at most forms of surveillance and sigint, it is clear, as I said before, that the idea is to trigger China's defences (radar, communications, etc) in order to evaluate them. This is why the Chinese are really so pissed off: this form of spying is part of active preparations for warfare.

I haven't given a detailed analysis of the recent recount of the Florida vote, partly because it isn't done yet, and partly because I assume you found decent reports if you wanted to. What's interesting is how often journalists who knew better insisted that it proved that Bush really won the state, when it did no such thing.

The British decennial census is starting, and Star Wars fans are marking down their religion as "Jedi." New Zealanders have already done this, but the count hasn't been finished yet.

Cambridge professors have calculated the kinetic energy, centrifugal force and co-efficient of friction for different kinds of pasta in order to determine scientifically how not to
make a mess.

The team found that the safest method of eating spaghetti is to hold the fork vertically, rather than horizontally, select a few strands and rotate them against the concave part of a spoon which is held parallel to the plate. The fork can then be lifted out and the spaghetti eaten off the spoon.

The laboratory experiments proved that the risk of sauce
splatter is highest as the last 4.3ins of spaghetti are rolled on to the fork: a final flick of the wrist can accelerate the speed of the spaghetti tip to more than nine feet per second, producing enough centrifugal force to make the sauce fly four feet.