Say kids, what time is it?

Well, someone's finally invented a clock accurate
to a quadrillionth of a second (a femtosecond), and I say it's way overdue.

Actually, the project was based on a misunderstanding caused by a stuck keyboard at the White House, which produced a memo saying, "President Bush will be taking a nap, could someone wake him up around 2:00:00000000000000000."

It's so crazy it just might work: Kenya's Daniel arap Moi says that AIDS can be stopped if all Kenyans would just not have sex for two years. Which is easy for him to say, since he must be pushing eighty.

Come for the legislation, stay for the snuff

According to the Guardian, smoking has been banned in the British House of Commons since 1693, well before the invention of California, but snuff is not only not banned, but is available free to members, not that many have taken advantage of it since Churchill retired in 1964. Indeed, the supplier reports that there have been no re-orders for 7 years. The Guardian is going to ask some poor MP to try it and report back, and I will pass the information along.

Thursday's Washington Post explains the nature of the dealings between the White House and the Salvation Army.

Perhaps I'm wrong in connecting two stories on the same page in today's NY Times, but it seems as if China is proving its capability of staging the Olympics Games by staging war games off Taiwan. Now remember, IOC, a vote for Beijing is a vote for mass deportations of beggars, mass arrests of dissidents and mass slaughter of stray (and other) dogs.

I haven't talked about Gary Condit yet. I'm tired of police engaging in public relations exercises and making deals with other people's PR people, such as whatever deal required them to say over and over that Condit was not a suspect. Of course he is.

Did anyone else see that thing at Kennebunkport, where Bush was asked about Putin and said something about Putin being concerned with extremism and Bush was too, where it was obvious that any follow-up question would have exposed that Bush had no idea what he was talking about?

Puns!

In Berkeley today I saw a woman with a t-shirt that said "I make boys cry."

Well, I was planning to make fun of a headline in the NY Times business section--"Switzerland: Hip Implant Lawsuits"--but I think the pun quota for the day has already been filled by the London Times, which reported the return of a Croatian Wimbeldon winner to his home town of Split with the headline "Split goes bananas for local hero Goran."

Fun stories this week you may have missed because they were broken by one newspaper and not generally picked up by other newspapers:

When asbestos was banned, W R Grace found itself prepared to move into the market vacuum suddenly opened up with a product that did the same product but didn't have asbestos. The only problem: it actually had asbestos. But less of it. So they pressured the (newly formed) EPA into setting a standard just high enough to ban all other products but theirs, and then spent decades lying about its asbestos content, and the danger therefrom.

Bush has a deal with the Salvation Army where they lobby for his "faith-based" policy and he exempts them from state and local government policies about groups that discriminate against gays. The Bush administration's first reaction was to call the Salvation Army a bunch of liars. (By the way, the Salvation Army is about to be banned in Moscow although not, I think, because of its policy re homosexuals.)

The Germans are about to remake Fawlty Towers, starting with updated versions of the scripts used for all but 1 of the originals. No cash prizes for guessing which one.

Most wonderful human being

New Yorker cartoon shows parents talking to their, say, 8-year old son: Now son, its very very important that you remember where you electronically transferred mommy and daddy’s assets to.

The media are a little schizophrenic (or just ignorant) about the Afghan warlord/vice president who was assassinated. I’ve read that he had an aggressive drug eradication program, and that he was implicated in drug sales (not necessarily mutually exclusive, I suppose, on the Bill Gates model), and The Times has 2 headlines, one saying Afghans Mourn Murdered Leader... and the other Feared Warlord... (again, perhaps on the Bill Gates model).

Director John Frankenheimer has died. I think we can all agree that he was the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.!

Speaking of schizophrenic and/or ignorant media, during the conference on African development a couple of weeks back, I saw two different reports, one in a newspaper, one by the BBC on Botswana, presented as the one African country was economy wasnt in the toilet. They looked for the secret of its success, brushing past the obvious answer: location location location; in this case, on type of huge diamond deposits. However today the story in the Telegraph and the Guardian is that Botswana faces extinction from AIDS, now affecting 39% of its adult population.

Headline that could and probably should be taken two ways: Bush Readies Corporate Scandal Plan.

Jenna Bush is slapped on the wrist. A fine and a one-month suspension of her driving license. First, it is stupid to suspend drivers' licenses for offenses unrelated to driving. Second, she'll just get the Secret Service to drive her.

I keep hearing rumors about a fourth Indiana Jones
movie. The Times commented that Indie is an archaelogist searching for old relics before pointedly adding that Harrison Ford is 59 and Mishter Connery 70.

Evidently Stalin used to draw humorous caricatures. For example, in one cartoon, which Ilizarov believes Stalin drew around 1930, his finance minister, Nikolai Bryukhanov, is depicted naked, hanging from a rope by his genitals. You can find the drawing at the www.sunday-times.co.uk, world news section, but it's kind of small.

Weird shit

Putin, through Gazprom, just silenced the last independent national media outlet, a radio station. Not surprisingly, the event received very little coverage inside Russia. And probably not much anywhere else.

If nothing else comes from the war crimes trials of Milosevic, etc, at least it made Ariel Sharon this week have to avoid Belgium, where an investigation of his war crimes is going on (the old ones in Lebanon, not the new ones). Not, of course, that being banned from Belgium is especially onerous.

Click here; don't ask any questions, just do it.

It is now illegal in Colorado to wear aluminum underwear. "This is serious business," insists State Sen. Stephanie Takis, who sponsored the bill. "We have laws against using crowbars as theft devices, but if you were lining your underwear with aluminum foil, that was not a crime." It is now. Apparently, shoplifters found such so-called "iron pants" allow them to sneak stolen items past anti-theft scanners at store doors. The law also allows store security officers to detain people who "crackle when they walk," but provides an exception for aluminum britches worn for "personal amusement". (Colorado Springs Gazette)

Dubya has been told by his advisors to look more relaxed. So he's been playing golf, which as we all know is very presidential. And he cheated, which is also very presidential.

From the NY Times review of Scary Movie 2: "Perhaps, in a rare instance of subtle social satire, this film is being released on July 4 to remind America of the high cost of freedom of speech."

Decision-making

I just got a call from the Chronicle. The caller asked if I was the decision-maker of the household. I said, "Yes, and I'm gonna make a decision now." And hung up the phone. How I do adore a straight line.

Israel says that it is sticking to the cease-fire, except for tracking down and assassinating people.

Zhirinovsky (born Eidelstein??) admits that his father was a Jew.

300 witches are killed in Congo-Kinshasa.

The Dubai husband who divorced his wife by text message
is back with her.

In Britain, the Co-op has decided to resist EU directives not to sell under-size fruit and vegetables. The headline (in both the Times and Daily Telegraph): We Will Fight Them on the Peaches.

NY Times business section headline: "Burger King Pledges Humane Use of Animals." For example, they're planning to eliminate the 1% beef content of their hamburgers. According to the Burger King spokesmodel, "We are the caretakers of God's creation."

Vladimir Putin met Jack Nicholson yesterday, and I still haven't thought of anything funny to say about it. Evidently Putin's favorite movie of Nicholson's was the (banned in the USSR) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Putin was in the KGB at the time, so he may have thought it was a comedy.

Cheney is getting a pacemaker. Well, they're always saying that Bush is "a little slow," so maybe Cheney should just use him. Cheney said "that he had no long-term concerns about his health". Maybe he should re-phrase that.

So the writer who led Clarence Thomas's character assassination of Anita Hill admits that he made stuff up and blackmailed a witness with information supplied by Thomas. I've been waiting all week since then for anyone, and I mean anyone at all in politics or the media or professional wrestling, to call for his resignation. No one else has, so consider it done. As I remarked in my corner of the ether when Clinton admitted lying to everyone including the Cabinet members who he had front for him about That Woman and no one resigned in protest, shame is absolutely dead in politics.

So every review of Tomb Raider (and no, I wasn't thinking of seeing it, but I do enjoy reviews of bad movies) mentions Angelina Jolie's physical attributes. One could say that they review Angelina Jolie's physical attributes. The NY Times Week In Review section had excerpts from a bunch of reviews just about her lips, but let's face it, even the Daily Show's incredibly gay film reviewer talked about her breasts. When did this become ok? Indeed, is it ok, given that the studios do spend a lot of money to buy a nice pair of breasts, with actress attached, in the hope of using them to open a movie. In Swordfish, for example, a badly reviewed film that just opened, Halle Barrie went topless for the first time and was paid an extra $250,000. Each. Under those circumstances, perhaps it would be appropriate to review the breasts just as one would do for any other expensive special effect ("Every penny is right there up on the screen"). Maybe we need another drawing for that little man in the SF Chronicle.

I forgot to mention the initiative in North Dakota to change its name to Dakota, because evidently "North Dakota" evokes an image of boredom and cold. Or is that Canada?

In case you thought Iran was going to rejoin civilization, the mad mullahs rule that a woman should be flogged 100 times and then stoned while buried up to her neck (men are buried up to their waist and if they have confessed and can escape, they go free). Evidently the size of the stones is carefully regulated. If she survives, which she won't, she gets 16 years in jail. It's for adultery and murder, if that matters, although last month a woman was stoned to death for acting in porno films. Everyone's a critic.

That whole squeaky clean Vicente Fox was trying for didn't last very long. Elected on an austerity campaign, he is refurbishing the presidential mansion, and I really would like to know what you get if you spend $443 each on bath towels. The remote control curtains are $19,000 each.

Sony, the company recently discovered to have invented fake reviewers for its print ads and fake "real people" for its commercials, has rented some real US Army Rangers and combat helicopters for a Ridley Scott film. Better yet, the US military is being deployed in a foreign country--Morocco--on behalf of a movie studio.

Ethnic cleansing comes to Macedonia. Serbs are rioting because of a cease-fire. And that's the side we're on.

In today's mail I received a form from my insurance
company telling me that they'd re-evaluated one of last year's claims and are increasing their payment by $0.12.

Nixon's dog Checkers is to be dug up and buried next to Nixon in Yorba Linda. Next to Nixon for all eternity.

A couple of Russian military planes were almost seized by debt collectors at a Paris air show, but flew off instead, as planes will do.

Interesting piece by William Saletan in Slate comparing the strategies of anti-abortion and anti-death penalty activists.
He says that the foot-in-the-door, slippery-slope strategy that led the former to go after so-called partial-birth abortions is being replicated by the latter in going after the execution of the mentally retarded.

Dead children, dead dog, dead hot tub...

The father of the 5 children whose mother killed them explains: "She wasn't in the right frame of mind." That cleared it up for me, so I didn't bother to read the actual story.

The guy who threw the dog into traffic in a road rage incident (very big news in the Bay Area for a while), is sentenced to 3 years in prison, which the Daily Show explained is actually 21 anal-rape years.

A Washington Post story explains that the California fake energy crisis is damaging the hot tub business. I foresee a mass exodus from Marin County. Something like the Okies, but with hot tubs strapped to the SUVs as they seek a better life.

Bush sent a messenger to Congress to threaten to veto the Patients' Bill of Rights, as they were discussing it. I mean a formal messenger, not quite up to Black Rod's standards, but some sort of formal thing I don't recall having seen before. I watched a bit of the debate on C-SPAN, or actually I watched Phil Gramm for two minutes, after which I felt like I needed health care. He was explaining how forcing health plans to cover Emergency Room visits made ERs unwilling to negotiate prices with insurance companies because under this provision they could charge whatever they wanted, so really we should be restricting people's ability to go to emergency rooms. That sort of logic is the best argument there is for a single-payer health plan. There is an article by Michael Kinsley on this in Slate that's worth reading.

So a 62-year old woman had implanted an embryo from her brother, crippled by 1992 since he tried to blow his brains out. It's not incest, she insists, because the egg, obviously, isn't hers. The offspring would ensure inheritance worth $3 million. On today's Jerry Springer: high tech hillbillies. Worse, they're French.

Jesse Helms is complaining that Bush Lite over-praised
Vladimir Putin. "For these reasons," Helms said, "Mr. Putin was far from deserving the powerful political prestige and influence that comes from an excessively personal endorsement by the president of the Untied States." (typo courtesy of the AP). Yes, Jesse, George Bushs's opinion really does carry that much weight in the world. I know I had to rethink my opinion of Putin because George looked into his soul. Yes, Bush's recommendation is worth a shade below that of one in an ad for a Sony movie.

Saw someone in a t-shirt in Berkeley the other day that said "Satan is a big pooh-pooh head". Probably a Graduate Theological Union student.

Failed to catch the state opening of Parliament today, though I suppose it's available on the Web. I always like to see them slam the door on Black Rod, which only sounds dirty. Only caught some of the provisions of the Queen's Speech before the London Times website packed up, but evidently Blair will eliminate jury trials, the presumption of innocence, and protection against double jeopardy.

But not fox hunting, not yet anyway. The queen practically ran out of the chamber after reading the speech in her usual monotone, so that she could get to the races.

The next feminist outrage (that is, outrage to feminists), will be a study from St Lawrence University which says that women are more likely to get pregnant from rape than from consensual sex
(8% v. 3.1% for women who are using no contraception and actually trying to get pregnant). This "proves," sort of, that rape is a sound evolutionary strategy, which is why it will piss feminists off.

The floodgates are open. The 2nd federal execution. The Attorney general, who doesn't see how 17 of 19 people on the federal death row being non-white could possibly be racist, insists that this execution is ok, because not only is the prisoner Hispanic, but so were his victims and the judge and I forget who else, maybe the prosecutor and some of the jurors. No, Mr. Ashcroft, that's why those people are allowed to call Garza a "wet-back" or possible a "beaner" and you are not, not why he should be executed. Ignoring that his consular rights and a couple of international treaties were violated, the jury was told that he committed murders in Mexico (in addition to those with which he was charged), despite not having been convicted in Mexico--or indeed tried--or indeed arrested.

According to Putin, the arms race is back on.
Thanks, Georgie.

Well, this whole post-Cold War thing is a real let-down anyway. Bulgaria just put its old child king back in charge, despite the fact that he's spent only 2 months of the last 55 years in the country. I'm sure that all his experience in fascist Spain will be a big help in getting Bulgaria back on its feet.

Putin says that he tried out his not very good English on Bush, but he thinks Bush only pretended to understand him. There isn't any joke I could put here that wouldn't be too easy.

Dubya was in Poland yesterday. So the prime minister of Poland, whoever that is, turned to him and said, "Hey I just heard a great joke. How many George Bushes does it take...."

This is his first visit to Europe and I'm reminded of Reagan's first visit to South America, when he came back with the revelation that they were all like different countries down there. Bush has learned the opposite lesson. "I will express to President Putin that Russia is a part of Europe". I'm sure he'll be happy to hear that. Don't tell George that Russia is also a part of Asia; it'll just confuse him. His speech was one long geography lesson. "Our vision of Europe must also include the Balkans." (Headline elsewhere in the Times: US Doesn't Want to Join Any NATO Mission Into Macedonia). "The Europe we are building must include Ukraine". Poland is evidently at the heart of Europe. The Baltics, on the other hand, didn't get a look in.

All of Europe's new democracies, he said, should have the same chance to join the institutions of Europe as Europe's "old democracies." Well, I said it was a geography lesson, not a history lesson. Old democracies indeed. Bush thanked Poland for acting as a bridge to the new democracies of Europe. That's usually what people--Stalin and Hitler, say--call Poland before they send tanks across it. The autobahn of Europe. I trust you noticed that the "institutions of Europe" meant NATO. He assured Russia that NATO is not an enemy of Russia. I said it was not a history lesson. He also said that Poland was not an enemy of Russia. I believe I just said it was not a history lesson. He also said that Warsaw was "razed by the Nazis and destroyed by the Soviets. Its people were mostly displaced." All except the spleens, I guess. When exactly did the Soviets destroy Warsaw?

Amusingly, he defined Communism as materialism and said that man (for a speech presumably written by Condi, its language is consistently sexist; it would not have gone over well if it had been turned in for the Stevenson Core Course) must find goals greater than mere consumption. This is George "You'll take the gear shift of my SUV when you pry it from my cold dead hands" Bush talking.

His aides are telling the papers that behind closed doors Bush is actually a serious statesman. That's interesting, because behind closed doors I'm actually quite thin.

Hey, trust Bush to go to Sweden, Sweden mind you, and start riots and shootings.

A Japanese court rules that compensation to atomic bomb survivors doesn't apply to those living outside the country, like say Koreans brought to Japan as slaves.

British supermarkets are working on changing fruit in order to make it more appealing to children. They're going to carbonate it. Really. Oranges and grapes are said to taste quite good carbonated, but the tomatoes are a bit strange. And it doesn't work with bananas, which explode if you try it. Actually, that would appeal to children too.

Something that never occurred to me. Mein Kampf is still under copyright. The copyright is held by the Bavarian finance ministry, but the book is banned in Germany. In Britain, the money since 1976 has been going to a charity for Jewish refugees from Germany.

The likely next mayor of Berlin is openly gay--the most prominent German gay politician. In contrast, the British Tory party's next leader, at the very least, has had some gay experiences.

FAIR points out that the treasury secretary would like to abolish corporate taxes. Also Social Security and Medicare. I had noticed at the time, but hadn't realized that it was completely buried. This is the same guy who decided to hold on to stock he was supposed to have divested himself of until his boss's policies made their value go way up. And Karl Rove met the CEO of a company he has stock in to advise him on a merger which will make the value of that stock go up. Nice to know that this admin is as ethical as we expect from Republicans.

Incidentally, in 1951 British intelligence concluded that the US was planning a preventive nuclear strike on the USSR in 1952.

A LAY preacher who claimed that God would look after him yesterday failed to persuade magistrates that divine protection was a substitute for motor insurance.

Peter David, 66, who preaches in chapels and on street
corners across South Wales, tried to persuade police that he had the highest level of cover of all, and that it meant he did not need an MoT certificate or road tax either.