A symbol both Gallic and phallic!

I'm somewhat bemused to read of a woman who's "had a commitment ceremony performed" - not with a human partner, but with the Eiffel Tower!




Perhaps unsurprisingly, she's from the West Coast.

A San Francisco woman says her affection for the Eiffel Tower goes beyond admiration to sexual attraction and romantic commitment.

The woman had a commitment ceremony performed with the Parisian tower two years ago and changed her name to Erika Eiffel to reflect her romantic love of the landmark, ABC News reported Wednesday.

"Her structure is just amazing. You know, she's got subtle, subtle curves, you know," Eiffel, 36, said of her inanimate "partner." "I just, it's almost like I heard her crying out, saying, 'Somebody, notice me.'"

She says she is part of a small group of people who call themselves "objectum sexuals," or those who are sexually attracted to objects and not people. The objects of their desire can be home computers, musical instruments or monuments such as the Eiffel Tower.

Er . . . well, if you say so! Personally, I'd have thought the relationship somewhat unrewarding. After all, once you've girded (or, in this case, girdered) your loins and made the commitment, what the heck do you do for a honeymoon?

Of course, the idea of a relationship with a musical instrument is a bit weird too. I mean, it sheds a whole new light on the story of Tubby the Tuba, for a start!

(I'm reminded of a retreat I attended back in 2002, preached by a nun. One of her rather New-Age instructions was to have us imagine that we were musical instruments, being 'played' by God in various ways. I'm afraid I quite ruined the touchy-feely, warm-fuzzy mood she was trying to establish by walking around for the rest of the day, intoning gravely to everyone I met, "I am a flute. Blow me!" The other participants dissolved in helpless giggles, but she rather huffily accused me of not taking her instruction seriously - a charge to which I gleefully admitted!)



Peter

Another innocent man cleared - but too late

A Texas man has been cleared of a rape for which he was convicted over 20 years ago - but too late for him to benefit from it. He died in prison in 1999.

A judge in a Travis County courtroom has formally cleared the name of a man wrongfully convicted of rape.

Timothy Cole died in prison in 1999 – 13 years into a 25 year sentence for the sexual assault of a Texas Tech University student.

Family members of Tim Cole said after Tuesday's hearing they’re pushing for new laws to be enacted at the State Capitol, as they mark the end of a two decade struggle for justice.

"The evidence is crystal clear that Timothy Cole died in prison an innocent man," said State District Judge Charles Baird, who formally exonerated Cole on Tuesday, after listening to testimony in the case in February.

DNA tests performed last year showed Cole was not the rapist, and those results implicated a man already in prison - who confessed to the crime in the mid-90s but was ignored by authorities in Lubbock County.

Four years after Jerry Wayne Johnson admitted he was the rapist – Cole died in prison from complications after an asthma attack.

This is why I'm unalterably opposed to the death penalty, in all cases except the most severe, where it's too dangerous to keep someone alive and in custody. Case after case like this has demonstrated that convictions aren't foolproof: and executing even one innocent person is too many for my conscience.

Mr. Cole wasn't executed, but nevertheless, the final 13 years of his life were effectively taken from him by his wrongful conviction. One hopes that the rapid spread of DNA technology will help to minimize such miscarriages of justice in future.

May Mr. Cole rest in peace, exonerated at last among those who knew him: and may the lessons learned from his case help to exonerate others who might otherwise have suffered his fate.

Peter

The wrong kind of hot water!

It seems that natural gas wells in Colorado have contaminated the drinking water in a local house - with highly unusual results!

Looking at the video, I can't help but wonder what would happen if a member of the household were to be barbecuing meat outside, fortified by several glasses of lemonade, or iced tea, or whatever, made with that tap water. All that gas has to go somewhere, surely? So, an unexpected attack of flatulence, in close proximity to the grill, might produce a barbecued backside instead of brats and burgers!



Peter

Teens, cellphones, and parents' money

I'm strongly opposed to giving teens their own cellphones, unless they're in a situation where they simply have to be able to call parents for transport or other assistance - and even then, they should be on the simplest and most basic of plans, otherwise they'll waste so much time on talking, texting and sending pictures to their friends that their other responsibilities will suffer. After all, teens aren't noted for their maturity!

This is perfectly borne out by a news report from Wyoming.

In one month, a Cheyenne teenager sent 10,000 text messages and received about the same - all while her family's plan did not include texting.

That means the family's provider - Verizon - charged them for each incoming and outgoing text.

The girl's parents, Gregg and Jaylene Christoffersen, thought texting had been disabled, so one can imagine their surprise when they got the monthly phone bill and it asked for $4,756.25.

"It just hit us like a rock, like you're stepping into a bus," Gregg Christoffersen said.

The bill was legit.

Dena Christoffersen, 13, had apparently been sending most of these messages at school. That's more than 300 texts within an eight-hour period every day for the whole month.

Needless to say, it drew attention away from what she should have been doing: paying attention in class.

"She went from As and Bs one semester to Fs in two months," Dena's dad said.

Hours after the enormous bill arrived, Gregg Christoffersen took a hammer to his daughter's phone.




He and Jaylene also grounded Dena until the end of school.

And about time too!

Peter

The economic outlook is still gloomy

Despite all the joyful prognostications of the optimists, I'm afraid I still don't see much light at the end of the economic tunnel - unless it's an oncoming train, of course! The various rescue packages passed by the US Government aren't addressing the real problems that caused our present mess: in fact, they're perpetuating many of those problems. A few articles in recent days make this point very clear.

Kevin Phillips sees inflation as a real danger in the short to medium term.

"The Democrats have replaced the Republicans as the big benefactors to the financial community," said Kevin Phillips, author of Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.

"The financial community is donating more to Democrats than ever before and you've got more Democrats in the financial community, creating a very powerful pattern there. I don't think you're going to see the Obama administration and Congress willing to be tough enough in dealing with these things," he told Reuters.

. . .

A year ago, he warned of a the pending explosion of a 25-year "multibubble" that started in the 1980s, when the financial sector accounted for 10 percent to 12 percent of the U.S. economy had started metastasizing into an "arguably crippling" 20 percent to 21 percent by the middle of this decade.

Overleveraging and easy credit was bound to create disaster, he warned.

Phillips assigns much of the blame to former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, but perhaps even more on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who he calls a "disaster," and his predecessor, Alan Greenspan.

Phillips calls Paulson a Wall Street insider who was looking out for his own, and Bernanke an academic misguidedly trying to refight the 1930s Great Depression. Together they formed the wrong team at the wrong time whose ad hoc approach threw away hundreds of billions of dollars and more than doubled the Fed's balance sheet, he says.

"What you're seeing Bernanke do is he's trying to create a bailout reflationary bubble, which he can't describe as a bubble, just as Greenspan couldn't describe the housing mortgage bubble as a bubble. What we're seeing by Bernanke is a covert attempt to rebubble," Phillips told Reuters.

Nouriel Roubini, the financial 'prophet' who predicted the present crisis years ago, seems to agree.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and chairman of economic research firm RGE Monitor, said on Tuesday that he expected more dour macroeconomic data and problems in the banking and housing sectors, as well as pressures on consumers.

Big stimulus packages will eventually slow the rate at which economies contract, but that will take time, he added.

"There will be a light at the end of the tunnel somewhere down the line, later rather than sooner," he said at a Toronto news conference, which took place ahead of a Sprott Asset Management event entitled "A Night with the Bears."

Roubini, who made a name for himself by sounding early warning signs about housing bubbles and credit crises, earlier told Canada's BNN television that he still believed the recent market upturn represented a bear market rally, and not a change in sentiment.

. . .

"I am more a realist than a pessimist. I'll be the first one to call for the bottom of this economic contraction, recovery of the market when I see a sustained economic and therefore financial recovery," he said.

Nassim Taleb has listed ten points that, he claims, must be implemented to avoid another economic meltdown like the present crisis. In very abbreviated form, they are:

1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too big to fail.

2. No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.

3. People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. The economics establishment (universities, regulators, central bankers, government officials, various organisations staffed with economists) lost its legitimacy with the failure of the system. It is irresponsible and foolish to put our trust in the ability of such experts to get us out of this mess. Instead, find the smart people whose hands are clean.

4. Do not let someone making an “incentive” bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.

5. Counter-balance complexity with simplicity.

6. Do not give children sticks of dynamite, even if they come with a warning. Complex derivatives need to be banned because nobody understands them and few are rational enough to know it.

7. Only Ponzi schemes should depend on confidence. Governments should never need to “restore confidence”.

8. Do not give an addict more drugs if he has withdrawal pains. Using leverage to cure the problems of too much leverage is not homeopathy, it is denial.

9. Citizens should not depend on financial assets or fallible “expert” advice for their retirement.

10. Make an omelette with the broken eggs. Finally, this crisis cannot be fixed with makeshift repairs, no more than a boat with a rotten hull can be fixed with ad-hoc patches. We need to rebuild the hull with new (stronger) materials; we will have to remake the system before it does so itself.

Felix Salmon agrees with Taleb, but points out:

Yves Smith calls [Taleb] a must read, and one which she is “highly confident will never be implemented”; she’s right on both counts. But in many ways that’s the strength of this piece: it both must be implemented and can’t be implemented at the same time. Which constitutes a massive policy dilemma.

Taleb’s first principle is that “nothing should ever become too big to fail”. But all economies have too-big-to-fail institutions; they always have, and they always will. Looking at the rest of the list, how on earth do you stop the financial sector from awarding its employees bonuses, or creating complex products? Derivatives are, at heart, bilateral contracts: how can you ban two consenting adults from entering in to such a contract?

Taleb’s big idea, these days, is that we of necessity are moving into a world with vastly less debt than we’ve been used to. I’m not entirely clear on what his timeframe for this is. A quote from my (boss’s boss’s) boss, Tom Glocer, seems germane here: “I’ve met a lot of smart people in my life, and they’re the ones who are eventually always right and they always know where things are going [and] they always underestimate friction in the world and how long it takes to get there.”

Good articles all. I highly recommend clicking on the links and reading them in full, if you're interested in and/or concerned about our economy and where it's going.

Peter

A future football star in the making?

Perhaps not . . .

I wonder what the dog was thinking? Probably something like "Strange puppies these humans raise!"



Peter

A cosmic hand on a gigantic scale

I'm amazed at a report on Space.com concerning a recent X-ray image from NASA.

In a new image from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, high-energy X-rays emanating from the nebula around PSR B1509-58 have been colored blue to reveal a structure resembling a hand reaching for some eternal red cosmic light.




The star now spins around at the dizzying pace of seven times every second -- as pulsars do -- spewing energy into space that creates the scene.

Strong magnetic fields, 15 trillion times stronger than the Earth's magnetic field, are thought to be involved, too. The combination drives an energetic wind of electrons and ions away from the dying star. As the electrons move through the magnetized nebula, they radiate away their energy as X-rays.

The red light actually a neighboring gas cloud, RCW 89, energized into glowing by the fingers of the PSR B1509-58 nebula, astronomers believe.

The scene, which spans 150 light-years, is about 17,000 light years away, so what we see now is how it actually looked 17,000 years ago, and that light is just arriving here.

What a fascinating image!

Peter

Not your average Church leaders!

It seems that the editorial staff of the newspaper of Brigham Young University in Utah have egg on their collective faces . . .

The newspaper of Utah's Brigham Young University said papers had to be reprinted after a front page typo used "apostates" in the place of "apostles."

Rich Evans, editorial manager for The Daily Universe, said newspaper employees retrieved as many of the 18,500 copies of Monday's paper they could find and reprinted them to correct the typo, The Salt Lake Tribune reported Tuesday.

Evans said the mistake was in a caption on the photo of this week's Latter Day Saints General Conference. The caption mistakenly had the word "apostates" in the place of "apostles," Evans said.

"Members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostates and other general authorities raise their hands in a sustaining vote Saturday morning," the uncorrected caption read.

The reprinted newspaper included the correction as well as an apology to the apostles.

"It was the worst possible mistake," Evans said.

"It would have been worse if it were done intentionally, as some have thought," Evans said. "But after talking to the people, we found it was an innocent mistake."

Evans said the mistake occurred when the newspaper's spell checking software noticed "apostles" was misspelled and offered the closest word it could find, "apostates."

Of course, given some of the shenanigans in which various leaders of a number of churches have been caught in flagrante delicto over recent years, the term might not always be a misnomer . . .



Peter

Doofus Of The Day #192

The driver of this SUV surely qualifies - as do the inane written comments by the person who posted the video!

Peter

Someone up there loves her!

From Germany comes the news of a woman who survived several car accidents in the space of less than an hour.

A German woman was involved in three car accidents in less than an hour that left a total of seven vehicles damaged but she suffered only slight injuries from the series of mishaps, police said Tuesday.

The 69-year-old woman from Berlin first crashed into three cars while trying to pull out of a supermarket car park on the Baltic resort island of Usedom.

Then, she accidentally stepped on the accelerator and sped across a lawn before crashing into a nearby house, police said. She was taken to hospital in an ambulance but that vehicle was then hit by a truck.

"She was actually fortunate that no one was seriously hurt in any of the accidents," said Zinnowitz police spokesman Axel Falkenberg. "The accidents were a little bit like dominoes toppling."

I suggest she goes out (on foot!) and buys as many lottery tickets as she can afford. With luck like that, she's bound to win!





Peter

So much for universal health care . . .

I've been cynically amused by the closet socialists calling for the US to adopt a system of nationalized, universal health care. They clearly haven't learned from the many horror stories emanating from countries that have done so. (On the other hand, reality has never been much of an issue for the Left - their ideology blinds them to it! Their whole focus is on how things should be, not how they really are.)

The latest such horror story comes from England, where the National Health Service's shortcomings have once again hit center stage.

Malnutrition killed more than 240 patients on NHS wards in 2007, the highest toll in a decade, figures show.

. . .

Since 1997, 2,311 hospital patients have died from malnutrition and the effects of hunger.

There were 209 cases in 1997, when Tony Blair was elected under a pledge to save the NHS. Ten years later the toll was 242.

In one area the number of deaths from malnutrition rose by more than 50 per cent.

The figures also show that over the past decade 55 patients have starved to death in council-run care homes.

. . .

Food is often so unappetising that patients do not eat - and 11 million meals are taken away untouched every year.

Sometimes food is placed out of patients' reach and taken away untouched, because nurses claim they are too busy to help patients eat.

. . .

Some of the patients would have been suffering from malnutrition when they entered hospital.

However, the figures come just weeks after it was revealed that more patients are discharged from hospital with malnutrition than are admitted with the condition - and the overall figures are rising.

In 1997, 70,658 patients were admitted with malnutrition and 75,431 discharged from hospital with it.

By 2007, these figures had jumped to 130,594 admitted and 139,127 discharged.

There's more at the link.

I hope and pray that those campaigning for a universal health care system in the USA will continue to be thwarted . . . but it's a priority for our present Administration, and they don't seem interested in learning from such horror stories. We may yet end up like this, or like Canada, where people are dying because they're having to wait too long for treatment (unless they can afford to come to the US and pay for the necessary treatment out of their own pocket, as many of them do).

Next time someone tries to sell you a socialist bill of goods about national health care, ask them about this - and watch them duck and dive! The truth is not in them.

Peter

Talk about marketing chutzpah!

Would you believe that some people are paying up to $60 for a jump rope - with no rope?

Fox News describes the product as follows:

What better way to get in shape than jumping rope, right? But for many jumping rope isn’t as easy as it seems. Enter the JumpSnap ropeless jump rope.




The patented computerized ropeless jump rope claims to give you all the benefits of jumping rope sans the rope making it ideal for any fitness level. Simply enter your height and weight and the computer will coach you through a workout.




It counts calories, exercise time and alerts you when you’ve reached your exercise time or number of jumps goal. JumpSnap sells for $59.95.

Oh, sure, it has an impressive list of details and bells and whistles: but the fact remains, it's a jump rope without a rope! Am I the only one who feels like the child in the story of 'The Emperor's New Clothes'? There's no bloody rope! How can they call it a 'jump rope' when rope is conspicuous by its absence? I've heard of selling something with no strings attached, but this is ridiculous!

On the other hand, maybe it's not so strange . . . after all, the US electorate just voted into office a President and Administration whose policies are very like the JumpSnap: all hype and no substance, for which we'll all have to pay dearly!

Peter

Safely home

I got in this evening from Alaska, basking in the local temperature of 67° - a pleasant change from the 28° at Anchorage airport last night! Everyone else here is shivering and complaining that it's a cold snap, compared to our normal spring temperatures of high 70's to low 80's, but believe me, after snow and ice, it's positively balmy!

I had a great time in the frozen North. Alaskan people are absolutely charming, in my limited experience of them - a real frontier society, with a great deal of emphasis on self-reliance, get-up-and-go determination, and none (at least none that I saw) of the reliance on the 'welfare State' that seems to plague those States further South. I enjoyed my stay, and look forward to returning there sometime soon.

Blogging will get back to normal over the next couple of days.

Peter

Cars - and drivers - on tape

I've found a number of interesting videos of cars and their perils, caught on video.

To begin, here's a rally car in Portugal that took the scenic route down the mountainside. The second half of the clip shows the view from inside the car! Amazingly, the driver and navigator were uninjured.

Here's a Le Mans Series sports car attempting a hill climb. Seems a bit suicidal to me at those speeds! - but he made it.

Next, some rally participants offer their help to a fellow racer to get his vehicle unstuck from the sand. Bet they wish they hadn't . . .

Former Formula 1 World Champion Damon Hill shows a journalist how to handle an AMG Mercedes-Benz:

And, finally, a fun advertisement for Mercedes-Benz.

Peter

The running of the . . . sheep???

Thanks to Grace B. for e-mailing this story to me.

It seems that the world-famous running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain (and elsewhere) has inspired others. According to a New Zealand report:

Safety arrangements at New Zealand's answer to Spain's "Running of the Bulls" - the "Running of the Sheep" – are being reviewed after hundreds of the animals ran amok through Te Kuiti injuring a spectator on Saturday.




They leapt over barriers designed to keep them on the main street and protect 7000 spectators who turned up to watch the annual event.

All semblance of order completely broke down with the sheep crossing the main road and the rail track before heading into the hills.




One woman was taken to hospital after being knocked unconscious when she was bowled over by the frightened sheep.

There's more at the link.

Clearly, this year's event was something of an aberration. Last year's was a lot more peaceful, to judge from this video clip.

Now, if they'd import a few sets of longhorns from Texas (the horns, not the whole steer!) and mount them on the rams, things might get a whole lot more interesting in the streets of Te Kuiti!






Peter

Burmese atrocities exposed

Many of us will remember the crackdown by the military dictatorship in Myanmar (formerly Burma) a couple of years ago. This remains one of the most repressive, evil and vicious governments in the world, as bad as anything dreamed up in the past. Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot would feel right at home with that nation's demented demagogues.

The BBC reports that a few courageous reporters have smuggled out footage of the crackdown on democratic dissent in Myanmar. It's been compiled into a film.

A monk looks into a camera at a monastery in Rangoon. His face is bruised and swollen.

Troops came during the night, he says. They beat the monks and took dozens of them away. He doesn't know where they are.

Outside, the camera records pools of blood on the floor, shards of glass and rubble.

The date was 27 September 2007 and the man behind the camera was Aung Htun.

He was one of a network of people working as undercover reporters for an Oslo-based NGO and opposition broadcaster, the Democratic Voice of Burma, when a fuel price hike triggered anti-government protests.

The protests spread from activists to monks and students, and became an uprising - the most significant challenge to Burma's generals in almost two decades.

Most foreign journalists are banned from Burma and the military government censors all media.

But the undercover reporters used small hand-held cameras to record what was happening. Even as troops brutally suppressed the unrest, they took enormous risks to send the pictures out of the country.

Media organisations used them to report on the unfolding crisis and the footage was broadcast around the world, defying government efforts to hide events from international eyes.

The camcorder material - and the story of the journalists' efforts to obtain it - has now been turned into film by Danish director Anders Ostergaard.

Called "Burma VJ", the docu-drama gives a powerful visual record of how the uprising unfolded.

. . .

Before September 2007, Mr Ostergaard had been planning to work with Joshua to make a short programme about day-to-day life inside Burma.

But that all changed when the protests erupted. "We had to revise everything when we realised that we had this incredible footage coming in," he said.

Aung Htun filmed some of the most memorable material.

He started working for DVB shortly before the protests. He was fed up with state censorship and wanted to "find a way to show the daily life of Burmese people".

He had a week of training with the camcorder and then got to work. The reporters did not all know each other. They communicated via mobile phone or the internet.

When the protests erupted, he went to film them, regardless of the risk. Someone told him about the raid on the monastery, so he went there and persuaded the monks to talk to him.

Later that day he went downtown. He was one of at least three secret cameramen in the crowd when a soldier shot Japanese journalist Kenji Nagai - who was also filming - at close range.

"We could hear [the soldiers cocking] their triggers, so we knew they were going to shoot," he said. "But I couldn't see him very well, we were in the smoke and the tear gas."

Aung Htun was not caught by the authorities. But some of his colleagues paid a high price for their covert work.

As troops ended the uprising, the reporters' headquarters in Rangoon was discovered and raided. Three people are now in prison; many others had to flee. The network broke up in disarray.

. . .

Back in Denmark, Anders Ostergaard's team began putting the material together.

Some footage arrived straight away via DVB. But more was still arriving months later, smuggled out of Burma into Thailand.

Some of it arrived with no information on date or location. So the producers used satellite images from Google Earth to identify places and held painstaking consultations to establish the chronology.

"It was crucial to understand what was going on when, both for [a record of] the uprising and to understand the emotion of the time," Mr Ostergaard said.

Deciding how much to show - places, faces in the crowd or among the marchers - was a constant dilemma, but he had to find a balance. Showing faces was "something you have to do if you want to tell this story", he said.

Mr Ostergaard hopes that the film will reignite international interest in Burma and "let people know we have not forgotten them". It has already won several awards.

There's more at the link.

For those who may not have seen reports at the time, here are a couple of video clips. The first documents the Myanmar military government's offensive against its own Karen tribespeople living near the border with Thailand.

Here's a CNN report on the military crackdown against democratic protesters in 2007.

And finally, here's the trailer for the new film, 'Burma VJ'. You can learn more about the movie at its Web site.

Let's be thankful that we live in a nation where we can express dissent with our government without being shot, beaten or starved to death. Many aren't so fortunate.

Peter

Copy of original 'Schindler's List' discovered

I'm very pleased, from an historical point of view, to read that a carbon copy of the original 'Schindler's List' has been discovered in an Australian library.

An Australian library has discovered it has a carbon copy of the original complete “Schindler’s List,” detailing 801 of the more than 1,000 Jews saved by Oskar Schindler from Nazi extermination, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on Monday.

The 13-page list on yellowed paper includes the typed names, nationalities, birthplaces and mechanical skills, and was discovered by historian Olwen Pryke while she looking through author Thomas Keneally’s research papers for his book "Schindler’s Ark," which was later made into the Oscar-winning film "Schindler’s List."

"This list was hurriedly typed on April 18, 1945, in the closing days of WWII, and it saved 801 men from the gas chambers," Pryke told the paper, adding that the document was “an incredibly moving piece of history.”

Oskar Schindler was an unlikely hero: a member of the Nazi party who used Jewish forced labourers in his factory in Krakow, Poland, he became disgusted by violence towards Jews and sought to protect his workers. Because his factory had special status as essential for the war effort, he was able claim exemption for those Jews the Nazis wanted to deport to concentration camps. Women, children and people with disabilities were shown to be essential employees at the factory.

The list discovered in the New South Wales State Library archives is one of only a handful of carbon copies of the original, which does not survive. Pryke added that Schindler compiled a number of lists as he persuaded the Nazis not to send his workers to the camps.

This is a very important find for scholars of the Holocaust. There are a few other copies in existence, but in poor condition, and most of them incomplete. The one pictured below is in the Holocaust archives at Bad Arolsen in Germany.




Let's hope that this newly-discovered copy will be preserved for future generations - particularly to counter those who deny that the Holocaust ever happened.

(Oh - and if you've never seen 'Schindler's List', may I recommend it very highly? It's not easy viewing, by any means, but it's one of the most important films ever made, in my opinion.)

Peter

Farewell to Alaska - for now

Sometime between 3 and 4 a.m. Central time I'll be flying out of Anchorage airport, on the long journey back to Louisiana. It's a long trip, via Seattle and Houston, and I'll only get in at about seven or eight this evening.

It's been a lovely visit, and I'll certainly be back. Miss D. will be joining me in Texas at the end of April, so sometime in early June she can look for me to arrive here again. I hope the snow will have melted by then!




Regular blogging will resume on Tuesday.

Peter

Are world bodies institutionally biased against the poor?

I've noted the fuss and bother over the official launch of the Tata Motors Nano in India a few days ago. The car, reputed to be the cheapest in the world, will also be on sale in Europe and the US in due course, once a model is developed that conforms to local safety and emissions regulations.

However, as soon as the Nano was announced, officials with the United Nations and other world bodies began to make noises about how it 'wasn't the answer' to Third World traffic problems. Witness, for example, the reaction of Dr. R. K. Pachauri, head of the UN committee on climate change, and winner (with Al Gore) of the Nobel Peace Prize:

“This is not the transport option for the country of a billion people many of whom cannot afford to buy even a bus ticket,’’ said Dr Pachauri.

"This car was not going to drive away two wheelers from the road, as has not happened in case of Maruti 800 too," he said. He, however, sought to clarify that he had nothing personally against the car but against its usage and demanded more user charges and taxation on cars.

At the launch of the Nano earlier in the day, Ratan Tata had said Pachauri need not worry as the car would meet strict pollution control norms.

“I am not blaming the manufacturer for it, but would certainly say that they should better concentrate on investing in public transport,’’ Dr Pachauri said.

To a question, he said it would be wrong to think that the Tata car would be a substitute for two wheelers. It would be just an add-on to the chaotic traffic conditions.

Dr Pachauri blamed the policy makers for the increasing road congestion in Indian cities and towns, and said users of cars should be made to pay for the road space they were using. Giving the example of central London, he said the imposition of heavy user charge on those entering that part of the city had yielded results, so there was no reason that similar measures in Delhi should fail.

Note the institutional socialism, even racism, inherent in his attitudes. The individual commuter doesn't matter to him at all. The fact that there isn't, never has been, and (probably) never will be an adequate public transport service, so that the commuter has to use his own transport or get nowhere, is lost on him. Further, the 'right' of the authorities to impose 'user charges' on those who have no public transport alternative is completely unquestioned. Oh - and the current accident rate, deaths and injuries to those on two wheels rather than four, is also unmentioned. The Nano has the potential to significantly reduce this toll, by making commuter transport more affordable and safer: but you won't hear the bureaucrats and One-Worlders acknowledge that. All they want is a system that promotes central government authority at the expense of individual freedoms and individual choice. Heaven forbid that you should have any more freedom than they're willing to (reluctantly) grant you!

Peter

The bare essentials?

One has to smile at the efforts of pole-vaulter Romain Mesnil to find a new sponsor.

A French pole vaulting champion ran naked with his pole through the streets of Paris and posted the video on the Internet, hoping to draw attention to his quest for a new sponsorship deal.

Romain Mesnil, who won a silver medal at the 2007 Athletics World Championships in Osaka, was sponsored by Nike but says his contract expired last year and was not renewed.

"It was probably for budgetary and strategic reasons. It's the crisis," he wrote on his Web site.

It certainly attracted attention! Quite apart from being a feature of French news bulletins, it leaked onto YouTube, and even CNN's Anderson Cooper picked it up.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to have attracted any new sponsors as yet. Could this be because the wrong pole is attracting all the attention? Or is it that the recession has circumcised circumscribed the ability of companies to do that sort of thing?



Peter

Why I won't buy a condo - ever!

I owned a so-called 'sectional title' apartment - the local name for an individually-owned condo - in South Africa, many years ago, and was head of the Body Corporate (what we called the association of owners). I still have painful memories of trying to get unit owners to pay their dues, suing those who fell more than a few months behind, and juggling finances to keep the building operating.

It seems that current economic conditions are having a similar impact on condo associations all over the US, and particularly in Florida. Reuters reports:

Florida's condominium and homeowners' associations are facing what experts call a trickle-down disaster from the property crisis. Dozens and perhaps hundreds of condo buildings have budget shortfalls as thousands of owners, under water on their mortgages or in foreclosure, stop paying monthly fees.

"I call it a death spiral," Miami Beach city commissioner Jerry Libbin said. "It's a catastrophe in the making."

Nearly half of Florida's 18 million residents live in condo or homeowners associations, communities where owners pay monthly fees for common expenses like cleaning, landscaping, pool maintenance and building insurance.

When a unit owner stops paying monthly fees, which can range from $150 in a small building to over $1,000 in a luxury tower, a condo board must collect money from other owners to make up the shortfall. Rising fees or special assessments, or levies, can drive other vulnerable owners into insolvency.

No one seems sure how many condo buildings are in trouble but the number of calls to Florida's condo ombudsman could be an indicator. They are up tenfold in recent months.

. . .

Carol Housen, the board president at the Miami Beach condo where nearly half the units are in hot water, would talk about its problems only with an agreement that the address would not be published. It's tough to sell a condo with a bad reputation.

Housen points out chipped paint on the concrete walkways, which haven't been redone lately. Crown-of-thorns and bougainvillea plants are blooming but she wonders how they will survive with the landscaper visiting less frequently.

"Everything is not going to look as nice," said Housen, a property broker. "We had an exterminator once a month. Now he comes once every two months. We're not fertilizing the trees."

The story of this building is a familiar one.

The apartments were converted to condos at the height of a boom that saw prices -- inflated by speculation and fraud -- double within four years, then tumble in the last three. A one-bedroom, 560-square-foot (52-square-meter) unit that topped out near $200,000 might now get $70,000, leaving owners drowning in debt.

Still, said Housen, it could be worse. She pointed to a nearby tower where she said more than 200 of the 244 units have liens or lawsuits pending.

Housen said an upscale building not far away -- where units that once sold for over $1 million and are now priced below $500,000 -- has 16 troubled apartments of 44 in the building.

The crisis could mean serious pain for Miami Beach, a resort town with 88,000 residents and 42,000 condos. If debtors walk away from their units, buildings could become derelict.

"I haven't seen it yet, but I think we're going to see it," Housen said.

Condo advocates say banks are partly responsible for hobbling condo boards by being slow to foreclose on owners who have fallen behind.

Lenders don't become responsible for an apartment's costs until they foreclose and under current law, a bank is liable to pay only six months worth of fees in arrears, or 1 percent of the mortgage value, when it takes back a property.

Condo advocates say banks are deliberately stalling.

"There's no doubt in my mind it's done so they don't have to pay the fees," Rosa de la Camara, a lawyer with Becker & Poliakoff, a Florida firm that does condo legal work.

There's more at the link.

I guess this proves the old, old saying once more: if your own economic survival depends on the economic health of your neighbors, you're in trouble! After my experience with sectional title in South Africa, I vowed never again to own any property that was partly controlled by a condo or homeowners' association, was subject to community levies and rules, or anything like that. This story tells me I was right!

Peter

11,000 free pizzas?

It seems that Domino's Pizza has egg pizza on its face.

"Bailout" was the magic word as Domino's had to give away thousands of free pizzas because someone stumbled on an online promotion the company scrapped.

Domino's Pizza Inc. spokesman Tim McIntyre said Wednesday that the company prepared an Internet coupon for an ad campaign that was considered in December but not approved.

He says someone apparently typed "bailout" into a Domino's promo code window and found it was good for a free medium pizza.

Word about the code spread quickly Monday night on the Web and 11,000 free pizzas were delivered before it was deactivated Tuesday morning.

Cincinnati-area franchise owner John Glass says his 14 stores gave away more than 600 pies, but that Domino's promised to reimburse him.

I'd love to know how that code word got out there. Was it a worker at one of the advertising agencies for the promo, disgruntled at not getting the business, and wanting revenge? Was it sheer chance that made someone try words at random, hoping to strike it lucky?

Peter

OK, that's taking hygiene too far!

A German woman has divorced her husband for being rather too clean-minded for her (or anyone else's) taste.

German media reported the wife got through 15 years of marriage putting up with the man's penchant for doing household chores, tidying up and rearranging the furniture.

But she ran out of patience when he knocked down and rebuilt a wall at their home when it got dirty, Christian Kropp, court judge in the central town of Sondershausen, said on Thursday.

"I'd never had anyone seek a divorce for this," he said.

Ah . . . well, yes. Dusting is one thing. Demolition's quite another!



Peter

Gutsy!

A Detroit school counselor has hit the headlines.

A social worker at a high school in Detroit is being lauded as a hero after he stopped a 17-year-old boy who allegedly was carrying a sawed-off shotgun and wrestled the boy to the ground.

No one was injured.

The Detroit Free Press reports 41-year-old social worker Idris Herring saw the teen rush through a metal detector Thursday at Westside Academy and glimpsed what looked a gun.

The boy fled after Herring tackled him and no arrests had been reported Saturday. Detroit Public Schools police said they were seeking a warrant for the teen's arrest.

There's more at the link.

Congratulations and thanks to Mr. Herring, and I hope he receives some official recognition. Tackling a shotgun-wielding teen with your bare hands? That's gutsy in anyone's language.

Peter

Light blogging tonight

I apologize for the dearth of blog posts tonight. I've not been able to get an Internet signal at all on my wireless network, and I've only managed to get this one briefly by wardriving the neighborhood. I'll try to post more tomorrow.

I'm scheduled to leave Alaska (the volcano on Mount Redoubt permitting) in the small hours of Monday morning, and should be home by late that evening. Blogging should return to normal on Tuesday evening.

Peter

Can sex offenders be safely released from prison?

You may have read the Supreme Court's emergency interim ruling in the ongoing case of U.S. v. Comstock, announced yesterday.

The Supreme Court has blocked the imminent release of dozens of sex offenders who have served their federal sentences after the Obama administration claimed many of them remain "sexually dangerous."

Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday ordered that the men be kept in custody while the case works its way through a federal appeals court, which had ruled as many as 77 North Carolina inmates should be released, some as early as next week.

At issue is whether the government has the power to indefinitely detain prisoners who have served their sentences but could pose a public threat upon release. Such laws are known as "civil commitments."

The Justice Department filed papers with the high court Friday, asking that any release be put on hold until the justices have more time to consider the larger legal issues raised in their appeal.

Such an early release "would pose a significant risk to the public and constitute a significant harm to the interest of the United States," wrote Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who took office this month.

There's more at the link.

I have a deep and very personal interest in this matter, arising from my years of part-time and full-time work as a prison chaplain. I can see both sides of the situation. A prisoner who's completed his sentence has 'done his time', and wants to be released. He may have undergone treatment during his incarceration, and may genuinely believe that he won't reoffend. On the other hand, the track record of the majority of sex offenders demonstrates that most of them remain prone to reoffending. (Of course, I'm talking about real sex offenders, not those created by a stroke of the pen - for example, by legislation defining consensual underage sex between teenage lovers as a sex crime. It's not. It's human nature, and has been going on for as long as homo sapiens has been in existence, and will until we die out. The fact that dumbass legislators have decided to label it as a sex crime, equating it with rape, etc., doesn' t make it so in reality.)

There have been several occasions when I sat with psychologists at a prison, discussing the case of an inmate scheduled for release. All of us knew - knew, beyond a shadow of doubt - that he'd reoffend within a matter of weeks, even days. There was no doubt about this whatsoever in our minds . . . but we had no legal grounds to keep him behind bars. Even if we'd gone to court, and pleaded with the judge in the name of his future victims to keep him locked up, there wasn't anything the judge could have done. We've had to release them, and later read the reports of their new crimes. It's soul-destroying. (By the way, these weren't only sex offenders. Many were violent criminals, former drug addicts, who'd fried their brains through prolonged exposure to illegal narcotics, and no longer had any sense of judgment or morality.)

On the other hand, I'm sure that this new law - and others that will follow it - will be misused from time to time. I've no doubt that some corrections officials will try to apply it across the board, to any inmate who might possibly reoffend. They'll fear being sued if they don't, and he's released, and commits another crime. This means that some inmates who aren't a danger to society any longer will probably be locked up past the completion of their sentences, perhaps for the rest of their lives. That's completely unjust and unfair . . . but what's the alternative?

It's a heck of a dilemma. Part of me supports an indefinite sentence for any and all criminals likely to pose a serious risk to the physical safety of others, whether through sexual or violent assault, arson, etc. On the other hand, part of me is unequivocally opposed to such indefinite sentences, knowing that bureaucrats will use them indiscriminately in an attempt to cover their own backsides against future problems, irrespective of whether or not this causes undue harm to prisoners who don't deserve it.

What's your answer, readers? I'd love to hear from you in Comments.

Peter

Another recipe

Miss D. invited a number of her Alaskan friends to join us for supper last night, and I cooked the main dish for them. (Not to imply that she's not an excellent cook in her own right, of course!) I made chicken breasts with cranberries and Brie, which seemed to be well received. I thought some of you might like the recipe.

Buy chicken breasts in sufficient quantity, and sautée them to taste. When cooked (and it's best to have them all ready to eat together, when the rest of the meal is ready as well), slice them in half horizontally. Spread cranberry sauce (I prefer the type with lots of whole cranberries) thickly on one half, then top with thin slices of Brie cheese. Replace the top half of the chicken breast on top of the Brie. The heat from the breast will melt the Brie onto (and into) the cranberry sauce in a matter of moments.

Serve with whatever side dishes you choose (Miss D. made a great salad, and rice, yesterday evening). Eight people had no complaints last night, and I've yet to find anyone who doesn't think that this combination of flavors is very tasty indeed.

Some choose to spread the cranberry sauce, and layer the Brie, on top of the chicken breast, rather than cut it open and put the 'fillings' in the middle. This will work, of course: but I find that the cheese won't melt, if it's insulated from the heat of the chicken breast by the cranberries. I prefer the 'filling' to be hot and oozy. Also, if the chicken breasts are fairly thick, one can open them up and eat them one half at a time, spreading the 'filling' over both of them. Yummy!

Peter

Awwww!

Four Sumatran tiger cubs have just had their introduction to the big bad world at Paington Zoo in England.

The youngsters - two male, two female - huddled together to get used to the bright spring sunshine.




However, their curiosity soon got the better of them, and they slinked outside at Paignton Zoo in Devon to join their mother Banda.

Each cub has a unique pattern of stripes, which should help their keepers to tell them apart.

The zoo will asking the public to help name them by choosing from a shortlist on its website.

Zoo worker Neil Bemment said: 'At eight weeks the cubs are quite mobile and inquisitive but they still sleep a lot during the day. They are so gorgeous and healthy.'

The two male cubs are now eight kilos and seven kilos and the females seven kilos and six kilos.




They are the result of a breeding programme at the zoo, which is a member of the European Endangered species Programme for Sumatran tigers, part of the global effort to save the species from extinction.

There are thought to be just 400 Sumatran tigers left in the wild, mainly on the Indonesian island which gave them their name.

All together, now: Awwww!



Peter

New-technology cellphones pose privacy risk

It seems that the latest generation of 'smart' cellphones aren't quite as innocent as they may seem.

The latest handsets are so advanced they can reveal the location of the owner to within a few yards - along with their internet shopping habits, their interests and the names and addresses of their friends.

Although phone providers are not supposed to pass on this 'Big Brother' data without permission, a 'worryingly large number' of people give consent for the information to be sold to marketing companies, campaigners say.

Simon Davies, of human rights group Privacy International, said the danger came when customers signed up to contracts or downloaded new mobile phone applications without reading the small print.

One of the most potentially intrusive applications is Google Latitude, which lets mobile phone owners 'share' their location with anyone in the world.

Mr Davies added that the risks of such snooping software on these 'smart phones' were far more sinister than Google's controversial-Street View service.

'People are giving consent for mobile phone companies to pass on this information without realising the consequences,' he said.

. . .

'People should care because this sort of information can be passed to a third party such as a credit provider or a credit reference company. It provides an enormous database that could be cherry-picked by the Government or police.

. . .

Records of website visits, messages, phone calls and even real-life locations visited can be stored by a mobile phone company. Although each application is relatively harmless on its own, combining data from several is potentially lucrative.

Glyn Read, a former marketing director of SAS Institute, a leading behavioural analysis company, said the ‘real worry’ would come when governments start to demand access to the data.

‘What is going on at the moment is the opening of a barn door in your personal habits,’ he told the Guardian. ‘The value of understanding people's personal information is enormous - this will allow a form of subliminal advertising.'

There's more at the link.

This is not good. Companies don't give two hoots about consumers' privacy at the best of times. Now that they can actually make money out of our normal, everyday activities, they'll be trying to milk us of every snippet of information they can.

Peter

Looks like eBay auctions are more difficult in Germany

A report from Germany shows that sellers are having difficulty listing their items in precisely the way they wanted - and it's having some negative consequences.

A German court ruled on Thursday that a man who accidentally sold a Porsche 911 on eBay for €5.50 [US $7.41] will not have to pay the buyer damages after refusing to deliver the sports car.

The seller ended the auction after just eight minutes due to errors in setting up the listing for the 911 Porsche Carrera Coupe. After bidding €5.50 for the Porsche, the highest bidder attempted to arrange a time and place for the transaction to take place, but the seller refused to the terms of the agreement, prompting the bidder to sue him for €75,000 [US $100,988] in damages – or the minimum value for the car, which was just one year old with only 5,800 kilometres on it.

According to the judge at the Koblenz court, the plaintiff could not possibly have expected to get the Porsche for the offered €5.50, or for his highest offer of €1,100 [US $1,481], for that matter. An eBay auction normally takes up to a week, and in cases of high-priced items up for auction, a number of bids are secured before the final sale is arranged. With that in mind, the judge said, it would be nearly impossible that the seller would fail to receive a higher offer by the time the auction had ended.

In another case of online auctions gone awry, a five-figure “Jeanneau Sun Way 21” yacht sold for €22.50 [US $30.30] after the owner apparently neglected to set a minimum bid for the six-metre boat, which he’d hoped to sell for at least €12,000 [US $16,158].

The seller from Porz tried to retract the boat from auction on the site, citing “technical problems” and “errors” on the website, but his claims didn’t float at the Cologne higher regional court in October 2008. The court ruled that the man had to go through with the transaction.

I found this a bit unfair at face value, and contacted a friend who does a lot of online auction business. He tells me that in the first instance, the man listing the Porsche pulled the auction after a matter of minutes, and didn't let it run for the normal time. That gave him his 'out' as far as the court was concerned. The second man didn't, and allowed his auction to run its course: therefore, since he took no steps to cancel it until it had lawfully concluded, he was liable to deliver the goods for the price bid.

Must keep my eyes open for a light aircraft on the German eBay site . . . judging by these problems, I might pick one up cheaply!



Peter

Political correctness and scientific research

We've all heard stories, I'm sure, of how climate change sceptics find it very difficult to make their voices heard, much less attract funding for scientific research, if they don't go along with the 'party line' that global warming is man-made, is about to kill us all, and necessitates the spending of countless billions (nay: trillions!) of dollars (that we don't have) on emergency measures (none of which are known to be effective) to contain or even reverse it.

It looks like the same agenda is being applied to tobacco research - and, by implication, to other areas as well. The New Scientist reports:

"I'VE been called a traitor," says Michael Siegel, a public-health doctor at Boston University in Massachusetts. "It's been a character assassination." This treatment seems surprising as, reading Siegel's CV, you'd think he was a poster boy for the anti-smoking movement. He regularly publishes research on the harmful effects of passive smoking and has testified in support of indoor smoking bans in more than 50 US cities.

Despite these credentials, Siegel has come under fire from colleagues in the field of smoking research. His offence was to post messages on the widely read mailing list Tobacco Policy Talk, in which he questioned one of the medical claims about passive smoking, as well as the wisdom of extreme measures such as outdoor smoking bans.

In front of his peers, funders and potential future employers, other contributors posted messages accusing Siegel of taking money from the tobacco industry. When Siegel stood his ground, the administrators kicked him off the list, cutting off a key source of news in his field. "It felt like I was excommunicated, says Siegel. "I was shocked: I've been a leader in the movement for 21 years."

Siegel's case is perhaps the most clear-cut example of a disturbing trend in the anti-smoking movement. There are genuine scientific questions over some of the more extreme claims made about the dangers of passive smoking and the best strategies to reduce smoking rates, but a few researchers who have voiced them have seen their reputations smeared and the debate stifled.

Putting aside the question of whether such tactics are ethical, they could ultimately backfire. About half of US states and many parts of Europe do not yet ban smoking even indoors in public places like bars and restaurants, so the anti-smoking movement cannot afford to lose credibility.

On the other hand, in some parts of the US, particularly California, the anti-smoking movement has grown so strong that smoking bans outdoors and in private apartments are in force in a few places, and being considered in more. These measures are at least partly based on disputed medical claims, so it is vital their accuracy be determined. But questioning the orthodoxy seems to be frowned on. "It's censorship," says Siegel. "We're heading towards scientific McCarthyism."

There's more at the link.

This is yet another manifestation of political correctness in research - and it's very worrying. As New Scientist itself opines in an editorial:

The evidence that third-hand smoke has any physiological effects is tenuous, yet much of the media - and some health organisations - reported it as fact. It is the World Health Organization's 20th World No Tobacco Day next month, but if claims like these can't be supported by sound science, the danger is that people will stop listening to the message.

When the scientific community is more interested in political correctness than in rigorous analysis, more concerned with opinion polls than with hard facts, more oriented towards serving the powers that be and their pre-conceived agendas than challenging such powers to orient their agendas toward and around the truth . . . there can be nothing but trouble ahead.

Peter

Now that's one tough mother!

It seems a Bosnian mother-in-law is intent on setting a high standard for her sisters.

A MAN tried to kill his mother-in-law with an anti-tank missile launcher and machine gun in Bosnia after claiming she had turned his wife against him.

Bosnian man Miroslav Miljici wanted revenge after blaming his wife's mum for the break-up of his marriage.

After his mother-in-law survived the rocket attack on her home, he tried to finish her off with a machine gun, a Bosnian court was told.

The tough-as-nails mother-in-law survived both attacks with barely a scratch, judges heard.

In defence Miljici - who was jailed for six years for attempted murder - told the court he could no longer take his mother-in-law's nagging.

Of course, she now has the opportunity to visit him - and nag him under police protection - every weekend for the next six years! I wonder if he gets time off for that, under the guise of 'cruel and unusual punishment' or something similar?



Peter

Still enjoying the frozen North

I'm into the sixth of my ten days in Alaska, and still enjoying it very much - despite the cold.

Miss D. took me a way out of town yesterday evening, to visit the town of Girdwood, about 38 miles away, with its ski resort. The traffic was fairly light, and the tide was out in the bay, so that on the way there, we were skirting miles upon miles of muddy shallows, topped with scattered lumps of ice. On the other side of the road, the mountains rose sheer above us, with occasional traces showing where avalanches had buried the road earlier in the season. The mountains ahead of us were lit by the setting sun behind us.




To my utter astonishment, D. insisted on stopping for ice-cream at a locally famous shop there - and others in the shop cheerfully agreed with her that Alaska has the highest per capita ice-cream consumption in the USA! Not for me, thank you . . . I want warmer weather before I inflict ice-cream on my digestive system!

Having eaten her ice-cream, we went in search of supper, but found that all the dining establishments in Girdwood had closed early. We drove back into Anchorage to rendezvous with micro-brewed beer and pizza at someplace called 'Moose's Tooth', a very well-known local nightspot. Good food and beer, and worth the long drive back through the snow.




I'm here until Sunday evening, and will be sorry to say goodbye to Miss D. (at least for now) and head South again. She'll be joining me in Texas at the end of the month, to visit the Alamo Liaison Squadron and attend their annual picnic and fly-in in San Antonio. If any of you plan to be there, let me know, and we'll arrange a blogger bash to follow the ALS festivities!

Peter

A quick recipe for Labrat

Commenting on a post I made yesterday, Labrat (the female half of the Atomic Nerds) asked for details of a recipe I cooked for supper. Sure, Labrat - it's quick, easy, and a very tasty light meal. Here goes.

First, get however many tomatoes you'll need. I allow two per person, assuming normal size and firmness. I also choose tomatoes with real flavor and texture whenever possible, not the cardboard-tasting mass-produced monstrosities that one finds at most supermarkets. Grow your own if possible, or find someone who does and buy from them, or from a farm stall where you're guaranteed to find something with flavor.

Wash the tomatoes, but don't peel them. Slice them into 3-4 slices per tomato, discarding the stem pieces top and bottom, so that each slice is about half-an-inch thick (cut them thinner if you want, but I prefer them thick and 'meaty'). Sprinkle the top of each slice with salt and pepper to taste, plus herbs of your choice (I prefer oregano or rosemary: some like mixed herbs of one or other description).

Prepare a frying-pan with a little (I emphasize: a little!) olive oil in the bottom. Pre-heat to medium temperature, and lay the tomato slices in the hot oil, with the herbed side upwards. Cook for 2-3 minutes, sizzling gently. Then flip them over, sprinkle more salt, pepper and herbs on the newly-cooked sides, then top with crumbled feta or chevrette cheese. This will slowly melt over the hot tomato as the rest of the slice cooks.

Prepare some toast slices (preferably a nice homemade loaf, otherwise something good from your local deli - not plain Wonderbread!). As the tomato finishes cooking (another 2-3 minutes for the second side), lift it out and place it on the toast. Serve at once. It makes a delicious light meal, very tasty, and not heavy on the calories.

To make it more substantial, serve with eggs florentine (poached eggs served on a bed of spinach, topped with hollandaise sauce), or with Italian spicy sausage. Tomato cooked like this makes a great side dish, or a light main course in itself. Yummy!

Peter

It's the thought that counts . . . or is it?

It seems that the paths of love are fraught with potential misunderstandings!

In Stuttgart, Germany, a court judge must decide on a case of honorable intentions in a situation where a man hired his neighbor to get his wife pregnant.

It seems that Demetrius Soupolos, 29, and his former beauty queen wife, Traute, wanted a child badly, but Demetrius was told by a doctor that he was sterile.

So, Soupolos, after calming his wife’s protests, hired his neighbor, Frank Maus, 34, to impregnate her. Since Maus was already married and the father of two children, plus looked very much like Soupolos to boot, the plan seemed good.

Soupolos paid Maus $2,500 for the job and for three evenings a week for the next six months, Maus tried desperately, a total of 72 different times, to impregnate Traute.

When his own wife objected, he explained, "I don’t like this any more than you. I’m simply doing it for the money. Try and understand."

When Traute failed to get pregnant after six months, however, Soupolos was not understanding and insisted that Maus have a medical examination, which he did.

The doctor’s announcement that Maus was also sterile shocked everyone except his wife, who was forced to confess that Maus was not the real father of their two children.

Now Soupolos is suing Maus for breach of contract in an effort to get his money back, but Maus refuses to give it up because he said he did not guarantee conception, but only that he would give an honest effort.

(Pauses to wipe streaming eyes and control helpless laughter . . . )

Well, he certainly made an effort - 72 times, in fact! - but I'd question whether it was an honest one!



Peter

Doofus Of The Day #191

Today's Doofus award goes collectively to seven unnamed Somali pirates, who, it seems, need a few lessons in ship identification . . .

Seven Somali pirates chose the wrong target the other day: it was not the harmless oil-tanker they thought it was but the German navy's fuel tanker FGS Spessart, part of the European anti-piracy fleet Eunavfor sailing in the Gulf of Aden about 85 miles north of the Somali port of Bosaso.

Surprised by the military muscle that responded to their attack, the pirates attempted a get-away in their fast-boat. Unfortunately for them the surrounding waters were infested: the Dutch frigate De Zeven Provincien for NATO, the Greek frigate Psara commanding Eurnavfor's Atalanta operation. participating Spanish frigate Victoria and the USS Boxer.

A Spanish helicopter followed by a Dutch one were sent to disable the fast boat and the pirates were then stopped by Dutch sailors. The suspects were arrested and transferred to the German frigate Rheinland-Pflaz which is sailing to the Kenyan port of Mombasa.

The German government has said it will file charges against the seven suspected pirates.

Oops!



Peter

So much for justice - political style!

I hope readers are as outraged as I am by the situation concerning former Senator Stevens from Alaska. To quote from this morning's report:

The U.S. Justice Department filed a motion Wednesday to drop its case against former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who was convicted of seven felony counts of corruption last fall.

Attorney General Eric Holder decided to abandon the case due to prosecutorial misconduct -- one Justice Department source called the stunning turnaround a "black eye" on the department and the FBI.

Stevens was convicted last year of lying on a Senate disclosure form in order to hide $250,000 in gifts he received from an oil company executive and friends.

Only after the conviction did allegations of FBI misconduct come to light. The judge in the case has repeatedly delayed sentencing Stevens, and at one point he held prosecutors in contempt. Justice Department officials later replaced the trial team.

Stevens sought to dismiss the case, and Wednesday's action in effect supports his request. A hearing has been set for April 7.

The fact that former Senator Stevens lost his seat after being found guilty by the court - a verdict which almost certainly handed his seat to his Democratic Party opponent - is conveniently ignored in all this. I think the only fair, reasonable and rational thing to do would be for Senator Stevens to formally apply in court to have last November's election for Senator invalidated, on the grounds of egregious prosecutorial misconduct, and request that it be re-run. I daresay he'd have a much better chance of winning this time.

Of course, the likelihood of the 'system' allowing that to happen is slim to none. More likely, some form of off-the-record 'compensation' will be offered to Senator Stevens if he 'plays ball' and 'shuts up'.

Makes you sick, doesn't it?

Peter