Neighbours

I have never seen the Australian soap opera, Neighbours, and this list of major events during the program's life tells me more than I ever wanted to know. I must at least remember that breathless Australian soap opera stars, tossed as they are from pillar to post, seem to have trouble avoiding falling over cliffs:

• 1985 - The first episode involving Des Clarke's bachelor party.
• 1986 - Clive Gibbons doing an emergency tracheotomy on Lucy Robinson after she was stung by a wasp.
• 1987 - Charlene and Scott's wedding with cameo appearance by Angry Anderson.
• 1988 - Daphne waking from her coma and uttering the immortal line "I love you too, Clarkey" to her husband Des, before dying of her injuries.
• 1989 - Madge Bishop and Harold Bishop winning the Lottery.
• 1990 - Kerry Bishop getting shot by a duck hunter.
• 1991 - Harold Bishop disappearing off a cliff into the ocean.
• 1992 - Todd Landers hit by a car and killed as he rushed to stop his pregnant girlfriend Pheobe from having an abortion.
• 1993 - Jim Robinson's Heart Attack.
• 1993 - The Waterhole explosion.
• 1994 - Julie Martin falling off a tower and dying during the Murder Mystery Weekend.
• 1994 - Mark Gottlieb jilting Annalise Hartman at the altar and telling her that he has decided to become a priest.
• 1995 - Mark Gottlieb discovering Lucy Robinson working as a go-go dancer.
• 1995 - Susan confessing to Brett Stark, whilst in Africa, that she performed Euthanasia on her mother.
• 1996 - Helen discovering Harold Bishop alive when he had been presumed dead for five years.
• 1996 - Cody Willis being shot by drug dealers.
• 1996 - Cheryl Stark getting knocked over by a car and Karl Kennedy giving her the wrong injection which killed her.
• 1997 - Helen Daniels dying in her sleep after twelve years on the show.
• 1997 - Ben Atkins race car crashing and bursting into flames.
• 1998 - Susan slapping Karl after finding out about his affair with Sarah Beaumont.
• 1998 - Joel Samuels' leg being trapped under a ute, with the water level rapidly rising around him.
• 1999 - Sarah Beaumont's wedding to Peter Hannay, in which her and Karl share one last passionate kiss.
• 1999 - The Scully house catching fire at the Millennium Eve party, with Lolly Carpenter trapped inside.
• 2000 - Steph Scully and Libby Kennedy having a serious accident on Steph's motorcycle.
• 2001 - Madge Bishop's death, after suffering from pancreatic cancer.
• 2001 - Whilst being trapped in a stable in Oakey, Libby Kennedy going into labour with Ben.
• 2002 - Rosie Hoyland's church catching fire, with her and Lou trapped inside.
• 2002 - Drew Kirk's death, after being thrown from a horse.
• 2003 - Darcy gets arrested for robbing the Kennedys and knocking over a pregnant Lyn.
• 2003 - Dee Rebecchi disappearing off a cliff after her wedding.
• 2004 - Susan exploding at Karl after she found out he and Izzy were having a baby, and the rest of the street witnessing it.
• 2004 - The Lassiter's explosion, in which the Coffee Shop, Lou's Place and the Doctors Surgery were all destroyed and Paul Robinson's return to the show during the chaos of the explosion.
• 2005 - Steph Hoyland is incriminated for the death of her grandfather, Charlie Cassidy.
• 2005 - Boyd Hoyland is believed to have murdered the father of Izzy's baby, Gus Cleary.
• 2005 - Izzy finally pushes Karl to breaking point - Karl almost dies from a heart attack on a lonely country road, but is taken to hospital and survives.
• 2005 - Boyd Hoyland is diagnosed with a big brain tumour.

Indignation...

...about interfering with the natural order of things, in order to advance scientific understanding:

Marina Bai, a Russian astrologist, filed a lawsuit last month with the Presnensky district court in Moscow, demanding that the U.S. space agency call off its $311 million Deep Impact mission. As reported in MosNews.com, Bai is also asking for 8.7 billion rubles ($311 million) in compensation for moral damages.

“The actions of NASA infringe upon my system of spiritual and life values, in particular on the values of every element of creation, upon the unacceptability of barbarically interfering with the natural life of the universe, and the violation of the natural balance of the Universe,” Bai said in her claim.

Deep Impact, which is already in space, is scheduled to collide with Comet 9P/Tempel 1 on July 4th of this year. The spacecraft will be used to dig out a crater in the comet. Scientists will then hope to learn what a typical comet is made of.

The district court dismissed the Bai’s case, but the Moscow City Court took up the appeal and will rule following a hearing scheduled for May 6.

Just Shut Up And Dance

Noel noticed that World Dance Day (April 29th) is almost here. In 2002, Professor Alkis Raftis (President of the International Dance Council, or CID) elaborated his philosophy of dance in his World Dance Day message. I don't know if something was lost in translation, but it makes me a bit nervous. Prof. Raftis starts with a quote:

Yo puedo bailar en un templo sin profanarlo (I can dance in a temple without profaning it). Vicente Escudero (1892-1980), Spanish flamenco dancer

OK, good start. I don't quite get it, but OK:

These eight words give the essence of good dance. They should be our compass in cases when commercialized dance in the rich countries deviates towards a meaningless sequence of movements.

Meaningless sequence of movements? What is he talking about? Rock and roll? Discotheques? Raves? Teletubbies? No sequence of movements is ever meaningless: badly done, sometimes, of course, but never entirely meaningless:

Choreography is corrupted by the frantic quest for innovation.

Well, lack of innovation is a sure-fire way to corrupt choreography: better to err on the side of frantic innovation:

Dance teaching is degraded by the blind concentration on steps.

More dance teaching is ruined by not focusing on the steps. Don't look at your feet, but by all means, drill those steps!:

Dance research is impoverished by the idealization of structure analysis.

This one makes my head hurt - what is he talking about? College-level mechanical engineering statics, applied to the physics of dance? College-level mechanical engineering dynamics, applied to the physics of dance? Dance as a branch of sculpture? Academicization? Watching too many videos?:

Too often we forget to ask ourselves if this or that dance is really beautiful, if it carries values, if it will resist the ultimate test of time.

Yup. I forget all the time. Mostly because the answer is self-evident - "The world will little note nor long remember....." We should be alert, of course, to really excellent dancing!:

Dance in itself is not sacred, but it can stand beside the sacred, as a means to transcend reality, a tool for liberation, a way of acquiring another self.

Good point! Like a fresh coat of paint! Well, maybe not paint, exactly, but maybe like a chameleon's skin. Well maybe not a chameleon exactly, but maybe like a peacock, or a duck, or an iridiscent fish, or a giant bumblebee!:

Not all creations can be fit to dance in a temple - just as we cannot always wear Sunday clothes.

That's right: when Pam hosts Sunday morning ballet class over at Cisneros' Temple of Dance, we don't do folk dancing. Well, not much folk dancing, unless Pam starts riffing on some Balkan or Greek melody, then, hey! Bring out the handkerchief, form a line, and challenge those weird rhythms!:

We therefore need to educate the public in developing qualitative criteria: how to tell "Sunday dances" from "everyday dances".

Pam tells me what that distinction is - I get them all mixed up!:

Our dances should at least be good enough to dance outside a temple.

At every opportunity, especially since I don't go to Cisneros' Temple of Dance five days out of seven!:

Happy World Dance Day!

Textile Trade Wars

China goes for broke, which is bad for South Carolina, but even worse for Lesotho:

South Africa itself has lost more than 30,000 textiles jobs. In Swaziland and Namibia, an estimated three in every four jobs will be lost by the end of June. In Lesotho, where unemployment has reached 40 per cent, the textile job losses are simply unaffordable in a country where textiles account for 90 per cent of all export earnings, Mr Mohaleroe says.

Fire Makes a Cloud

Courtesy of Jerry, here is a cool picture of a fire-generated cumulus cloud. These sort of clouds are always interesting. Sometimes on summertime satellite pictures, you can see a tiny cumulus cloud (or at least it looks tiny from space), generated by the plumes from the coal-fired power plant in Joseph City, AZ. It's so cute!

Doves

Quiet but busy weekend.

Came back just now from Woodland, after practicing with Sally's group (Woodland Dance Academy) for "Coppelia" in May. Made a visit to the Yolo County Fair Grounds to catch the tail end of the annual Scottish Games there, but Jeannie had already left, and all their meat pies were sold. Drat! Caught a glimpse of peripatetic Whyt on her way out, however, which was nice.

There was one last show, though: massed pipers and drums (about 100 each) advanced onto the field for awards. Very impressive - I've always liked bagpipes, and to see about 100 playing in unison was quite a sight (and sound). A single bagpiper played "Amazing Grace," brilliant white doves were released into the storm-cloud filled sky, and the massed musicians left playing "Scotland, The Brave."

DMTC

I've been slightly out-of-touch with DMTC lately, but I understand a milestone was recently passed concerning New Theater financing "Plan B."

Let's go: I'm getting impatient!

Rumors of My Passing...

...have been greatly exaggerated - I now have an entry at the Political Graveyard!

Plus, for reasons that elude me, my name was sent to a comet:

As a public outreach effort, over 1 million names were collected and placed on the STARDUST spacecraft,which will visit Comet Wild 2 in 2004.

Funny, I don't remember this cometary outreach effort (really reaching way out). I wonder if it was me or someone else with my name?

Ka-Ching!

Must be nice having lobbyist friends. All of this violates House ethics rules, of course:

The airfare to London and Scotland in 2000 for then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was charged to an American Express card issued to Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist at the center of a federal criminal and tax probe, according to two sources who know Abramoff's credit card account number and to a copy of a travel invoice displaying that number.

DeLay's expenses during the same trip for food, phone calls and other items at a golf course hotel in Scotland were billed to a different credit card also used on the trip by a second registered Washington lobbyist, Edwin A. Buckham, according to receipts documenting that portion of the trip.

Greenspan's Deficit Chickens....

....are all coming home to roost:

"I don't doubt, at the end of the day," that taxes will go up in any plan to cut the federal budget deficit, Greenspan told the Senate Budget Committee.

But he quickly added that there is "no way you can raise taxes enough" to cover future spending commitments, including Social Security and Medicare. Greenspan warned that tax increases would hold down economic growth and made clear he would prefer spending cuts to tax increases.

Greenspan is wrong, of course, on the ineffectiveness of raising taxes. There is a lot of lightly-taxed money in the higher-income tax brackets these days. Effective action on health care costs PLUS tax increases on the rich would arrest or reverse the deficit's growth.

Possibly providing ammunition to tax-cut opponents, Greenspan said his support for President Bush's 2001 tax-cut package played a part in turning the federal budget from surplus to record-setting deficits.

With Republicans in Congress declaring in 2001 that they had Greenspan's support, they enacted a $1.35 trillion, 10-year tax cut plan. Congress then passed further tax cuts each of the next two years. Democrats blame the cuts for deficits that have skyrocketed to more than $400 billion a year.

Republicans contend that the cuts helped the troubled economy and staved off a more painful downturn.

Finally, reality is catching up to Greenspan! The downturn may have been blunted by the tax cuts, but the long-term harm to the economy may more than outweigh the benefit.

In his Capitol Hill appearance Thursday, Greenspan for the first time publicly defended himself against critics who put blame on him for the expanding deficits.

It is "frankly unfair" to blame him for the deficits, Greenspan said, because Congress decided to "read half my testimony and discard the rest."

He said that tax-cut advocates ignored his warning in 2001 that forecasts for higher surpluses might be wrong. Congress also ignored his proposal for "trigger" recommendations that would have limited the tax cuts if spending targets were not met and the deficit began to soar, Greenspan said.

Sen. Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., reminded Greenspan that he is well versed in how Congress works and should have been aware that Congress would skip the triggers.

"I plead guilty to that," Greenspan said. "I did not intend it that way."

That's not good enough, Mr. Greenspan. You knew perfectly well what was going to happen. People warned you about it at the time. You pulled the trigger anyway!

The Fed chairman said that controlling government spending is an especially urgent matter because some 76 million baby boomers will begin leaving the work force soon. Then there won't be enough tax revenue coming in for the federal government to meet retirement and health promises to boomers.

"Unless that trend is reversed," Greenspan warned, "at some point these deficits would cause the economy to stagnate or worse."

..."The federal budget deficit is on an unsustainable path, in which large deficits result in rising interest rates and ever-growing interest payments that augment deficits in future years," Greenspan testified.

While the "ramp-up" in spending for defense and homeland security is not expected to continue indefinitely, Greenspan said, he foresees increasing national debt unless the government cuts spending.

The government may have promised too much to its aging population, Greenspan said.

"I fear that we may have already committed more physical resources to the baby-boom generation in its retirement years than our economy has the capacity to deliver," he said.

It's high time Greenspan-the-Fool realized that Congress and the nation are absolutely on the hook for Social Security costs. Everyone should plan accordingly, and not follow Greenspan's failed 2001 example. And his Chicken-Little fear of the coming Baby-Boomer retirement is ridiculous. The money will be there - if he's willing to tax the rich to get it!

Plame News Blog

Here's a good blog for news regarding the increasingly-baroque Valerie Plame scandal.

Clever! Clever!

Margo Lucero and her innovation:

JEFFERSON COUNTY - Seventh-grader Bailey Pierce, hand pressed against her heart, was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance when the voice over the intercom said something that stopped her cold.

"One nation, under 'your belief system.' "

Bailey said that guidance counselor Margo Lucero substituted the phrase for "under God" while leading the morning pledge at Everitt Middle School on Wednesday.

Bailey said the incident shocked her and her classmates, many of whom stopped in mid-sentence and exchanged bewildered looks.

As Kevin Drum notes:

And so the worm turns. After all, if it's OK for biology teachers to decline to teach evolution and for pharmacists to refuse to dispense certain medications, why shouldn't teachers have the right to modify the pledge for reasons of personal conscience?

It's quite a little rabbit hole we have here, don't we?

CPB

You just knew this would happen eventually. CPB is stealthily carrying out a right-wing coup against PBS:

"We don't want to be alarmist, but I would be less than honest if I said there wasn't concern here," said one senior executive at PBS, who insisted on anonymity because CPB provides about 10 percent of its annual budget. "When you put it all together, a pattern starts to emerge."

A senior FCC official, who would not speak for attribution because he must rule on issues affecting public broadcasting, went further, saying CPB "is engaged in a systematic effort not just to sanitize the truth, but to impose a right-wing agenda on PBS. It's almost like a right-wing coup. It appears to be orchestrated."

A Trend?

Boy, this would be nice if it continues:

The credit card industry presumes, based on happy experience, that Americans will borrow more money each quarter to support their spending habits, regardless of the direction of interest rates, and that enough consumers will be happy simply to pay off just enough debt to allow them to borrow more. But last quarter MBNA, to its apparent shock, found that "results were further impacted by unexpectedly high payment volumes from U.S. credit card customers," and that "the payment volumes were particularly higher on accounts with higher interest rates."

Accu-Weather Cronyism

Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum's bill is the worst kind of protectionism! Private weather companies have to add value to their products in order to be worth the bother, but now they're insisting on getting paid without bothering to innovate. The trouble is that the Weather Service is the only organization that performs its particular core function, and if that effort is hobbled, everyone, including the private companies, will suffer.

"The weather service proved so instrumental and popular and helpful in the wake of the hurricanes. How can you make an argument that we should pull it off the Net now?" said (Florida Senator Ben) Nelson's spokesman, Dan McLaughlin. "What are you going to do, charge hurricane victims to go online, or give them a pop-up ad?"

But Barry Myers, AccuWeather's executive vice president, said the bill would improve public safety by making the weather service devote its efforts to hurricanes, tsunamis and other dangers, rather than duplicating products already available from the private sector.

"The National Weather Service has not focused on what its core mission should be, which is protecting other people's lives and property," said Myers, whose company is based in State College, Pa. Instead, he said, "It spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year, every day, producing forecasts of 'warm and sunny.'"

One trouble with the weather is that it is absolutely everywhere. In order to be able to focus on its core mission of storm forecasts, the National Weather Service (NWS) ALSO has to know where it is 'warm and sunny'. In weather forecasting, if you don't know a little bit about what the weather is everywhere, you'll have a poor idea of what the weather is in any one particular spot.

...NOAA has taken no position on (Senator Santorum's) bill. But Ed Johnson, the weather service's director of strategic planning and policy, said his agency is expanding its online offerings to serve the public.

"If someone claims that our core mission is just warning the public of hazardous conditions, that's really impossible unless we forecast the weather all the time," Johnson said. "You don't just plug in your clock when you want to know what time it is."

Myers argued that nearly all consumers get their weather information for free through commercial providers, including the news media, so there's little reason for the federal agency to duplicate their efforts.

"Do you really need that from the NOAA Web site?" he asked.

This Myers is a slimy bastard. He's got the process backwards, and he knows it perfectly well. Commercial providers duplicate federal agency efforts, and try to add value. For example, your radio station meteorologist usually just parrots NWS forecasts, but provides it more conveniently, through your radio, so you can more easily access the information.

Another supporter of the weather service's efforts, Tallahassee database analyst John Simpson, said the plethora of free data becoming available could eventually fuel a new industry of small and emerging companies that would repackage the information for public consumption. He said a similar explosion occurred in the 1990s, when corporations' federal securities filings became freely available on the Web. Shutting off the information flow would stifle that innovation and solidify the major weather companies' hold on the market, Simpson said.

Accu-weather is part of that information explosion. Now they are trying to consolidate monopoly-like control to keep competitors out.

Santorum's bill also would require the weather service to provide "simultaneous and equal access" to its information.

That would prevent weather service employees from favoring some news outlets over others, which Santorum and Myers said has happened in some markets. But it also could end the common practice of giving one-on-one interviews to individual reporters who have questions about storms, droughts or other weather patterns.

"What we want is to make sure that whatever information is provided to one source is provided to all," Myers said.

But Johnson said it's important to answer reporters' questions so the public receives accurate information — especially when lives are at stake.

"We are not interested in turning off our telephones," Johnson said. "I would be concerned that that would actually be dangerous."

Me-thinks this flawed Accu-Weather business model of repackaging data already generated at taxpayer expense is what really needs looking at. Protectionist toadies exploiting political access! Republican hypocrisy in action! Gag!

Shameless

John Bolton:

In July 2003, Bolton attracted widespread attention with a speech in South Korea in which he leveled repeated personal attacks on North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Some U.S. diplomats feared the speech would lead North Korea to pull out of international talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program.

In testimony last week, Bolton implied that Thomas Hubbard, the former U.S. ambassador to South Korea, approved in advance of the speech and that he thanked Bolton for his comments afterward.

But Hubbard, a career diplomat who was Bush's ambassador to South Korea from 2001 to 2004, contradicted Bolton, saying in an interview that he did not express gratitude for the speech and disapproved of it.

"I didn't approve personally of the tone of the speech, and had urged him to tone it down," said Hubbard, who has now retired from the foreign service.

Bolton testified that the night before the speech, Hubbard "reviewed it one last time and made a few more changes." After the speech, Bolton testified that Hubbard praised him.

"And I can tell you what our ambassador to South Korea, Tom Hubbard, said after the speech," Bolton said under questioning by Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R.I. "He said: 'Thanks a lot for that speech, John, it will help us a lot out here.' "

Hubbard disputed Bolton's testimony.

Before the speech, Hubbard said he had urged Bolton and his staff "to tone it down, on grounds that it would be counterproductive to getting the North Koreans to the negotiating table."

But, "He rejected that suggestion," Hubbard said.

He said Bolton did agree to accept some recommendations on factual errors, and on "some phrases that I thought would be taken badly or misunderstood by the South Koreans." When he offered thanks, it was for those changes, Hubbard said."

It's a gross exaggeration to elevate that to praise for the entire speech, and approval of it," Hubbard added.

Hubbard, who earlier had served as U.S. ambassador to the Philippines during the Clinton administration, said he had spoken with several senators and Senate staff members to set the record straight about his views on the Bolton address. His disagreement with Bolton's testimony was first reported this week on Newsweek's Web site.

The Return of that Nixon Droid

Who might run for the New York Senate seat held by Hillary Clinton next year? Oh no! Could it be? Yes it is! Quick! I need my Lawrence Welk fix!:

Two potentially strong opponents - Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki, both formidable fund-raisers, have shown little interest in running against her in 2006. At this point, the most likely Republican candidate is Edward F. Cox, a lawyer who is the son-in-law of President Nixon.

Connecting The Dots

The Republicans' shell game:

Treasury Secretary John Snow explicitly linked the administration's efforts to cut the deficit to the push to partially phase-out Social Security. The logic of that statement points to only one conclusion: the deficits the administration has run up with upper-income tax cuts will be reduced by benefit cuts in Social Security.

Cut To "The Chase"

"The Chase," from Deborah McMillion-Nering (I took this photo a bit from the side, so the width appears slightly shorter than it should):

Ratzinger and the Jews

From an interview with Rabbi David Rosen, who was a "key figure in the establishment of diplomatic relations between Israel and the Vatican in 1993," in Haaretz:

Ratzinger, who made several quiet visits to Israel before the establishment of diplomatic ties, wrote the introduction to what Rosen calls the "most important" document on Christian-Jewish relations to come out of the Pontifical Biblical Studies Commission, the Vatican body that focuses on biblical studies. The document, which was issued under Ratzinger's authority, deals with the central place of the Jewish people and of religious Jewish texts in Christian teaching.

In the document, Ratzinger seeks to tackle the Jews' refusal to accept Jesus as the messiah and Judaism's insistence that the messiah has not yet come.

"He argued that this position is also part of the divine plan," explains Rosen, who now heads the American Jewish Committee's Interreligious Affairs department, "and the fact Jews don't accept Jesus must not be seen as an act of rejecting God, but as part of God's plan to remind the world that peace and salvation for all humanity has not yet come. This is amazing. He took something that has been the source of major condemnation of Judaism and the Jewish people down the ages and twisted it into something of a positive theological nature."

Swan

Although it appears to date from the late 70's, Young Dancer magazine is now serializing Ariyoshi Kyoko's manga, "Swan". It's really quite nice: full of technical ballet details and it has a sweet story line. Hooray for Japanese manga!

"That Giant Mexican Head....

...Is Going To Eat Us All," and other favorite tales.

Maybe an Interesting Blog

Just paging through this LANL blog, I recognize the name Doug Beason: we used to work together at the Kirtland AFB Weapons Lab in Albuquerque, NM, from 1977-1980. He was one of the hot Air Force Academy grads and I was a lowly UNM "Stay-in-School" student...

Miracles

First it was that magical Jesus-on-a-tortilla in Lake Arthur New Mexico, and now this:

CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- A steady stream of the faithful and the curious, many carrying flowers and candles, have flocked to an expressway underpass for a view of a yellow and white stain on a concrete wall that some believe is an image of the Virgin Mary.

...."We believe it's a miracle," said Elbia Tello, 42. "We have faith, and we can see her face."

....The stain is likely the result of salt run-off, according to the Illinois Department of Transportation. The agency does not plan to scrub it off the wall. "We're treating this just like we treat any type of roadside memorial," said IDOT spokesman Mike Claffey. "We have no plans to clean this site."

Plateau Peril

People prepare for trouble in Southern Utah:

Snow has accumulated to as much as 372 percent of normal at some higher elevations, nearly 13 feet deep at some spots on the high sprawling plateau above Cedar City, home of more than 20,000 people and Southern Utah University.

...Crews are working to channel the meandering Virgin River at St. George, a booming retirement community. Springdale, in the scenic canyon just outside Zion National Park, sits almost entirely on the river’s floodplain. Downstream, crews at Mesquite, Nev., failed in an attempt to coax the river back into an old channel and away from eroded banks that in January forced dozens from their homes.

When all that snow melts, it might get ugly. The canyons are steep and narrow off those plateaus in southern Utah and northern Arizona!

Update: Flooding issues in Alaska too!:

McClure said some of the most impressive measurements came along the Yukon River near the Dalton Highway crossing, where water content was measured at 180 to 190 percent above normal, and in the White Mountains, where water content was 150 percent.

Fuzzy Wuzzy Iz My Eyes

Went to the optometrist today. Last visit was in 2001. That visit was fine: Marina Campana said nice things about the new frames. This time, who knows? My eyes are now all dilated and irritable from those yellow drops they put in them. Plus, there's a big yellow orb in the sky that makes my eyes water whenever I look outside.

Dr. S. suggested bifocals: I suggested two separate pairs of glasses instead. Dr. S. looked at the scars from the 1994 retinal reattachment surgery on the left eye and suggested I get the other Dr. S. at Mercy Hospital to look at his decade-old surgical handiwork just to make sure everything is the way he'd like to see it. That's probably a good idea.

That eye surgery in 1994 was sure interesting. They put me under with sodium pentathol ("truth serum") . When I woke up in the recovery room, everybody there was laughing. I asked what was so funny, and everyone said, "oh, nothing!" Then they did laser spot-welding on the right eye. 500 welds in 10 brilliantly yellow-green minutes. Afterwards, all I could see was purple everywhere!

Forgot about ordering new contact lenses. I'll need to get those ordered next week!

Climate and Brave Sir James Inhofe

When knowledge reared its ugly head, brave Sir James misrepresented.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri

This treasure trove is now being opened, to great excitement:

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

In the past four days alone, Oxford's classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod and other literary giants of the ancient world, lost for millennia.

Pope Benedict XVI

From the New York Times:


photo credit: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters

Gabe, my traditionalist Catholic friend, is ecstatic at the choice of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as the new Pope. Many blessings on the new Pope, Benedict XVI!

Genesis

From my Deborah McMillion-Nering collection:

FDR's Second Bill of Rights

Remembering a more-noble time:

Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as "a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed."Among these rights, he said, are:

• "The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
• "The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
• "The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
• "The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
• "The right of every family to a decent home.
• "The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
• "The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
• "The right to a good education."

Ownership and Inheritability

On today's Wall Street Journal editorial page, Ed Crane, President of the Cato Institute, asks why Paul Krugman of the New York Times, and by extension all liberal commentators, avoid certain questions when discussing Social Security:

Not once in his rants does he address the issues of ownership and inheritability. Indeed, opponents of personal accounts shy away from those issues like a vampire from the cross.

Crane urges pressing these two points when Social Security reform is discussed. Presumably these are the most salient advantages of personal accounts.

Well, OK, fair enough, let's ask about these questions. Ownership implies control. Who could possibly be against control over one's destiny? Well, the Bush Administration, among many. The people who own personal retirement accounts own all the risk, but will not be able to move money, at will, into the hot stocks of the day. No day-trading with these stocks! The apportionment of money will be stringently regulated. People will be asked to forgo a certain benefit, for a degree of uncertainty, heavy fees, and loss of control. Some great trade that is!

And what's the big deal about inheritability? All new workers have to do to get a certain benefit of some sort is to get Social Security numbers and pay taxes. It's like having a big, extended family concerned about your future! And Congress is absolutely on the hook to get you the money! An inheritance you work for.

Social Security functions as social insurance, not as investment. Are there any insurance programs that you know of that allow your heirs to inherit your policies? If your dad is a doctor, should you inherit his malpractice coverage?

In any event, one can always supplement one's retirement with personal investments.

Meanwhile, Republicans conspire away with various bait-and-switch techniques to break Democratic will:

The emerging Bush-Senate Republican strategy is to entice Democrats into the debate by first focusing on shoring up the system and then selling the private accounts as the smartest way to ease the pain of benefit cuts. All of this relies on Grassley's ability -- and willingness -- to push ahead on an issue some Republicans would rather avoid.

Republicans like Crane should just give up with Social Security "piratization."

The Man-Woman Thing

Before too much time passes, I'd like to note Warren Farrell's new book "Why Men Earn More." Warren Farrell attributes the pay gap between men and women mostly due to different hours-per-week the sexes work, as well as the absence of women in difficult or hazardous occupations. Farrell was interviewed by Claudia Deutsch of the New York Times on February 27th. Farrell also appeared on C-SPAN in late February, speaking (I believe) to Stanford's (influential and conservative) Hoover Institution.

I remember Warren Farrell as one of the 135 California Recall gubernatorial candidates, however. Farrell was an exponent of what might be called the Men's Movement, or the Father's Movement - sort of an echo of feminism, stressing the needs of men going through divorce: for example, to retain visitation rights to children, to cope with demands of alimony in a rational manner, etc. Farrell's platform promoted "legislation to force courts to grant divorced fathers equal time with their children."

William "B.J." Wagener, host and producer of a television program called "On Second Thought," and who was so helpful getting media coverage for the alternative candidates, was one of Farrell's biggest supporters, but Wagener seemed to have *issues* regarding divorce. I wondered whether Farrell had *issues* as well. In Deutch's NY Times interview, Farrell is described as stressing calm objectivity regarding men's/women's issues:

Although he has written extensively about issues like sexual harrassment and fatherhood, he says he is not spurred on by personal experiences. "I've always been motivated to stop people from doing dysfunctional things," he said.

Still, with groups like "Fathers Mentoring Fathers" out there, trying to address the needs of divorced men through a judicial system guaranteed to lead to frustration, I can't help but wonder.... It takes a lot of work to write a book. How entwined are Farrell's personal experiences with his research? Is it possible for anyone EVER to separate the personal from the political? SHOULD one separate the personal from the political, and if so, how? Is advocacy an adequate response to dysfunction?

(I suppose I could just send an E-Mail and ask his response, but it's more fun to pose the questions unanswered.)

Backsliding Democrats

I saw the stupid AP story too. I hope it's just chaff to confuse Republicans. For the first time, Democrats have a victory, and these 'strategists' want to throw it away. That's what Kerry was for: plucking defeat from the jaws of victory. Let's not go there again.

Rogue Wave

Geophysicists have discovered these huge waves aren't so rare. The cruise ship passengers were lucky - this time:

"The ship was hit by a freak wave that caused two windows to break in two different cabins," Norwegian Cruise Line said in a statement. It said 62 cabins were flooded and four passengers had cuts and bruises. The wave reached as high as deck 10 on the ship, company spokeswoman Susan Robison said Sunday.

Sahara

Last night, I went out with the DMTC theater crowd and we saw the new action-adventure movie "Sahara," with Matthew McConaughey, Steve Zahn, and Penélope Cruz. The movie was fun and fast-paced, with an interesting NW Africa setting that has rarely been exploited before in cinema. The picture's rapid-fire pace resembled that of the Indiana Jones movies (e.g., "Raiders of the Lost Ark.") Most everyone in our group thought it was an excellent picture.

Nevertheless, I had issues with "Sahara." I have the same issues with the Indiana Jones movies too. For an action-adventure movie to work for me, even if the premise is a bit far-fetched, it has to be somewhat plausible and operate in the same universe I live in. The early James Bond flicks were grounded in reality, and I liked them a lot. The later James Bond flicks departed too far from reality to be pleasing, and the Indiana Jones movies were so far outside reality as to be utterly uninteresting.

"Sahara" has the following problems, from my point-of-view:

• A proposed journey of 72 hours, to go against the flow of the Niger River, in a motorboat, from Lagos, Nigeria to Goa, Mali, and back again? 800-or-so miles as the crow flies, and probably more than a thousand on the winding river? Yeah, right!
• Ironclads crossing the Atlantic and going up the Niger River 140 years ago, when they had trouble managing to just get across the James River? Yeah, right!
• Just a short drive to the Algerian border, through Mali? Through one of the world's most desolate wastelands? Yeah, right!
• A high-tech toxic waste dump? In Mali? Yeah, right!
• A limited toxic waste spill, in Mali, threatening the whole world? Through eutrophication? Yeah, right!
• No one noticing all that Confederate gold for so many years? Yeah, right!

You get the idea. Call me a pill. Maybe I'm just too old for the modern era (meaning since about 1980, when 'Raiders...' came out.)

But it was a 'fun' film! At least talented Penélope Cruz will get a sure-fire hit out of it (fortunately her lack of chemistry with Matthew McConaughey didn't affect the movie much).

Weather Service Budget Dilemmas

We really do need a National Weather Service. There are core functions, like launching rawinsondes, that private weather firms don't do and which they can't duplicate. The budget has to be adequate or people get killed by floods and tornadoes. It's that simple.

Resuscitating Chickens

Tales of strange Colorado chickens.

Decompress

The trip back last night from Anaheim was wearisome despite the sparse crowd at John Wayne airport. There were few passengers on the last Southwest flight of the evening from Orange County to Sacramento. The flight was half an hour late taking off, and upon arrival, they parked the plane for the night without bothering to check whether any bags were in the luggage hold. Several of us were inconvenienced. I guess we were lucky they remembered to deplane the passengers!

Side Show

Class in Anaheim continues today. Tonight I return to Sacramento.

Last night, in the Carl's Jr. drive-through, I got a salad (for the roughage), and consequently dreamed about chewing apart a crystal-clear drinking glass to soothing music. Some roughage: I need a better diet!

Last night, I blindly went to Elizabeth Howard's Dinner Theater in Tustin, not knowing what I'd find playing (I had thought about visiting Hollywood, but it's too far away). The show at the moment in Tustin is "Annie Get Your Gun," but that show was dark on Wednesday night. Instead, a fundraiser was being held to support 'The Academy For Performing Arts,' the magnet component of Huntington Beach High School. The show featured many recent Academy alumni in performance, plus as much cheesecake as one could eat.

Act I featured a number of songs from a musical I'm unfamiliar with: "Side Show." It's about the occupational and romantic dilemmas of the Hilton sisters, Siamese twins in a traveling circus. The Hilton sisters (not Paris and Nikki, but rather Daisy and Violet) were played by Amie Shapiro and Nicole Gerardi. It's a modern-style musical, where the dialogue is all sung, and there is a lot of dialogue to sing. Amie and Nicole sang several anthems: 'By Your Side,' and 'I Will Never Leave You.' The two were strongly matched (as might be expected) and they both sang very well. The best of the ensemble numbers was 'The Devil You Know.'

"Side Show" seems to be an anti-Carnival-type musical. Instead of the thrill of life changes by joining the circus, plus the anticipation of romance, there is the dread of life changes by leaving the circus, plus the anticipation of romance. The former seems inherently more interesting, at least to me. Musicals seem to work best when they place ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Here, extraordinary people were placed in more-or-less ordinary circumstances. Well, whatever gets the beautiful songs sung: that's what counts most of all!

Act II featured a number of songs from other musicals: 'Hey, Big Spender' from "Sweet Charity," 'Lida Rose' from "The Music Man," 'Good Morning Baltimore' from "Hairspray," 'Waiting for Life to Begin' from "Once on This Island," etc. "D" Pull and Matt Bartosch made a good team of male singers in several contexts: "Side Show" in Act I, and 'High Flying Adored' from "Evita" in Act II. The singer I most enjoyed, however, was Katie Dixon, who sang 'Come To My Garden' from "The Secret Garden." Beautiful voice!

In the same shopping center as Elizabeth Howard's Dinner Theater is "Deva's", the bar run by Reva Renee Renz, one of the 135 gubernatorial candidates from the 2003 Recall Election. Last year I narrowly and stupidly missed seeing her. This year, I quickly peeked in, unannounced and unanticipated, to see if she was running bar: it seemed to be a slow Wednesday, and I didn't see her, so I didn't go in.


'Welcome to the Sixties' finale, from "Hairspray." Looks kinda cool (in an abstract way). Energy and enthusiasm conquer all shortcomings, including my inexpert photography!

One Too Many Oops

From Salon, and everyone else:

Britney Spears has revealed what might be Hollywood's worst-kept secret: She's pregnant. In a posting on her Web site, Spears told fans that she and husband, Kevin Federline, were expecting their first child together. The couple were married in September.

New Horizons

Well, here I am again, back at New Horizons in Anaheim, exactly a year to the date that I was here before!

The flight down yesterday was uneventful. The plane was a Southwest 737, in AZ Grand Canyon colors, with a *swoosh!* wing tip. The airport was uncrowded and unrushed (is the post 9/11 fever dying out, have all the passengers fled, or was it just a slow time?). Kids in the back of the plane made a lot of noise counting down the takeoff roll. I would have fallen asleep just before landing, but the kids started up again, counting down the landing touchdown.

The rent-a-car drive from the airport was weird. My eyesight is so bad now (I have an optometrist appointment for about a week from now), and it's impacting my driving: I can't read the signs. Plus, I have a totally unwarranted confidence in my ability to negotiate the streets of unfamiliar cities (which got me in trouble at Christmas in Las Vegas). Plus, I rarely plan ahead and don't look at maps. Unsurprisingly, I ended up on the wrong road, instead of taking Highway 55 to Tustin, I took the 405 to Long Beach. I drove all over Orange County, transitioning eventually to the 605. All these city names - Westminster, Artesia, Cerritos, Hawaiian Gardens - and I don't know where the freak I am! But after a while, I figured it out. Finally stopped and looked at a map. Drove two to three times as far as I had to to find the hotel. The Marriott Towne Suites are exactly the same as last year. I am a "Platinum Guest," whatever the hell that is. I get two free Milano wafers and a bottle of Dasani purified water. Sweet!

Met a fellow student named Austin Kerr, who lives in Davis and works at EDAW, just two blocks away from Sierra, directly across J street from the Subway Restaurant (my most famous rut of all: where I've eaten lunch almost every day since 1997). Sometimes you have to travel far to meet your neighbors!



I like this tree just outside New Horizons (a picture of the same tree a year ago is on the blog)


A picture of the Metrolink train (similar picture as a year ago).


Springtime in Anaheim - a "Painted Lady" butterfly?

Disannoyland

Looks like it's time to go to Anaheim for two days. The purpose is to learn the workings of a computer program called HARP. I'm not too keen on this class or this trip, but maybe there will side benefits. A chance to get some sleep for a change. A chance to visit that dinner theater in Tustin. An opportunity to visit Deva's, maybe. See what's going on in the Southland. Catch some rays. Learn about the hazardous interface between toxics modeling and dispersion modeling. Get more work tasks. Like that's what I really need these busy days.

I'll try to blog while I'm down there, but if I don't, at least I'll have stories when I get back.

Hotel Rwanda Review

An excellent review of a superb and memorable film:

One of the most remarkable things about Hotel Rwanda, then, is that the movie is not a sermon--or at least not only a sermon. Its backdrop may be this recent history of African horror and Western disgrace but in the foreground it tells a tale intended less to shame than to inspire, that of Paul Rusesabagina, a real-life luxury hotel manager who used his wits, connections, and sheer decency to save more than 1,200 Tutsi and Hutu refugees from the carnage that claimed the rest of his country.

Mountain Biking...

...Copper Canyon, haunt of the Tarahumaras.

Anguish

In a corner of Red-State Kansas.

What Is He Thinking?

Strange story:

...Finkelstein is putting together a "Stop Her Now" campaign designed around Swift-Boat style anti-Hillary charges.

It won't be the first time that Finkelstein has led the attack against a Democratic candidate: again and again in his career, the reclusive advisor has made "liberal" a dirty word as he's bashed and smeared his clients' opponents. But Finkelstein's anti-Hillary campaign will be his first since the right-wing partisans who fund his work found out this little truth about Finkelstein: In December, he got married -- to another man.

Limelight

Interesting stuff, among the things posted on Drudge - zapping fruit flies with mind-controlling lasers. Orwell would be impressed:

Using the lasers to stimulate specific brain cells, researchers say they were able to make the flies jump, walk, flap their wings and fly.

Even headless flies took flight when researchers stimulated the correct neurons, according to the study, published in the April 7 issue of the journal Cell.

Scientists say the study could ultimately help identify the cells associated with psychiatric disorders, overeating and aggressiveness.

Biologists have long known that an electrical stimulus can trigger muscle response, but this approach used focused beams of light to stimulate neurons that would have been impossible to study using electrodes.

Such a Fate for a Cheerleader

From the Carpetbagger Report, regarding George W. Bush's recent trip to Italy:

Let me get this straight, many Catholic pilgrims were booing — at the pope’s funeral — at the very sight of the president on a TV screen. Want to talk about unpopular? That’s unpopular.

Sin City

Went and saw "Sin City" last night. I was attracted to the talk on the "Charlie Rose Show": cutting-edge film-noir animation. I forgot that Quentin Tarantino's inclusion in the project meant just one thing: violence. Stupid violence, funny violence, tedious violence, colorful violence, good violence, bad violence, and regular, old bruising violence. Can't remember much now except the blood and the stylized evil of the thing.

When Nature Gets Rambunctious

Fun story:

It's interesting to read the story behind the photos. This occurred on April 28th, 1979.

The river is the Tombigbee River and this happened to be the record high water ever for that area. The towboat you see coming down on the bridge is the Motor Vessel Cahaba owned by Warrior Gulf Navigation out of Mobile, Alabama. Warrior Gulf is a subsidiary of Pittsburgh Steel.

Didn't Realize

Max's Opera Cafe closed at the end of last year! Andee Thorpe, a Max's alumnus, says it's supposed to reopen downtown, though, hopefully later this year.

Wide Load

This afternoon, I washed Cloudy the Rabbit (in anticipation of her visit to the vet this week) and also washed Sparky, and put them both out to dry in the afternoon sun. I heard a fuss in the backyard, though: it sounded like two upset blue jays spitting and hissing at a cat. Instead, it was two baby possums in distress, one in my yard and one in the yard next door, calling out for help. They had both fallen off Mama Possum, who was busy balancing on the fence top, with two of her remaining babies clinging on her back. Mama Possum was slowly pacing and turning around on the high, narrow beam of the fence top, endangering the safety her two remaining passengers.

Even though possums are a possible danger to Cloudy the Rabbit, I decided to help Mama Possum through this particular crisis. Even though I might regret my acts later, it seemed like the right thing to do. The babies looked really cute (not quite like last year's scraggly, adolescent possum).

Using a dust pan, I collected the baby possum in my yard and returned it to Mama's back, then went into the yard next door and tried to so the same with that baby possum. Baby possum lost its grip and fell again, however, this time in my yard, so I crossed back into my yard and tried again to help out, this time successfully. Then I heard another cry from next door: there was yet another baby possum in distress in the next door neighbor's yard. So, I crossed back over and put the baby back on a relieved Mama Possum. She was sure carrying a wide load: four big babies on her back, and a fifth big baby stuffed in her pouch!

By the time I left for Saturday ballet class, the back yard was a picture of bucolic bliss: wet Cloudy, miserable and suspicious, was trying to warm herself in the sun under the birch tree, and clueless Sparky, barking at phantoms, still hadn't figured out there was even one possum nearby (much less six). Mama Possum seemed to be eyeing Cloudy from the fence top, perhaps with hunger, or envy for Cloudy's carefree single life. Mama Possum was slowly changing direction yet again on the fence top (a really, really bad idea under the circumstances), and from somewhere in the yard next door, I heard again the bleating of a baby possum (presumably having fallen yet again from Mama's back).

Rafael Bonachela Interview

Oh, he's Spanish! I thought he was Italian!

A Surprise Arrest

A disturbing local story:

A 22-year-old woman who worked in the gift shop of Sacramento's Il Fornaio restaurant was arrested Wednesday in connection with a bold, midday gang slaying on Florin Road in February that highlighted a raging Asian gang war in Sacramento.

...The 5-foot-1-inch, 100-pound suspect is believed to have been the driver in the Feb. 20 shooting of a 23-year-old Marysville man who was attacked in his car at a stoplight in front of Florin Mall next to a church bus filled with children, Sacramento County sheriff's investigators said Wednesday.

As chaperones on the bus watched in horror, two men emerged from a 1997 Toyota Camry ..., skirted the bus, and shot (the victim) Pra Yang 14 times before escaping as the light turned green at Florin Road and Stockton Boulevard.

Il Fornaio restaurant is one of the poshest restaurants in downtown Sacramento. If such an unassuming person is a 'made man,' so to speak, what about everyone else you meet on a typical day in the city? Makes me want to hide under my bed!

Second Friday at Luna's

A pleasant evening at Luna's Cafe, listening to a variety of local poets. My understanding is that second Friday in April is now a tradition there, where the poets get to read selections written by their favorite poets.

I came to see Gil Rodriguez reprise Artaud, of course (Gil is my next door neighbor and Artaud is one bizarre French poet). Gil is a wonderful performance artist. Tonight Gil needed all his skills: he momentarily forgot his lines and had to improvise Artaud. He did it without apparent flaws, which is something performers have a hard time doing unless they really know their material well, which Gil does.

Jose Montoya was among the poets there (he is apparently well-known in Sacramento). Montoya asked violinist Arturo Balderrama to accompany him with a Yaqui tune. That sparked a memory from my days in Tucson, in the mid-80's.

Near I-10 in Tucson, just off W. Grant and behind the smog inspection station, there is a distinct barrio (Pascua) where many Yaqui Indians live. The Yaquis, originally from Sonora, were refugees from the Mexican Revolution, and had established the barrio on what was then the fringe of Tucson. 20th Century growth engulfed the barrio as the city limits expanded, but the place remained where it was, quite distinct. My customary jogging path ran right in-between the smog inspection station and the barrio.

One day, perhaps during Holy Week, I was jogging past the barrio when I suddenly noticed a number of Yaqui men, in full ceremonial Indian regalia, dancing in a line to the sound of tribal drums. I tried to jog past without drawing attention, but the Yaquis saw me approach. They broke their line dance, rushed up, and in full Indian dress, began jogging in an exaggerated way to the sound of the drums right beside me.

What a dramatic collision between new-fangled modern ways and ancient traditional ways! The Yaquis were mocking me! I didn't know, however, whether to be angry or to just laugh out loud! I smiled at them and continued jogging. After a while, the Yaquis broke off, and we parted ways, with a few waves and slight smiles. Certainly made an impression on me! The past lives with us still, modern city or not. May we all have the grace and the will to pass on traditional ways to the young, and from them to their young, ad infinitum! May we all mock the present!

Just Close the Blinds

Once again, a tornado passes only 4 miles away from here, and I'm unaware of its existence.

The first time was February 22nd: today is the second time. In both cases the tornado passed about four miles north of here (I'm in downtown Sacramento). KFBK radio is reporting the tornado today hit around Northgate and San Juan, just about the same neighborhood it hit in February. I'm getting worried about that neighborhood: what makes the sky gods so angry?

In February, I was working on a Saturday afternoon when the tornado passed. The lights flickered (the tornado was thrashing power lines and breaking stuff). Oblivious, I prudently saved the spreadsheet I was working on. Today, no lights flickered, so I remained unaware of any problems (I guess the power lines are still down in that neighborhood).

Afternoon heating in the Sierra foothills is promoting convection. That, and that low pressure system moving in as well. There may be more storms this evening. I promise to remain utterly inattentive to whatever is going on in the sky (unless the lights flicker, of course).

Helpful John Cornyn

Nice judicial robes there. It would be sad if anything were to happen to get such nice robes stained. Blood stains are the worst, they say. Let us help you keep your robes fresh and safe!

Celebrity Autonomy

Yesterday, Blogger was really acting acting up, and so I couldn't blog. Very frustrating. Now it's working again, and I suddenly have nothing to say. So, how's the weather?

Ballet practice yesterday in Woodland. Showers yesterday, and again today. I received my latest CD in the mail, the long-awaited critical success: "Britney Spears: Greatest Hits." Now I can listen to her most significant, insightful works. Not that they are all that significant and insightful, although there are few tunes that are nice for my inner dancer: 'Slave For U,' 'Toxic,' 'Do Something.' She's a terrible actress and mediocre singer, but a great dancer. Very popular in Iran, for some reason. She should dance some more: pouting songs about just wanting freedom, privacy, and autonomy while dealing with the demands of running a media empire tend to leave me a bit cold. A couple of weeks ago, Drudge was saying she was pregnant, then yanked the story quickly. Did he misunderstand the EPT results he picked out of her trash dumpster? Is she pregnant?

There was a funny blip in today's Bee regarding Madonna's two kids: they've been learning French in school, and now exclusively speak French to each other at home, because neither Madonna or Guy Ritchie speak a word of it. Get some autonomy and some privacy, and let their mother run the media empire. Good for them!

I'll Stick With Coach Class, Thanks!

Human rights activists, watch your back!:

Police in Indonesia have named two new suspects in the investigation into the murder Munir Sa'id Thalib of Indonesian Commission for Missing Persons and Violence, in Jakarta.... The activist, Munir Sa'id Thalib, died on a flight to Amsterdam after ingesting a large amount of arsenic.

Munir Sa'id Thalib died in agony hours before his Garuda Indonesia airlines plane touched down in Amsterdam. According to an autopsy carried out by Dutch police, he had ingested nearly 500 milligrams of arsenic, enough poison to kill four people.

The two new suspects are both airline cabin crew: one was working in the plane's pantry and the other was the stewardess who served Mr. Munir his meal.

Police have already named a Garuda pilot as a suspect - he apparently offered his business-class seat to Mr. Munir, and there have been inconsistencies in his explanation as to why he was on the flight.

But friends and colleagues of Mr. Munir, a 38-year-old lawyer and human-rights activist who had challenged some of Indonesia's most powerful vested interests, believe that other people could have been behind the murder.

Benedict DeLay

Always willing to sell out American soldiers for cash:

And now we know, as Kevin points out, that DeLay was doing all of this as the beneficiary of largesse from the Russian security services. Taking an expensive vacation at the expense of the military of a foreign power to support America's enemies probably doesn't amount to treason under the Constitutional definition, but it comes close.

Sub-Launched Nuclear Weapons

How reliable are the W-76 warheads? Now that the land-based missiles are largely retired, the W-76 is our main nuclear warhead, but it may not be as reliable as we think:

Dr. (Richard L.) Morse (Los Alamos National Lab) specialized in scientific explanations for the complex flows that curl through the extraordinarily hot gases known as plasmas, which lie at the heart of an exploding nuclear weapon. His main goal was to help scientists develop a giant laser that, in lieu of an atomic match, would fire on a tiny radiation case surrounding an even tinier pellet of hydrogen fuel, releasing a burst of nuclear energy. Heat from such miniature hydrogen bombs was envisioned as one day being used to make electricity.

But Dr. Morse found that nature had erected tricky barriers to that goal. In particular, he documented how a form of turbulence known as Rayleigh-Taylor instability (named after the physicists Lord Rayleigh and Geoffrey Taylor) could perturb the expanding plasma of the very hot radiation case, forming waves, ripples and whorls that blocked ignition of the thermonuclear fuel. He also found that extremely small variations in the case were responsible for the onset of turbulence, making it hard to eliminate.

In 1996, Dr. Morse brought similar analyses to bear on the W-76's thin case, arguing that it would probably fail. He said that for decades, officials had swept the issue under the rug and that Mr. Cremer, the designer, had struggled with the problem.
In an interview, Dr. Morse said he was soon "disinvited" from the evaluation and left Los Alamos for Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. But he added that concerns about the W-76 only grew.

Dr. Beckner (National Nuclear Security Administration) disagreed. He said the joint review found that the W-76 "looks like a pretty good weapon."

...At a secret meeting in March 2004 at Los Alamos, Dr. Morse led four critics who laid out their concerns to lab and federal officials, including Dr. Beckner. Dr. Morse characterized the discussion as acrimonious.

"It was a verbal mud-wrestling match," he recalled. The lab and federal officials "would not be candid with us. We told them things they didn't know. It was very, very disappointing."

In contrast, Dr. Beckner said the meeting and subsequent analyses left him with "high confidence that this nuclear weapon is a good design, was built properly and will function if required."

In early July, news reports in New Mexico began to describe the dispute, and the director of Los Alamos days later scheduled a secret lab symposium to review the "technical challenges" to understanding how radiation cases act in the first microseconds of a nuclear blast, according to a synopsis of the planned meeting.
As the number of news reports grew, officials denied that there was any problem with the W-76. They cited a history of detonations of the weapon at the Nevada Test Site.

In late November, the dependability issue emerged nationally as Congress approved a small budget item that began a new weapons design effort known as the Reliable Replacement Warhead program. Its goal is to have weapons scientists design a new generation of nuclear arms that are more reliable and more durable, reversing the cold war trend of making small, lightweight, powerful weapons. If possible, the effort is to proceed without nuclear testing.

Grapes of Warth Watch

And so, the joint cases were plea-bargained, and the jury sent home without being able to determine guilt or innocence "behind unreasonable doubt."

Trigger-Happy

If I'm an agoraphobic Floridian, can I shoot at everyone?:

Florida's legislature has approved a bill that would give residents the right to open fire against anyone they perceive as a threat in public, instead of having to try to avoid a conflict as under prevailing law.

Outraged opponents say the law will encourage Floridians to open fire first and ask questions later, fostering a sort of statewide Wild West shootout mentality. Supporters argue that criminals will think twice if they believe they are likely to be promptly shot when they assault someone.

Candidate Adventures

From today's Wall Street Journal, regarding Ali Ghaleb, a Sunni lawyer from Tikrit, Iraq:

Mr. Ghaleb put himself up for election last year. Then he joined the opposition to the elections and resolved to withdraw, but got kidnapped and missed the deadline to remove his name from the ballot. On election day, he found himself a reluctant winner.

Big Bonuses

Big bonuses are supposed to be incentives to motivate hard work, right? So what exactly do they do for dead people?

Southern Symbols

I was amused by Diane McWhorter's story in the New York Times Magazine last Sunday, in her review of John M. Coski's history, ''The Confederate Battle Flag'':

Some years ago, I was looking into a potential elementary school for my younger child. It was a highly recommended prospect, located on the politically correct Upper West Side of Manhattan and named after one of General Sheridan's colleagues. Halfway through the school's guided tour, I decided ''no way,'' explaining to a fellow Southern mom who was there, ''Do you really think you could tell the folks back home that you're sending your child to the William Tecumseh Sherman School?''

Sonoluminescence

Science News (March 5, 2005) reports that sonoluminescence (the emission of light from collapsing bubbles in a fluid bombarded by ultrasound) may be so hot that fusion might be sustained:

Indeed the new data provide "indirect evidence" of temperatures of hundreds of thousands of degrees K inside the imploding bubbles....

That's amazing, if true!

They Are Blue, Aren't They?

I can't find my little blue pills! I can't find my little blue pills! I can find *that* but beyond that I can't find - anything at all!

The condition, known as nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy (NAION), causes a rapid reduction of vision and can, in the most serious cases, lead to blindness.

Report co-author Dr Howard Pomeranz said the drug had long been linked to sight problems.

"For years, we have known some men who take Viagra will experience temporary colour changes in their vision and see things as blue or green.

"NAION is a much more serious condition because it can lead to permanent vision loss."

Breaking Wind

Regarding the recent report, "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction," and the report's conclusion that there was no politicization of intelligence leading up to the Iraq war, Jacob Weisberg notes:

You can't see the wind either, but it still blows things over.

Knifed

Josh Marshall:

Who's turning on the bug man? Call me cynical: but Drudge is playing this story awfully prominently. That makes me wonder whether a thumb at the White House that used to be turned up just turned down. More concretely, a lot of DeLay's lieutenants are now under indictment or on their way there. Eventually, you've got to figure one of them starts to squeal. You've seen Deliverance, right?

Half-Staff

Did we lower the flag for Popes Paul and John Paul I in 1978? My memory is that we did not.

My Name is Gannon. Jeff Gannon

This is ridiculous, but it's great - missing child Johnny Gosch grows up to be - Jeff Gannon?!:

Reports the Register: "The complete concoction goes like this: Gosch was kidnapped into a pedophilia and child pornography ring that serviced the upper echelons of Washington, D.C., society. He was brainwashed by the CIA, trained to be part of a top-secret escort program. Then, he became Jeff Gannon and was given a plum job as a White House correspondent with the online conservative news service to keep him quiet. Finally, he was "uncovered" by the bloggers.

Additionally, the newspaper notes, "[Bloggers] try to link both Bush presidents to this conspiracy, prove that Hunter S. Thompson's death was not a suicide and investigate a so-called government-sponsored pedophilia operation they claim continues to abduct children."

More Pozen

Ryan Lizza at TNR weighs in on Pozen's disastrous ratchet proposal and Bush's desperation:

...the long-term effect of progressive indexing would be to turn Social Security into a welfare system and erode support for it. While there is now some wealth redistribution inherent in Social Security, there is also a relationship between how much one contributes to Social Security and the benefits one receives upon retirement, a linkage that is the linchpin of the system's near-universal support. Under the Pozen plan, benefits for high and middle earners would, over time, be drastically reduced, while benefits for low earners would hold steady. The entire benefit structure would be flattened, turning it into a wealth-transfer system from rich to poor and shattering the system's political popularity.

...Conservatives are tearing their hair out as they watch Bush negotiate with himself in public, moving from full price indexing (drastic benefit cuts) to progressive price indexing (less drastic benefit cuts) in a few months with no response from Democrats. Even worse, the private accounts in the Pozen plan are half the size of Bush's original plan, so Bush is likely to lose conservative supporters, especially in the House, by embracing Pozen. "Pozen's plan is further to the left than we need to move," says conservative activist Grover Norquist. "Plus, the other challenge is that any benefit cuts are problematic because Bush campaigned in 2000 and 2004 saying he didn't want any benefit cuts."

So why is Pozen the White House's new best friend? Because Bush is desperate. He is boxed in by his decision to make the inclusion of private accounts and the exclusion of tax increases his two nonnegotiable demands. The only real policy olive branch he can offer Democrats is on the restructuring of benefits, and it's not enough.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

Teaching them 'liberal' judges a lesson. Cornyn: good cop, a former judge, just trying to be helpful to his brethren. Bad cop: that Doberman DeLay.

Conservatism and Vicious Cycles

Economic big-think over at Smirking Chimp, regarding oil. The authors claim ex-urban growth is but a paradoxical symptom of our basic dilemma: we are addicted to petroleum! Conservatism is a natural reaction to shortage and so as petroleum gets scarce, we see a conservative trend.

But the more I think about this, the more skeptical I'm getting. It's hard to tell exactly where the circular logic fails, though. Even though the consumption of petroleum grew greatly over the 20th Century, at any specific time, there were always limits on the availability of petroleum. Nevertheless, progressives saw their influence grow at the expense of conservatives during the first two-thirds of the 20th Century.

The Depression was caused in large measure to the failure of consumption to keep pace with production. That may be the cause of a future Depression in the U.S.: the middle class is being systematically starved of wage increases commensurate to its production, with wealth gravitating towards the top. It may be that the circular logic fails with the need to grant tax cuts to the rich: that grant only slows, doesn't stop, the process of progressive indebtedness to foreigners, and losing control over the American economy's destiny. I don't think the gang currently in power cares much about the nationality of ownership. Just so long as they are rich!

Nevertheless, here are some selections from an interesting reading:

The competition is not over scarce energy in itself, but over a particular form of energy which can be used to substitute for everything else. There is nothing in this world that one cannot get more cheaply by using more oil to get it ... Americans moved to the suburbs because it was cheaper to drive farther than to work through the problems of urbanization, and one could get a larger house with a larger yard in the bargain. As long as it was cheaper to pay rent to Saudi Arabia for the oil ... people chose to pay rent to OPEC rather than taxes to the government....

But what happens when America buys energy? What does that trade deficit mean? This is the second step of the vicious circle: while many nations sell some energy, a few nations export energy, but import virtually nothing. ... (Oil) profits, rather than going into developing Saudi Arabia, are poured back into the US.

The reason oil causes a particular problem in the world economy is that one can make huge profits in an oil economy, without having the entire superstructure of a cosmopolitan, entrepreneurial, liberal and technological society around it. One cannot manufacture cars, develop technology or develop medicines without a large population of educated people, but one can run an oil economy with a relatively small core of people, many of whom can be imported....This means the trade deficit creates an investment deficit: the US takes in more investment from the rest of the world than it sends out to the rest of the world.

However, with investment pouring in from nations where the investors are also the government, more and more control over the US economy at its highest levels is in the hands of the wealthy of nations like Saudi Arabia. Should they chose to pull their wealth from the US, or even simply stop rolling over their financing, the result would be a rapid drop in the value of US stocks and assets.... To prevent investors in these countries from gaining control, the developed world, and particularly the US, is forced down a particular path: it must cut taxes on our wealthy, so that they match the taxes on the wealthy of Saudi Arabia. The "race to the bottom" starts at the top. This cutting of revenues is what drives the US budget deficit: without the reduction in revenues from upper-bracket tax rates being lowered, and without the interest on the National debt, there is no financial crisis. This means that the trade deficit, combined with the nature of a few energy exporting states, creates the budget deficit.

The money then comes back to the United States at the top of the economy - in the purchase of financial stocks primarily - and then filters downward. This "top down economy," called "trickle down economics," means that America cannot invest in getting out of the energy trap, because the very people who hold the purse strings have no interest in ending it. The only way to slow the process is by, as you should guess, holding real wages flat, because if people earn more, they burn more oil, and make the trade deficit worse.

The reason Reaganomics was put in place then, and remained in place even after the Democrats took back both the Congress and, by 1992, the Presidency, is that no single point on the circle could be broken: raise real wages, and the trade deficit gets worse, raise tax rates by enough to rapidly wipe out the deficit, and face the prospect of foreign ownership of the "commanding heights" of the American economy. Instead of finding a way off of the dependence on foreign oil, and instead of untangling money from oil, Reaganomics used cuts in capital gains taxes and upper-income marginal income tax rates, and the increase in FICA taxes as a regressive tax to reduce consumption as a way of allowing foreign investment to pour into America. The cost was that wages would have to stay flat in real terms, and that corporations and stock wealth would have to grow almost without limit.

This means that the reason Reagan won, and gradually pulled the media and much of the public mood behind him, was that in a world which is zero sum - and the amount of oil being the basis of profit meant it was zero sum - people become conservative, grasping at whatever bits of their bundle of ultimate scarcity they hold. It meant that allowing the rich to become richer was essential to keep America under the control of Americans. It meant that corporations had to be allowed to become larger and larger, so that they were harder and harder to hold accountable through political means. It also created another vicious circle: Americans had more and more of their wealth in their homes, which created more pressure for sprawl, which, in turn, created more and more demand that gasoline prices remain low, so that people could trade cheap energy to pay less for expensive land.

The process became a vicious circle because larger and larger corporations with more and more wealth at the top became the dominant political force. Natural selection of a political kind took over: attempts to change one of these features of the economy met with disaster. Raise wages, and inflation returned; raise taxes, and autonomy was threatened; cut oil consumption, and other nations would consume more oil to sell to the United States. In other words, progressivism ebbed because there seemed to be no single point of attack that did not involve a dramatic energy austerity, and the resulting reduction in American standards of living....

The vicious cycle is this: that a cheap energy deficit created a trade deficit, creating an investment deficit, which then created the political pressure for a wages and wealth deficit, which, in turn, made the cheap energy deficit worse, and even more political pressure for even more inequality of wealth and to keep the one lever Americans still had - the ability to drive further to keep costs down, since they could no longer strike or organize to raise real wages. This started the cycle all over again. This is the key to the move to the right - by creating an economy which is determined by the scarcity of one commodity: oil, and a money system which bends around the dynamics of that one commodity, an environment is fostered in which people think as conservatives first.

Terror-Alert Van

I saw a lot of these vans during the gubernatorial race. A lot of good they did keeping us safe from steroid extremists.

Painted red, white, and blue, the TerrorFirst! van is the first mobile unit devoted to monitoring terrorist threats on a local level. The van is equipped with live satellite feeds to and from the Fox News channel, a fax machine prepared to receive alerts from the Department of Homeland Security in Washington, an English-Arabic phrase book for translating any intercepted al-Qaeda correspondence, and a field-issue anthrax-detection kit.

"In a minute's notice, the van can be completely prepped, on the road, and speeding toward any site of terrorist activity within the WMFB broadcast area," Bogert said. "Assuming two attacks don't happen concurrently, of course."

According to Bogert, the TerrorFirst! van features a rooftop satellite dish, a diesel-powered generator in case terrorists take down the Tennessee power grid, emergency snow chains for use in the event of a nuclear winter, a supply of promotional "Fox 11 News...Looking Out For You" T-shirts and bumper stickers, and a gun rack. The van is outfitted with several state-of-the-art monitoring systems, as well.

"TerrorDoppler can detect a dirty-bomb detonation of any significant magnitude from up to 40 miles away," Bogert said. "The van can transmit a map of contaminated areas to the station for broadcast. That way, Fox 11 viewers gain valuable minutes—time which could be used to plan escape routes, call loved ones, and gather survival supplies."

Light Years Away

Just beginning the planning process. I was alarmed today to discover that almost all of Kylie's Australian Tour tickets have already been sold:

West Australian fans proved just how much they loved Kylie earlier this year when three Perth concerts sold out in a matter of hours. As a fourth show in Perth isn't possible, Kylie's management and promoter have been in talks determining whether seats could be added to the existing shows to meet the demand for more tickets. It looks like it worked, because an additional section of tickets will be released for Kylie's first Perth concert at the Burswood Dome on Sunday, June 12.

But what if I can't make that concert?

If you shouldn't be so lucky, then you should try your hand winning a Willy Wonka-style golden ticket. Festival Mushroom Records have weaved a lot of magic and have confirmed a national 'find the golden ticket' (read: peel a sticker off the cover of the single which reveals a unique code that you enter into a ninemsn database) competition where anyone who buys Giving You Up in its first week of release (from April 10-16 only) gets the chance to sit front row at one of Kylie's Australian Showgirl shows! There are five double passes hidden... so happy hunting!

That's ridiculous! I'm not going to buy every CD-single in Australia next week hoping to get lucky! Nevertheless, in response to heavy demand, new shows HAVE been squeezed into her itinerary:

True to past form, Kylie has sold out another Showgirl concert at astonishing speed. A fifth Melbourne concert went on sale this morning at 9.00am with all tickets snapped up in just two hours.

In response to the continued demand for tickets, Kylie has agreed to celebrate her birthday with her fans with one final Melbourne concert on Saturday 28 May. ...Kylie said; "I can’t think of a more appropriate way to spend my birthday than at home in Melbourne doing what I love best. I’m enjoying the Showgirl tour so much and I’d love to share this special day with my fans in Melbourne."

Promoter Michael Gudinski said; "Kylie’s Showgirl tour is already one big party from start to finish, so it seems fitting that Kylie is prepared to perform on her birthday. This will be an unforgettable night for her Melbourne fans."

The sixth Melbourne concert will absolutely be the last chance for fans to see Kylie in Melbourne on the Showgirl tour. So get your party shoes on and secure your tickets now.

So, I made a stab at the newly-announced third show in Brisbane Queensland, on Australia's fabled 'Gold Coast', north of Sydney, on Monday June 6th (which works out to June 5th on this side of the International Date Line). I secured one "Gold" ticket:

Kylie announced the European leg of her tour in 2004 and the tour exploded from the original dates to a thirty-five date run. Ticketing websites and booking agencies went into meltdown as the systems literally couldn't meet the demand for tickets.

...An enormous AUS$3 million stage will be especially shipped from the UK for the Australian tour.

And while no money will be spared in the production of the tour (staging of Show Girl will exceed the AUS$10 million cost of the Fever tour), Kylie is adamant the costs won't subsequently hit the wallets of her fans.

After a number of discussions with promoter Michael Gudinski, it was decided to keep ticket prices exactly the same as her 2002 Fever tour.

Michael Gudinski said the decision is illustrative of Kylie's long term dedication to her fans.

"Kylie wanted to ensure that her Show Girl ticket prices were kept as reasonable as possible.

"This is an enormously spectacular show, which will cost a fortune to stage, but Kylie's decision from day one was to keep the prices as they were on her last tour."

The Brisbane Entertainment Centre (BEC), built in 1986, sounds like a nice place: smaller than ARCO Arena's 17,317 seats.

The Brisbane Entertainment Centre is Queensland’s premier entertainment and meeting facility and was purpose built to accommodate the most complex events, from an intimate setting of 500 people up to a maximum of 13,500 for the grandest extravaganzas and international conferences.

Now the hard part - getting time off work and plane tickets and lodging! (Oh yeah, and unloading those silly Irish tickets!) Fun facts about the tour:

The show represents Kylie's finest moments in music, performance and style and is an homage to the showgirl, one of the most exotic, decadent and sensual icons of our times. Inspiration has come from the Moulin Rouge to the Folies Bergere, from the Doris Girls of the Paris Lido to the entertainment palaces of Las Vegas, from the underground burlesque bars of Soho to the Busby Berkeley musicals of the thirties. Kylie's show pays tribute to the showgirl in all her forms and guises. It also amalgamates the strengths of Kylie's past three major tours - the intimacy of 'Intimate and Live', the celebratory aspects of 'On A Night Like This' and the technological futurism of 'Fever'.

Kylie recently admitted that the scale of this tour came home to her when she realised the amount of trucks it would take to get the show from one city/country to the next - this show needs 15 trucks to ferry it around, including half of a truck devoted solely to feathers!

The show is so huge that it needs well over 100 people to get it on the road. The million pound, art deco inspired stage is believed to be the biggest ever built for an arena tour and features 5 hydraulic lifts within its construction. Like Kylie's 2002 Fever tour, Showgirl pushes the technological boundaries, using innovative technology in video, lighting and sound. At each venue the trucks will start unloading at 7am to have the show ready for 9pm.

Onstage with Kylie will be 7 band members and 12 dancers.

Here's a nice picture (via Bogs Doddy, from this site):

Thinking About Australia

Thinking? Thinking! I was alarmed when I saw my first Web page of plane fares, but the Australian Dollar is currently worth about 77 American cents, so the impact won't be as bad as I first thought. But are Kylie concert tickets available? Maybe I should go to Perth - what looks like the back of the outback to this naive Californian!

Looking Forward...

Interesting poetry reading next Friday night at Luna's Cafe. My literary next-door neighbor, Gil Rodriguez, has some interesting things planned, including, among other things, more Artaud, the semi-psychotic post-WWII French poet widely - and understandably - derided in his lifetime, but whose poetry functions much better as performance art.

To my unpracticed eye, having once seen Gil perform Artaud with his Und Heimlich group, it looks like Artaud the Poet missed his true calling, perhaps on Cable-TV's Comedy Central: like Lewis Black on acid. Gil has teased out what works best in Artaud's highly-conflicted mess of a legacy. Keep the date in mind: Gil's approach is excellent and intriguing!

Brrr!

Boy, that was an abrupt rain-soaked frontal passage this evening! Reminds you of what spring is supposed to be all about. April showers, May flowers, and all that. Just wish I had put away my tools!

Damaged Goods

Digby makes the point that the conservative world-view was damaged by the Schiavo matter. Once a week, I see a conservative lawyer of my acquaintance, and we chat briefly. He was livid about the Schiavo matter. The gap between FOX News and the Constitution was too great to bridge.

For instance, a conservative doctor of my acquaintance was stunned by the Schiavo matter. This man watches nothing but Fox news and could not believe the anti-intellectual religiosity of their coverage. This is a matter that he knows intimately and he could see clearly that the coverage wasn't "fair and balanced." Indeed, it wasn't true. It's as if a veil fell from his eyes.

My conservative Rush loving neighbor was heard complaining the his hero didn't know what he was talking about on the Schiavo case. That is a first. This guy is a true believer --- who also has a very sick wife.

My nurse sister-in-law (also a born again Christian and avid FOX watcher) insisted that all the news be turned off in the house because she couldn't stand the exploitation of the patient or the sideshow outside that hospice. She's very depressed about all this.

See, the right isn't like us. They think that the so called liberal media is irretrievably biased but believe what they see, read and hear on their own media. We on the left, on the other hand, have no faith in any mainstream media, really, or any alternative media either for that matter. We have developed the habit of culling from various sources and analyzing the information ourselves as best we can. Even then we are very skeptical. Nothing that the media could do would particularly shock or disappoint us. No so with the other side. A fair number of them are actually hurt and bewildered by what they saw in the Schiavo matter.

The President

Cases the joint.

An Arrest

In the Arellano case.