I've said it for years. Tupperwear.

British researchers have grown a new liver from umbilical-cord stem cells, a breakthrough of immense proportions that promises the potential of almost-instant organ transplantation:
British scientists have grown the world's first artificial liver from stem cells in a breakthrough that will one day provide entire organs for transplant.
The technique that created the 'mini-liver', currently the size of a one pence piece, will be developed to create a full-size functioning liver.
Described as a 'Eureka moment' by the Newcastle University researchers, the tissue was created from blood taken from babies' umbilical cords just a few minutes after birth.
Within five years, pieces of artificial tissue could be used to repair livers damaged by injury, disease, alcohol abuse and paracetamol overdose.
And then, in just 15 years' time, entire liver transplants could take place using organs grown in a lab.

COLUMBUS, Indiana (AP) -- An inmate accused of forcibly tattooing a slain 10-year-old girl's name onto her killer's forehead in an Indiana prison was the victim's cousin, a family friend said.
Jared Harris, 22, is a cousin of Katlyn "Katie" Collman, family friend and spokesman Terry Gray told The Republic newspaper. He said he did not believe they knew each other well.
Harris, 22, who is serving time on a burglary conviction at Wabash Valley state prison in Carlisle, has been charged with battery and accused of tattooing "KATIE'S REVENGE" across Anthony Ray Stockelman's forehead.
Harris told prison officials the attack was in revenge, according to an affidavit.
Stockelman is serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to abducting, molesting and killing the fourth-grader, who lived about 70 miles south of Indianapolis. She was missing for five days before her body was found January 30, 2005, in a creek about 15 miles from her home.
The affidavit said that prison officials transferred Harris to the same prison wing as Stockelman on September 19, three days before the attack, and that Harris subsequently threatened Stockelman's life several times.
Harris slipped into the open cell Stockelman shared with another prisoner on September 22 and, when Stockelman returned, Harris closed the locking cell door, according to the affidavit.
Stockelman told investigators that Harris put his right hand around his throat and told him, "I'm either gonna stick you and leave you bleeding or I'm gonna tattoo you." After applying the tattoo, Harris discarded the tattoo gun in a prison trash can, he told investigators.
It was unclear how he had gotten the tattoo gun.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Best Headline Ever.

Trojans Come From Behind Against Beavers

POSTED: 2:12 am EST November 7, 2004

CORVALLIS, Ore. -- Dominique Byrd caught two touchdown passes and Reggie Bush returned a punt 65 yards for a score, as the top-ranked Southern California Trojans came from behind against the Beavers of Oregon State to post a 28-20 victory.
Byrd hauled in seven catches for 85 yards and LenDale White rushed for 116 yards and a score for Southern California (9-0, 6-0 Pac-10). The Trojans have torn up the Beavers over the years, to the tune of a 57-8-4 lead in the all- time series. Southern California has won 18 consecutive games overall, 13 in a row in the Pac-10 and 10 straight in the visitor's role.
Oregon State (4-5, 3-3) jumped out to a 13-0 lead. Alexis Serna nailed a pair of first quarter field goals, and Derek Anderson hit Marcel Love on an eight- yard scoring toss with nine minutes left in the second quarter.
But the Trojans found the scoreboard with just over four minutes left in the first half. Matt Leinart capped a five-play, 77-yard drive by hitting Byrd on an 18-yard scoring toss. Byrd extended and made a nice one-handed catch on the play.
Southern California took its first lead with 12:14 left in the third quarter, as Byrd took it in again, this time for a 25-yard score.
In the fourth, Oregon State elected to punt to Bush for the first time all game and it backfired, as he scampered 65 yards to the end zone to up the advantage to 21-13. White scored on a five-yard run with just over seven minutes left to push the Trojans' lead to 28-13.
Anderson, who threw for 330 yards, connected with Josh Hawkins on a 36-yard scoring toss with 2:36 left in the fourth to account for the 28-20 final score.
Leinart finished with 17 completions on 31 attempts for 205 yards.
Anderson's TD pass with 2 1/2 minutes left was the first touchdown the Trojans have given up in the fourth quarter all season.
Bush added 88 yards rushing on 11 carries.

Halloween Party?

Joey: Hey! I know you! You're Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, you play basketball for the Los Angeles Lakers!
Roger Murdock: I'm sorry, I think you have me confused with someone else, my name is Roger Murdock.
Joey: You are Kareem! I've seen you play! My dad's got season tickets.
Roger Murdock: I think it's time to go back to your seat, right Clarence?
Oveur: No, let him stay. He's not bothering anyone.
Joey: I think you're the greatest, but my dad says you don't work hard enough on defense.
Roger Murdock: THE HELL I DON'T! Look, I'm out there bustin' my butt EVERY NIGHT. Tell your old man to run up and down the court for forty minutes!

Ongoing 'intifada' in France has injured 2,500 police in 2006
Special to World Tribune.com
GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT.COM

Friday, October 27, 2006
This might have dropped below the radar, but Al Qaida and its allies are literally battling the Crusaders every day in Europe. And so far, Europe isn't doing so well.
"We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists," said Michel Thoomis, secretary general of the Action Police trade union. "This is not a question of urban violence any more. It is an intifada, with stones and firebombs."
The French Interior Ministry has acknowledged the Muslim uprising. The ministry said more than 2,500 police officers have been injured in 2006. This amounts to at least 14 officers each day.
The battles have been under-reported but alarming to French authorities. Muslim street commanders, who run lucrative drug networks, have organized youngsters in housing projects to ambush police and confront security forces. The response time allows hundreds of Muslims to storm police cars and patrols within minutes.
"You no longer see two or three youths confronting police," Thoomis said. "You see whole tower blocks emptying into the streets to set their comrades free when they are arrested."
France's huge Muslim minority community has come under the influence of agents often influenced and financed by Al Qaida. These agents have recruited Muslim youngsters for urban warfare in which police and government representatives are injured daily.
Not surprisingly, Muslim neighborhoods are becoming autonomous zones, with police and government workers too scared to enter. The police union is demanding the Interior Ministry supply officers with armored cars.
European law enforcement sources say France could be a model for other countries. The most worried are Britain and the Netherlands.

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

Best closing sentence ever.

POTENTIAL WINNERS AND LOSERS
Industry sectors that could prosper or suffer if Democrats gain control of Congress:

Winners

Government-sponsored enterprises
Dems favor less regulation for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac

Life sciences providers
Dems support more generous funding of National Institutes of Health

Alternative energy
Dems worried about global warming

Life insurers
Dems don't support lower estate taxes, could boost insurance demand

Losers

Drugs/biotech
Dems want Medicare to negotiate drug prices

Oil/energy services
Dems favor energy conservation via taxes

Coal
Less efficient than natural gas, alternative fuels

Telecom
Dems favor "net neutrality," generally less friendly to big Bells

Student lending/ for-profit education
Dems favor direct lending, not-for-profit universities

Restaurants
Dems favor higher minimum wages, support obesity suits

Tobacco
Dems favor tougher regulation, support class-action suits

Property & casualty insurance
Dems less supportive of tort reform

Government information technology
Dems less supportive of outsourcing

Source: UBS

Everyone is speculating about which party will control Congress after next month's voting. But we may not know for a while. We could see either party pursue the kind of lawsuits that Al Gore unleashed in Florida in 2000 and contest any number of tight races that are within the "margin of litigation." Recounts and even seating challenges in Congress could stretch on for weeks--another endless election. "We're waiting for the day that pols can cut out the middleman and settle all elections in court," jokes the political newsletter Hotline.
"In 2000 in Florida, we broke a psychic barrier," says Doug Chapin, director of the nonpartisan Election Reform Information Project. "Election night is not necessarily the finish line anymore. Both sides are lawyering up." Indeed, in 1998 the number of court cases challenging elections totaled 104, by 2004 that number had climbed to 361.

Geologist: Earth has lots and lots of oil
SPOKANE, Wash., Oct. 20 (UPI) -- A University of Washington economic geologist says there is lots of crude oil left for human use.
Eric Cheney said Friday in a news release that changing economics, technological advances and efforts such as recycling and substitution make the world's mineral resources virtually infinite.
For instance, oil deposits unreachable 40 years ago can be tapped using improved technology, and oil once too costly to extract from tar sands, organic matter or coal is now worth manufacturing. Though some resources might be costlier now, they still are needed.
"The most common question I get is, 'When are we going to run out of oil?' The correct response is, 'Never,'" said Cheney. "It might be a heck of a lot more expensive than it is now, but there will always be some oil available at a price, perhaps $10 to $100 a gallon."
Cheney also said that gasoline prices today, adjusted for inflation, are about what they were in the early part of the last century. Current prices seem inordinately high, he said, because crude oil was at an extremely low price, $10 a barrel, eight years ago and now fetches around $58 a barrel.

Dolchstosslegende

Interesting Analysis

Control Congress is a multi-partisan, issue-oriented political forum that brings together the Left, Right, and everyone in between.
A Conservative Plan for Iraq

Anyone who questions the lack of a realistic and comprehensive Iraq strategy is labeled a friend of fascism by the Republican leadership. House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) recently said, “I wonder if [Democrats] are more interested in protecting the terrorists than protecting the American people.” Republicans are paralyzed with the fear of being thought ineffective on national security and the war.
Meanwhile, the Democratic leadership cannot seem to accept that—regardless of how we got there—we are in Iraq. They have not made a convincing case that an arbitrary phased or date-certain troop withdrawal is in the best long-term interest of the United States. Rather, they seem to think that withdrawal will undo the decision to have gone to war. Rubbing President Bush’s nose in Iraq’s difficulties is also a priority.
This political food fight is stifling the desperately needed public discussion about a meaningful resolution to the fire fight. Most Americans know Iraq is going badly. And they know the best path lies somewhere between “stay the course” and “get out now”.
Some Truths
1) Iraq is having a civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites. The Kurds will certainly join, if attacked. It may not look like a civil war, because they don’t have tanks, helicopters, and infantry; but they are fighting with what they have.
2) Vast oil revenues are a significant factor behind the fighting. Yes, there are religious and cultural differences—but concerns about how the oil revenue will be split among the three groups make the problem worse.
3) Most Iraqis support partitioning Iraq into Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish regions. (Their current arrangement resulted from a pen stroke during the British occupation, not some organic alignment.)
4) Most citizens of the Middle East who support groups that kill and terrorize civilians—such as Hezbollah, Hamas, or al Qaeda—in part because of their aggressive stance against Israel and the United States, but also because they provide much needed social services, such as building schools.5) Both Republican and Democratic administrations have spent decades doing business with the tyrants who run the Middle East in exchange for oil and cheap labor. This has been the one of the rallying calls of Bin Laden and Hezbollah—that we support tyrants who abuse people for profits. In fact, our latest trade deals with Oman and Jordan actually promote child and slave labor; it’s so bad the State Department had to issue warnings about rampant child trafficking in those countries.
6) Iran is using the instability in Iraq to enhance its political stature in the region. Leaving Iraq without a government that can stand up to Iran would be very destabilizing to the region and the world.
From the U.S. perspective, this is all mostly about energy. As things stand, a serious oil supply disruption would devastate our economy, threaten our security, and jeopardize our ability to provide for our children.
New Directions
Success in Iraq and the Middle East in general requires us to work in three areas simultaneously: (1) fostering a more stable Middle East region, including Iraq, (2) pursuing alternative sources of oil, and (3) developing alternatives to oil. To these ends we must:

1) Insure that the oil revenues are fairly and transparently split among all three groups: Shiite, Sunni, and Kurds based on population.
2) Allow each group to have a much stronger role in self government by creating three virtually-autonomous regions. Forcing a united Iraq down their throats is not working. Our military would then be there in support a solution that people want, rather than one they are resisting.
3) Become a genuine force for positive change, thus denying extremist groups much of their leverage. Driving a fair two-state solution to the Israeli/Palestinian problem should be our first priority. We should also engage in projects that both help the average Middle Easterner and Americans, such as supporting schools that are an alternative to the ones that teach hate and recruit terrorists. We should also stop participating in trade deals that promote child and slave labor by insisting on deals that include livable wages and basic labor rights.
4) Declare a Marshal Plan to end our Middle Eastern energy dependency with a compromise between exploring for new sources, reducing consumption, and developing of alternative energies. For example, we should re-establish normal relations with Cuba so we can beat China to Cuba’s off-shore oil. We should also redirect existing tax breaks for Big Oil into loan guarantees for alternative energy companies.
Once we no longer need so much oil from the Middle East, we can begin winning over its people by using our oil purchases to reward positive and peaceful behavior from their leaders. This would ultimately reduce tensions and encourage prosperity in the region.
We will have to live with the threat of Islamic radical terrorism forever; but these solutions are a start to reducing the threat. Both parties have to put politics aside and put together an honest and reasonable plan that the American understand.

Posted by JohnKonop on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 10:29 am under

Your the best, AROOOOUND!

Marcus

Thomas Friedman (requires TimesSelect subscription) on the jihadists’ plans to kill for the media’s cameras—and for the political benefit of the Democrats.

"The jihadists follow our politics much more closely than people realize. A friend at the Pentagon just sent me a post by the “Global Islamic Media Front” carried by the jihadist Web site Ana al-Muslim on Aug. 11. It begins: “The people of jihad need to carry out a media war that is parallel to the military war and exert all possible efforts to wage it successfully. This is because we can observe the effect that the media have on nations to make them either support or reject an issue.”
It then explains that for jihadist videos of attacks on Americans to have the biggest impact, “Some persons will be needed who are proficient in the use of computer graphics including Photoshop, 3D Studio Max, or other programs that the people of jihad will need to design ... video clips about the operations.”
Finally, the Web site suggests that jihadists flood e-mail and video of their operations to “chat rooms,” “television channels,” and to “famous U.S. authors who have public e-mail addresses ... such as Friedman, Chomsky, Fukuyama, Huntington and others.” This is the first time I’ve ever been on the same mailing list with Noam Chomsky.
It would be depressing to see the jihadists influence our politics with a Tet-like media/war frenzy."

Terrifying

Dawkins Intro from Colbert Report

"My guest tonight is a scientist that argues that there is no God. Well You know what, he will have an enternity in hell to prove it. Richard Dawkins"

Campbell had argued that the travails of Odysseus or the legends of King Arthur were not meant to be taken literally – you wouldn’t go into a restaurant, he famously explained, see “steak” on the menu and then eat the menu. Rather, their truthfulness emerges when they are understood as metaphors for human action that work in terms of deep psychological principles.

FU/UN

How bad does the new United Nations Human Rights Council have to be, to get the Washington Post to condemn it?

Reform Run Amok.

"For all its faults, the previous U.N. commission occasionally discussed and condemned the regimes most responsible for human rights crimes, such as those in Belarus and Burma. China used to feel compelled to burnish its record before the annual meeting. The new council, in contrast, has so far taken action on only one country, which has dominated the debate at both of its regular meetings and been the sole subject of two extraordinary sessions: Israel.
Western human rights groups sought to focus the council’s attention on Darfur, where genocide is occurring, and on Uzbekistan, where a dictator refuses to allow the investigation of a massacre by his security forces. Their efforts have been in vain. Instead, the council has treated itself to report after report on the alleged crimes of the Jewish state; in all, there were six official “rapporteurs” on that subject in the latest session alone. One, Jean Ziegler, is supposed to report on “the right to food.” But he, too, delivered a diatribe on Israeli “crimes” in Lebanon.
This ludicrous diplomatic lynch mob has been directed by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which accounts for 17 governments on the 47-member council and counts on the support of like-minded dictatorships such as Cuba and China. Council rules allow an extraordinary session to be called at the behest of just one-third of the membership, making it easy for the Islamic association to orchestrate anti-Israel spectacles. Several Muslim governments that boast of a new commitment to democracy and human rights — including Jordan and Morocco — have readily joined in this willful sabotage of those values."

The same countries that are screaming the loudest for the release of the Guantanamo Bay terrorists are refusing to accept custody of them.

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Britain and other U.S. allies have demanded closure of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but have also blocked efforts to let some prisoners return home, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday.
British officials recently rejected a U.S. offer to transfer 10 former British residents from Guantanamo to the United Kingdom, arguing that it would be too expensive to keep them under surveillance, the newspaper said, citing documents made public this month in London.
Britain has also staved off a legal challenge by the relatives of some prisoners who sued to require the British government to seek their release, The Washington Post said.
While all British citizens in Guantanamo were freed starting in 2004, Britain has balked at allowing former legal residents of the country to return, the newspaper said.
Germany and other European allies, which have spoken out against Guantanamo, also have balked at accepting prisoners from the facility, the Post said."

>>

After injecting themselves into the Lebanon crisis and making all kinds of promises they didn’t intend to keep, France and the United Nations have made it explicitly clear that they will not use force to disarm Hizballah, or to prevent weapons from being smuggled in from Syria.
But Israeli Air Force overflights, to keep watch over the terrorists? Now there’s something the French are willing to fight against: Peretz: French UNIFIL say will fire at IAF overflights.

"Commanders of the French contingent of the United Nations force in Lebanon have warned that they might have to open fire if Israel Air Force warplanes continue their overflights in Lebanon, Defense Minister Amir Peretz told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday.
Peretz said that nevertheless, Israel would continue to patrol the skies over Lebanon as long as United Nations resolution 1701 remained unfilfilled, adding that such operations were critical for the country’s security, especially as the abducted IDF soldiers remain in Hezbollah custody and the transfer of arms continue.
Over the past few days, Peretz said, Israel had gathered clear evidence that Syria was transfering arms and ammunition to Lebanon, meaning that the embargo imposed by UN Resolution 1701 was not being completely enforced."

"A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big."

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tomorrow will I live, the fool does say;
Today itself is too late; the wise lived yesterday.
Martial (Marcus Valerius martialis)

Rushdie on the Religion of Peace
Here’s a great interview with Salman Rushdie, full of insight into the evil of radical Islam and the willful blindness of Western liberal elites: Salman Rushdie: His life, his work and his religion.
It’s in The Independent, so the interviewer exhibits some of that willful blindness.

“If tomorrow the Israel/Palestine issue was resolved to the total happiness of all parties, it would not diminish the amount of terrorism coming out of al-Qa’ida by one jot. It’s not what they’re after,” he adds, his foot tapping against mine as he leans forward. “Yes, it’s a recruiting tool, rhetorically. Many people see there’s an injustice there, and it helps them to get people into the gang, but it’s not what they want. What they want is to change the nature of human life on earth into the image of the Taliban. If you want the whole earth to look like Taliban Afghanistan, then you’re on the same side as them. If you don’t want that, you’re not. They do not represent the quest for human justice. That, I think, is one of the great mistakes of the left.”
Within this Talibanist morality, there is room for great slabs of delusion and hypocrisy. In Shalimar the Clown, Rushdie shows sparingly how the jihadi fighters of Afghanistan have sex with adolescent boys, and the next day chop to pieces men they have dubbed “homosexual”. “One of the great untold stories of al-Qa’ida is that they are all these men who f-ck little boys. They all have these disciples who they’re ostensibly training in the way of the warrior, but they’re also enjoying. For a while, then they go off - and they have their wives and families at home. It’s like Classical Greece.” Does he think Osama bin Laden has done it? “I wouldn’t like to say,” he says tactfully. “He’s an Arab, he’s not an Afghan. But Mullah Omar, he’s another story...”
He senses soft racism in the refusal to see Islamic fundamentalists for what they are. When looking at the Christian fundamentalists of the United States, most people see an autonomous movement of superstitious madmen. But when they look at their Islamic equivalents, they assume they cannot mean what they say. “One of the things that’s commonly said by Islamists is that it’s acceptable to bomb a disco, because a disco is a place where people are behaving in a disgusting way. Go away and die - that’s all bin Laden wants you to do. It’s not just about Iraq, it’s about ham sandwiches and kissing in public places and sex with girls you’re not married to.” He pauses. “It’s about life.”

http://www.daveskillerbread.com/

Great bread!

Bill Murray Goes to College Party-Does Dishes

Stars They're Just Like Us

LONDON, England (AP) -- Bill Murray created a small sensation in the Scottish town of St. Andrews, joining Scandinavian students at a late-night party and even helping to wash the dishes, a newspaper reported Sunday.
In the movie "Lost in Translation," Murray plays a lonely middle-aged actor in Japan who befriends a young American woman and goes partying with her.
And in what The Sunday Telegraph said was life imitating art, the 56-year-old Murray joined up with 22-year-old Norwegian student Lykke Stavnef, who took him to a house where a student party was in full swing.
"Nobody could believe it when I arrived at the party with Bill Murray," Stavnef, a social anthropology student, was quoted as saying. "He was just like the character in 'Lost in Translation."'
The newspaper reported that Murray met Stavnef at a bar where he was drinking with fellow golfers after playing in the October 5-8 Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in St. Andrews with other actors.
To Stavnef's surprise, Murray accepted her invitation to a party and accompanied her and her friend to a party, the newspaper said.
She said she was first concerned when the apartment had no clean glasses left, but that Murray was happy to drink vodka from a coffee cup and also helped wash dishes in the cramped kitchen.
The Sunday Telegraph article was accompanied by a photograph that appears to show Murray, dressed in a checkered shirt and a brown vest, washing a metal pot at the sink.
As news spread around the city that Murray had turned up at the student party, the house became crowded with people wanting to meet the star of "Ghostbusters," the article said.
"He was joking with me about reheating some leftover pasta and how drunk everyone was," said partygoer Agnes Huitfeldt, 22.
Tom Wright, 22, another college student, said "the party was overflowing with stunning Scandinavian blondes."
"He seemed to be in his element, cracking lots of jokes," Wright said. "It was the talk of the town the next day."
Shortly after doing the dishes, Murray left the party, the students said.

Andre The Giant Drank Molsons

BJ & The Bear

Once a great Ironworks stood at the end of my street...

A five-alarm fire at the abandoned Greenpoint Terminal Warehouse/Market is being fought this morning in dramatic fashion: News choppers show that the FDNY's marine units are at work - the warehouse occupie a 200' by 600' lot along the East River. (WNBC's Vivian Lee, on location, said the fire was making it feel like a 100 degree day even 50 yards away.) Last year, Tien visited the terminal market last year and found a description of it from the Greenpoint-Williamsburg Environmental Impact Study:

The Greenpoint Terminal Market site occupies over three blocks of land along the East River between Greenpoint Avenue and Oak Street. This site, which is largely vacant, includes six industrial buildings ranging in height from one to seven stories, several of which are severely deteriorated. Immediately south of the Greenpoint Terminal Market is a now vacant piece of land formerly occupied by Consolidated Freight, a national freight forwarding company that declared bankruptcy in August 2002.
Also, the U.S.S. Monitor was built there when Continental Ironworks was located there. The warehouse's vastness made it seem ripe for a conversion of some sort (commercial-residential, perhaps) - see pictures from Flickr of its cool skyways.

Mr Rumsfeld showed the picture to illustrate how backward the northern regime really is - and how oppressed its people are. Without electricity there can be none of the appliances that make life easy and that we take for granted, he said.
"Except for my wife and family, that is my favourite photo," said Mr Rumsfeld.
"It says it all. There's the south, the same people as the north, the same resources north and south, and the big difference is in the south it's a free political system and a free economic system.
"The people in the north are starving, their growth is stunted. It's a shame, a tragedy."

Gallipoli

Went and watched "The Departed" last night. This is all I have to say about it.

"Loose Change" debunked!

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=911_morons

Lancet 600k numbers

Organic

Truth, duty, honesty
Only hype makes organic food healthier
By Judi McLeod
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Thanks to multi-million dollar advertising campaigns, the consumer believes that organic food is healthier for you. The organic and natural food craze teaches John Q. Public that organic foods are somehow safer and more nutritious.
Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
The latest victims of organic products now include two Toronto residents, paralyzed in hospital after drinking carrot juice that tested positive for a botulism toxin.
"There are two adults who are severely ill in hospital and they had a history of drinking the exact same juice that's been part of the carrot juice recall," Dr. Elizabeth Rea, an associate medical officer of health, told the Toronto Star on Sunday.
Four cases of botulism in the United States have been linked to toxic carrot juice. The juice, produced by Bolthouse Farms in Bakersfield, Calif., was ordered off North American shelves late last month.
California grows about $400 million per year in organic produce and about half of it comes from just five farms.
A Florida woman has been in hospital, unresponsive, since mid-September. Three people in the State of Georgia suffered respiratory failure and are on ventilators since drinking carrot juice a month ago.
Bolthouse Farms, which bottles three brands of "organic" carrot juice, includes three recalled products: Bolthouse Farms 100% Carrot Juice, Earthbound Farm Organic Carrot Juice and President's Choice Organic 100% Pure Carrot Juice.
Ironically, it is the health conscious consumer who looks to organic products as being safer and more nutritious.
Bolthouse Farms, which has been around since 1915, describes its carrot juice as "smooth, creamy with a uniquely fresh taste!"
"Bolthouse Farms is the premium producer of the Earthbound Farm carrots, the most recognized organic produce brand. Our organic carrots have all the quality and reliability consumers expect from Bolthouse Farms‹and they're 100% organic certified by CCOF, an accredited USDA National Organic Program third party certifier. From snacking to juicing, Bolthouse Farms offers a variety of organic carrots to fit our lifestyle," says Bolthouse Farms on its website.
"After four generations of innovation in agriculture, harvesting, and now bottling, we know that everything really important (freshness, great taste and good health) still begins in the fields."
And it's the fields that are the problem.
As the National Review's John Miller reported in 2004,
"Organic foods may be fresh, but they're also fresh from the manure fields."
Earthbound Farms, one of the biggest organic farms in North America, is also the source of the contaminated spinach that is suspected in three deaths and hospitalized at least 29 other people with kidney failure. In total, the poison spinach sickened nearly 200, in 23 states and Canada.
And now lettuce has been added to the potential E. coli contamination list.
Earthbound fertilizes its leafy vegetables with cow manure.
"Most conventional farmers fertilize their food crops with "chemical" fertilizer, and put their livestock manure on feed crops like corn," Hudson's Center for Global Food Issues Dennis T. Avery and Alex A. Avery wrote in canadafreepress.com on Oct. 3. "Organic farmers reject chemical fertilizer. Instead, they compost raw cattle manure for some weeks, hoping that will kill any dangerous organisms that could contaminate the food. Sometimes it doesn't.
"In the old days, when organic produce came from a few little farms, an occasional sick customer was no big deal. Often, the victim refused to believe organic food could cause the illness. But so many people now believe the organic hype that organic farms have gotten big and corporate and the manure-related consumer epidemics make national news."
"A study by the Center for Global Food Issues found that although organic foods make up about 1 percent of America's diet, they also account for about 8 percent of confirmed E. coli cases." (The Center for Consumer Freedom, Jan., 2004).
Meanwhile, the Averys believe "our objective should be to get the manure away from our food crops. Organic and natural aren't safer, or more nutritious: Just more expensive, and far more dangerous."

TALK about torture. Blender magazine editors chose Starship's 1985 hit "We Built This City" as the worst song of all time. Now they've assigned contributor Russ Heller to set a world record for repeatedly listening to the worst song ever. He'll sit in a plexiglass booth at the Best Buy in NoHo starting Friday at 8 a.m. and grit his teeth as "We Built This City" is played at least 324 times over a grueling 24 hours

Wow.

University of Wisconsin-Madison instructor Kevin Barrett is a Muslim convert, teaching Islam along with a heaping helping of evil conspiracy theories—and students will be required to buy his book: UW Instructor Compares Bush to Hitler. (Hat tip: LGF readers.)

MILWAUKEE (AP) — A university instructor who came under scrutiny for arguing that the U.S. government orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks likens President Bush to Adolf Hitler in an essay his students are being required to buy for his course.

The essay by Kevin Barrett, “Interpreting the Unspeakable: The Myth of 9/11,” is part of a $20 book of essays by 15 authors, according to an unedited copy first obtained by WKOW-TV in Madison and later by The Associated Press.

The book’s title is “9/11 and American Empire: Muslims, Jews, and Christians Speak Out.” It is on the syllabus for Barrett’s course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “Islam: Religion and Culture,” but only three of the essays are required reading, not including Barrett’s essay.

Barrett, a part-time instructor who holds a doctorate in African languages and literature and folklore from UW-Madison, is active in a group called Scholars for 9/11 Truth. The group’s members say U.S. officials, not al-Qaida terrorists, were behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

U.S. doubts Korean test was nuclear
By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES October 10, 2006

U.S. intelligence agencies say, based on preliminary indications, that North Korea did not produce its first nuclear blast yesterday. U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that seismic readings show that the conventional high explosives used to create a chain reaction in a plutonium-based device went off, but that the blast's readings were shy of a typical nuclear detonation. "We're still evaluating the data, and as more data comes in, we hope to develop a clearer picture," said one official familiar with intelligence reports. "There was a seismic event that registered about 4 on the Richter scale, but it still isn't clear if it was a nuclear test. You can get that kind of seismic reading from high explosives." The underground explosion, which Pyongyang dubbed a historic nuclear test, is thought to have been the equivalent of several hundred tons of TNT, far short of the several thousand tons of TNT, or kilotons, that are signs of a nuclear blast, the official said. The official said that so far, "it appears there was more fizz than pop."

The Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction
Although his detectives do precious little detecting, Charles Willeford sparked the modern South Florida mystery craze
by Marshall Jon Fisher
.....
Not long after I met Charles Willeford, he told me the secret to writing. "Never allow yourself to take a leak in the morning," he said, "until you've written a page. That way you're guaranteed a page a day, and at the end of a year you have a novel." Here was Willeford in a nutshell: the crudeness, the humor, and above all the love of the lie. One doubted whether he followed any of the advice he was so fond of dispensing.
Willeford, who died twelve years ago this spring, might be called the progenitor of the modern South Florida crime novel. John D. MacDonald had put the region on the mystery map in the 1960s, with his Travis McGee novels, but that was an older, sleepier South Florida. Willeford's last four novels (1984-1988) spanned Miami's metamorphosis from vacationer and retiree haven to the nation's capital of glamour, drugs, and weird crime, and these inspired the post-Miami Vice group of Miami writers, including Carl Hiaasen and James W. Hall. "Miami Blues [1984] launched the modern era of Miami crime fiction," Mitch Kaplan, the owner of Books & Books, Miami's leading literary bookstore, told me recently. "There's a direct line from Charles through just about everyone writing crime fiction in Miami today."
When I first knew Willeford, in the late 1970s, he had only a small cult following. He hadn't published a book in seven years, and his twelve novels to that point were all out of print. He was teaching at Miami-Dade Community College and reviewing mysteries for The Miami Herald. My mother was a student in his creative-writing class, and he and his future wife, Betsy, became good friends of my family's.
Willeford was soon a fixture at my parents' parties, skulking by the kitchen door to the patio with a cigarette in one hand and a bourbon in the other, telling dirty jokes or stomach-turning anecdotes from his years in the Army. After growling out the one about eating dog in the Philippines, or the one about the coed long-distance-urination contest, he would drag on his cigarette, the glow illuminating his great white moustache and waggish blue eyes. Then he'd exhale, his ample belly undulating with laughter as if he'd just heard the story for the first time himself.
As a very young man, Willeford considered himself a poet, and he continued to write poetry throughout his life. His real writing career, though, began with a series of eight novels published as pulp paperbacks in the 1950s and early 1960s. In them Willeford fashioned his own brand of hard-boiled prose. But he was not writing for the pulp market; that was simply where he was able to sell his work. In his first book, High Priest of California (1953), a used-car salesman goes to great lengths to seduce an innocent woman for sport, gravely disrupting her life. But the writing is hardly lurid, and the protagonist is anything but what you might expect. He listens to Bartók while reading T. S. Eliot aloud, and as a hobby he rewrites Ulysses in contemporary American vernacular. Willeford's books also offer lots of practical advice: the reader of Pick-Up (1955), the story of two down-and-out alcoholics keeping each other alive in San Francisco, learns how to fry a steak properly, how to reuse coffee grounds, and how to keep ants out of a dresser.
The novels did, on occasion, work in issues of real import. The Black Mass of Brother Springer (1958) is about a white writer who abandons his wife to accept a fake ordination and assume the ministry of a black church in a northern-Florida city. Sam Springer is a characteristically Willefordian amalgam of selfish mercenary and well-meaning drifter. He bounces through life like a pinball, responding shrewdly to the moment and giving little thought to the future. But Black Mass is also an early depiction of the civil-rights revolution in the South: one subplot, paralleling the Rosa Parks incident, follows the city's reaction to a black woman's refusal to give up her seat on a bus.
The true earmark of these paperbacks, however, was humor—a distinctively crotchety, sometimes raunchy, often genre-satirizing humor. The very first lines of High Priest of California are a send-up of the dime-novel tough guy.
I slipped a dollar under the wicket and a sullen-lipped cashier asked me for a penny. "You're making the change," I told her.
A similar playfulness pervaded Willeford's later, more mainstream novels. The Burnt Orange Heresy (1971), for example, is one long satire on art (a favorite topic—Willeford studied painting in France and Peru after World War II), art criticism, and art collecting. It's the story of James Figueras, a bachelor, cad, and freelance art critic in Palm Beach, and his fascination with the (fictional) French artist Jacques Debierue. A murder occurs, but the real violence is Willeford's attack on artistic pretension: Debierue is supposedly the founder of the Nihilistic Surrealism movement—the missing link between Dada and Surrealism—who retires into famous seclusion after the creation of one work, No. One, an empty frame mounted around a crack in a wall. According to Figueras, "The fact that he used the English No. One instead of Nombre une may or may not've influenced Samuel Beckett to write in French instead of English, as the literary critic Leon Mindlin has claimed." Willeford also has fun with his hero: "But I wasn't getting my work done. Work is important to a man. Not even a Helen of Troy can compete with a Hermes. No matter how wonderful she is, a woman is only a woman, whereas 2,500 words is an article."
The funniest thing in Willeford's books, though, may be his characters' clothing. He loved to present outlandish fashion as everyday wear. In The Shark-Infested Custard, written in the early 1970s but published only posthumously, in 1993, he described a protagonist thus: "In his new white sharkskin suit, red silk shirt, with a white-on-white necktie, red socks, and white alligator-grained Ballys, he looked like a friendly giant."
And then there were the jump suits. Another description in Custard reads,
The [yellow] poplin jump suit was skin tight, bespoken, probably, and then cut down even more, and he wore it without the usual matching belt at the waist. It had short sleeves, and his sinewy forearms were hairy. Thick reddish chest hair curled out of the top of the suit where he had pulled the zipper down for about eight inches. He wore zippered cordovan boots, and they were highly polished.
Years later, in Sideswipe (1987), Detective Hoke Moseley, temporarily retired, pares his wardrobe down to two yellow-poplin jump suits.
No one I know in Miami can remember seeing men in jump suits, yellow or otherwise. Willeford once wrote that "Poe was a bullshit artist." He couldn't have written a better epitaph for himself, unless it was what the crime writer James Crumley once said of him: "He's kidding when he's not kidding."
Willeford never found humor and violence mutually exclusive. (Perhaps that's why he proved a source of inspiration to Quentin Tarantino. "[Pulp Fiction] is not noir," Tarantino has said. "I don't do neo-noir. I see Pulp Fiction as closer to modern-day crime fiction, a little closer to Charles Willeford.") I remember him roaring with laughter while telling my parents about the opening scene of his novel-in-progress, which would become Miami Blues. In it Freddy Frenger, a haiku-writing psychopath, brutally breaks the finger of a Hare Krishna in the Miami airport. Frenger goes on his merry way, and the Krishna collapses in shock—and dies. "His humor was often gruesome," Betsy admitted recently in the dark, air-conditioned living room of the South Miami home they had shared. She did not speak without admiration; sick humor, often displayed on gaudy T-shirts, was one of the many passions they had in common. "Miami was the perfect place for Charles to live. And it was getting more and more interesting. When I see a headline like 'DEAD BODIES IN CAR CAUSE RUBBERNECKING DELAY,' I really miss him."
illiford's offbeat humor and sense of the macabre were forged in a life that was itself worthy of novelization. He was born in Arkansas in 1919 and soon moved to Los Angeles; by the time he was eight, he had lost both his parents to tuberculosis. He lived with his grandmother until he was twelve, when he decided that the Depression had made it too difficult for her to support him. One day, instead of getting off the streetcar at his school stop, he rode it all the way to the Los Angeles River. He walked straight to the nearby railroad yards and that night hopped an eastbound freight train. For the next two years he was one of the thousands of children who rode out the Depression on the freights, drifting aimlessly across the Dust Bowl. I Was Looking for a Street (1988), one of two autobiographical volumes and perhaps Willeford's best book, narrates this period in his life.
At sixteen Willeford joined the Army, lying about his age. The next four years, with the Air Corps in the Philippines and back in California with the Cavalry, are recounted in the other installment of his autobiography, Something About a Soldier (1986). This book, though filled with sex scenes that are not for the squeamish, is an absorbing account of life in the Army between the wars.
Willeford was in the armed forces off and on for twenty years and was awarded the Purple Heart as a tank commander in the Battle of the Bulge before retiring with a pension at thirty-seven. Between hitches he worked as a flea-circus barker, a professional boxer, and an actor (he would later star in a TV commercial for Hanes underwear). In 1950, while stationed at Hamilton Air Force Base, in California, Willeford began driving down to San Francisco on weekends, where he would check into the Powell Hotel and spend the full two days writing. After a few rejections, the product of his labors—High Priest of California—was brought out by Universal Publishing and Distributing, a paperback house known for such works as Hitch-Hike Hussy and Loves of a Girl Wrestler. UPD would bring out Willeford's next four novels as well. Like his later publishers, the house often changed his titles without even notifying him first: for instance, Willeford simply got a letter informing him that The Black Mass of Brother Springer had just been published under the title Honey Gal. (Years later it was reissued under Willeford's title.) Made in Miami became Lust Is a Woman (1958); The Director turned into The Woman Chaser (1960); and Willeford's one western, The Difference, was released in 1971 as The Hombre From Sonora.
Willeford reached the end of his paperback run with Cockfighter (1962), the least likely pulp novel of them all. It had no sensationalism and very little sex or violence (between human beings, at least). It offered just a straightforward plot, a thorough evocation of the sport of cockfighting, and a protagonist who carried the Willeford hero's laconicism to an extreme: Frank Mansfield vows to remain silent until he wins the Southern Cockfighter of the Year award, and indeed he hardly speaks a word in the entire book.
In the kind of bad break that often befell Willeford's protagonists, his publisher died just after Cockfighter came out; the house went bankrupt, and most of the printing, some 24,000 copies, was never distributed. Willeford published a short-story collection in paperback the next year, but no novels appeared for almost a decade. In the meantime, Willeford moved to South Florida, received bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Miami, and began teaching.
In his early fifties he finally attracted the attention of a major hardcover publisher, and he enjoyed a brief spin in the limelight. In 1971 Crown Publishers brought out The Burnt Orange Heresy to rave reviews (a Crown subsidiary published The Hombre From Sonora, by "Will Charles," that year). The next year Crown published a revised version of Cockfighter, and the producer Roger Corman bought the film rights. The movie, directed by Monte Hellman, came out in 1974, and featured Willeford in the supporting role of Ed Middleton, an official on the Southern Conference cockfighting circuit.
But the books soon went out of print; the movie lost money; and Willeford fell into a second decade-long fallow period.
Then, in 1984, came Miami Blues. At that time Miami was nothing like the gold mine it is now for writers specializing in crime, decadence, and sleaze. In the 1970s South Beach—the southern tip of the island of Miami Beach—was a strip of rundown hotels populated by senior citizens. The beach side of Ocean Drive, which is now jammed with supermodels, nightclub impresarios, and other purveyors of the fast life, was a quiet, grassy area harboring retirees on lawn chairs. The city of Miami, on the mainland, was a wasteland of government offices; when I was growing up, the only time I went downtown was to get my first passport.
Miami Blues and the three subsequent novels featuring Hoke Moseley—Willeford's first cop protagonist—present a Miami in transition, after the 1980 Mariel boatlift that hyper-accelerated the Latinization of the area's population, but before the city was renovated and rejuvenated. Moseley's South Beach is still decrepit and full of old people, but a new sense of danger pervades the streets—a scent of violent desperation among refugees from Latin America and opportunists from the rest of the United States.
Moseley is the typical Willeford hero a bit worse for wear. He's in his mid-forties but, with his false teeth and aching body, seems twenty years older. Moseley is a decent man and a good cop, but he is incompetent at living. A bad divorce settlement has rendered him impecunious and terribly cheap: he uses his police status to avoid paying for drinks and phone calls. He hasn't had a date in years, though he'd like one. And when his daughters come to live with him, he's about as doting a parent as Medea.
Like Willeford's pulp novels of earlier decades, the Hoke Moseley books defy their genre. For detective novels they have precious little mystery or police procedure. There is a smattering of violence, and each book does have a criminal who gets nabbed in the end, but all this seems peripheral to the portrayal of Moseley and his relationships with his detective partner—a Cuban woman—and his daughters. For example, Sideswipe, the third in the series, is primarily concerned with Moseley's midlife crisis, during which he retires to his home town and takes to wearing the yellow jump suits. There is a parallel plot having to do with a criminal, but Moseley gets involved only at the very end, and only by serendipity. He doesn't "solve" the crime at all.
Willeford never wanted to write a series, but after the success of Miami Blues his publisher insisted. In response, he first produced an absurdly violent manuscript, called Grimhaven, in which Moseley murders his daughters to avoid taking custody of them. Luckily for Willeford, his agent refused to send it to the publisher. Willeford then submitted more seriously to the pressure to continue the series, and found that he actually enjoyed it. "He never felt trapped by genre," Betsy told me, "whether it was the pulps or the Hoke detective series. He always tried to write the best he could, and didn't worry about it. And in the end Hoke became a way for Charles to write about a changing Miami."
If Miami Blues was Willeford's breakthrough novel, the fourth Moseley book, The Way We Die Now, took his success to a new level. The popularity of the first three in the series enabled Willeford's agent to sign this book up, with a new publisher, for an advance of $225,000. After a career of paying dues, Willeford was finally getting the big payoff.
He didn't have long to enjoy it. Although he was only sixty-eight, a lifetime of hard drinking and smoking was taking its toll. As he wrote to a friend in 1987,
In addition to my bad ticker, I also have chronic bronchitis, emphysema, blood that doesn't clot, rheumatism, a bad back, caused by a horse kick in the cavalry ... and so I'm in pretty bad shape for the shape that I'm in.
He had difficulty sleeping, remaining seated in one position, even breathing at times.
On March 20, 1988, during one of Willeford's last excursions from his house, he and Betsy saw the first copies of The Way We Die Now in the window of Books & Books. Seven days later he died. A heart attack was the culprit, fingered by the coroner from his long lineup of infirmities. The next day I wrote to Betsy about the last time I'd seen Charles, in January, when my mother and I met him for lunch in a coffee shop near Red and Sunset.
It's fitting that we spent much of the lunch listening to him tell stories of when he came to New York in the forties and fell in with a motley group of transients in the hotel where he lived. Fitting because that for so many of us was the essence of him: the stories he told of the memorable life he'd lived.
Betsy wrote back, "As an aspiring writer you probably should heed this warning from Charles: Just tell the truth, and they'll accuse you of writing black humor." In Charles Willeford's life there was little difference between the two.

The URL for this page is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200005/miami-crime.

M. Ward

M. Ward Chinese Translation

I sailed a wild, wild sea climbed up a tall, tall mountain I met a old, old man beneath a weeping willow tree He said now if you got some questions go and lay them at my feet but my time here is brief so you'll have to pick just three And I said What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart and how can a man like me remain in the light and if life is really as short as they say then why is the night so long and then the sun went down and he sang for me this song

See I once was a young fool like you afraid to do the things that I knew I had to do So I played an escapade just like you I played an escapade just like you

I sailed a wild, wild sea climbed up a tall, tall mountain I met an old, old man he sat beneath a sapling tree He said now if you got some questions go and lay them at my feet but my time here is brief so you'll have to pick just three And I said What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart and how can a man like me remain in the light and if life is really as short as they say then why is the night so long and then the sun went down and he played for me this song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToEPFDIzhNA

Making the World a Better Place http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/05/AR2006100501811_pf.html

A long Washington Post piece on "new media" includes this great tidbit about Bill Clinton:

"He said Democrats of his generation tend to be naive about new media realities. There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies--and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new-media excesses.
"We're all that way, and I think a part of it is we grew up in the '60s and the press led us against the war and the press led us on civil rights and the press led us on Watergate," Clinton said. "Those of us of a certain age grew up with this almost unrealistic set of expectations."

This Clinton is an astute one, isn't he? We've made essentially the same argument many times--including with reference to Clinton's own recent outburst on "Fox News Sunday." The former president, used to sycophantic interviewers like David Remnick and Larry King, was unprepared for a tough question and lashed out, delivering an angry, paranoid rant.
Somehow Clinton understands that "we," his fellow liberals, are fatuous about the media but he fails to grasp that he is.

This is what passes for reporting at Agence France Presse, in a story about the poor, oppressed, discouraged Palestinians and their loss of faith in the United States: US pledges fall on deaf Palestinian ears.

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AFP) - A pledge from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to redouble efforts to improve the Palestinian lot has fallen on deaf ears, with few in Ramallah optimistic about any practical benefit.
“There is no more hope,” says Nasser Ikhder, 29, a carpenter on busy Al-Manara Street as shoppers scurry for bread, fresh plums, oranges and dates, preparing for the sunset break-the-fast meal customary during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. “Rice, (US President George W.) Bush, (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair, they’re all saying the same thing. The tune never changes.”
Since the second Palestinian uprising broke out six years ago, the situation for Palestinians has grown ever more bleak. In the occupied West Bank, the number of Israeli checkpoints has mushroomed and the vast separation barrier, slammed by Palestinians as an apartheid wall, has separated loved ones, landowners from land and necessitated long detours.
Travel restrictions, daily humiliations and a nosediving economy are, for many in this West Bank political capital, the only fruits of a peace process that kicked off with the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994.
But Rice’s latest visit, tasked in part by Bush to support Israeli and Palestinian leaders “in their efforts to come together to resolve their differences” was too little too late for many in Ramallah.
Once a beacon of hope for Palestinians, now US involvement in the peace process is a harbinger of doom, says Tamer Mohammed as he slouches against the hood of a rusted beat-up Fiat in Ramallah’s Al-Amaray refugee camp.

Notice: in AFP’s simple-minded summation of the Palestinians’ “bleak situation,” there is not even a hint of acknowledgment that at every step of the way, the Palestinians have brought this situation upon themselves.
The intifada didn’t just “break out.” It was a politically calculated terror war launched against Jewish civilians by Yasser Arafat and the surrounding Arab states, with the full support of the Palestinian people. And when that terror war failed to break Israel’s will, the Palestinians overwhelmingly elected the genocidal terrorist gang Hamas to be their “government,” running on a platform to destroy Israel.
Recently, they had another chance to create the beginning of a functioning society, when Israel withdrew from Gaza. International investors purchased the numerous high-tech greenhouses Israel had built and operated at great profit (giving employment to numerous Palestinian families), and presented them to the PA as a gift. The response: the greenhouses were burned and looted by marauding mobs, and the no man’s land where Gaza meets the Israeli border is now used mostly for firing rockets into Israel, in attempts to murder more Jewish men, women, and children. At random.
People who genuinely want to build a functioning society will start building it. You can’t stop them. But the Palestinians have proven time and again that destroying the Jewish state takes precedence over creating a hopeful future for their children.
My tears are all dried up when it comes to the plight of the Palestinian people. I’ll save my sympathy and support for those who deserve it.

Sorry, I need to post this so I can use for my profile.

In early 2005, Gallo made a posting on his merchandise website offering his "disease-free" sperm for $1 million. Gallo, however, refused to sell it to anyone of "extremely dark complexion" and said "though a fan of Franco Harris, Derek Jeter, Lenny Kravitz and Lena Horne, Mr. Gallo does not want to be part of that type of integration." However, he offered discounts to blonde-haired, blue-eyed women or women with genealogical ties to "German soldiers of the mid-century." He mentions the potential size of the offspring's genitals if it is a boy, saying "8 inches if he's like his father." He was also open to Jewish women because he thought if his offspring became an actor, "this connection to the Jewish faith would guarantee his offspring a better chance at good reviews and maybe even a prize at the Sundance Film Festival or an Oscar". If fertilization was unsuccessful, Gallo said the purchaser had to pay for any additional attempts, but said he would "supply sperm for as many attempts as it takes to complete a successful fertilization and successful delivery." In addition, Gallo said he would impregnate through intercourse for an additional $500,000, but would waive the fee for anyone that he found attractive. Purchasers were not allowed to use his surname for their child.In early 2006, Gallo made another website posting offering his services as an "evening or weekend escort" and was open to any woman ("even black chicks") who would pay his fee of $50,000 for one night or $100,000 for a weekend, plus expenses, a "security fee" to be determined by the "details of an encounter and how much security I will need," and a $50,000-per-day fee if flight travel was needed. He required STD scanning, bathing, and grooming for all women - "Detailed photos of potential clients also required prior." He also advised his clients to watch The Brown Bunny "to be sure for themselves that they can fully accommodate all of me. Clients who have doubt may want to test themselves with an unusually thick and large prosthetic prior to meeting me. You may be surprised just how much you can handle and how good it feels."

Doesn't Yale have Lacrosse?

Yale football, hockey players arrested after fight
Associated Press

NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- Two Yale football players, including the starting quarterback, and three hockey players were arrested after a fight outside a downtown market and charged with breach of peace.

Police said a window at the Gourmet Heaven on Broadway was broken during the scuffle early Sunday.

Quarterback Matt Polhemus and running back Mike McLeod were arrested along with hockey players Alec Richards, Matt Nelson and Brad Mills.

Both football players are expected to play when Yale visits Dartmouth on Saturday.

The players were charged with breach of peace, and all but Polhemus were also charged with criminal mischief.

None of the athletes will be disciplined by the university until the legal process has been completed, the school said.

"The investigation is in the hands of Yale University and the New Haven Police Department as they gather the facts associated with this incident," Yale athletic director Tom Beckett said in a prepared statement.

McLeod was the Ivy League's offensive player of the week. He ran for 172 yards and three touchdowns in the team's 37-34 win over Lafayette last Saturday. Polhemus has thrown for 489 yards and rushed for 139 in leading the Bulldogs to a 2-1 start this season.

The hockey team does not open its season until Oct. 27.

Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press

Jack of All Trades

"In terms of age . . . over the last year, I've probably covered the territory from 21 to 61." Jack Nicholson, actor, on the women he dates

It has been reported by film trade magazine "Variety" that the Coen brothers have acquired the rights to write, direct, and produce No Country for Old Men.

Jack Interview

"Where there's clarity, there is no choice; where there's choice, there is misery," he chants. It's a line he has used before. The phrase -- actually a quote from the 1968 Monkees' movie "Head," on which Nicholson served as a writer...

"You're brave, nothing ever happens to the brave."
Hemingway

"biz-zay"

Krusty: Whaddya got in mind? Sexy broad? Gangster octopus? Myers: No, no. The animal chain of command goes mouse, cat, dog. [to the writers] D-O-G.
Weinstein: Uh, a dog? Isn't that a tad predictable?
Lady: In your dreams. We're talking the original dog from hell.
Oakley: You mean Cerberus?
Lady: We at the network want a dog with attitude. He's edgy, he's "in your face." You've heard the expression "let's get busy"? Well, this is a dog who gets "biz-zay!" Consistently and thoroughly.
Krusty: So he's proactive, huh?
Lady: Oh, God, yes. We're talking about a totally outrageous paradigm.
Meyer: Excuse me, but "proactive" and "paradigm"? Aren't these just buzzwords that dumb people use to sound important? [backpedaling] Not that I'm accusing you of anything like that. [pause] I'm fired, aren't I?
Myers: Oh, yes.

http://www.thesneeze.com/mt-archives/cat_steve_dont_eat_it.php

Dude, some of the funniest writing I have ever read.

Must see this movie. Must.

Leprechaun 4 is magically delicious

SIMON MANGIARACINA
STAFF WRITER

After spending a semester in Italy, watching way too much Italian television, I have happily returned to review some of the best direct-to-video films that Video Galaxy has to offer. While Italian TV was fascinating, I have missed feature-length films such as Femalien, Killer Tongue, and even Killer Eye.
During the summer I considered changing the format of this column a bit. At first I wanted to cover a terrific program on Italian television that I watched with some frequency, titled Colpo Grosso, which loosely translates to Blow Fat. The program is a game-show of sorts, which involves contestants stripping for money, and also a regular cast of talented female co-hosts who also strip when contestants answer questions correctly. While I never fully understood the rules of the show, I found myself consistently captivated.
Another direction I considered taking the column was more towards the seedier side of the video market, namely pornographic films, and their relationship to popular film in the more mainstream market. For instance, I could review the role of male/ female relationships in Disney’s popular animated release Pocahontas, as compared to Vivid’s less well known Poke-a-hot-ass. Or, I could compare the revolutionary visuals in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with those in the softcore classic 2069: A Sex Odyssey. And how about plot-development in Pokemon: The First Movie versus Shut Up and Blow Me Part 4. Well, maybe that last one doesn’t work quite so well, but I think you get the idea. After much consideration, I realized that in order to do a column such as this, I would have to watch quite a bit of porn. While that may be well and good, I would have to frequent the adult section of Video Galaxy on a weekly basis; and let’s face it, I’m way too shy for that.
So by default, it’s back to the same old grind. For those of you who are not familiar with my column, each and every week I will review a new direct-to-video film. These movies are so innovative and ahead of their time, that a wide release in theaters would not make financial sense, since only a small audience is sophisticated enough to fully appreciate them. This week I am reviewing the fifth installment of the ever-popular Leprechaun series, Leprechaun in the Hood, starring Ice-T. After success as a solo rap-artist, his band’s controversial classic single Cop-killer, and the lead role as an under-cover police officer in the influential film New Jack City, it is only natural that Ice-T would choose to move on to more avant-guard work such as Leprechaun in the Hood. While Leprechaun 4: Leprechaun in Space was a telling and introspective spoof on the sci-fi genre of film, it’s successor takes on a more serious tone. Leprechaun in the Hood is a revealing study of three up-and-coming rap artists from the streets of Compton struggling to make their way to success, and one bad-ass leprechaun who gets in their way.
Three young rap-artists, Butch, Stray-Bullet, and Postmaster P, need some funding to enter themselves in a rap contest which could send them to the finals in Vegas and win them a record deal. But when the local pimp/record-producer Mac Daddy (Ice-T) turns them down, our down-on-their-luck rappers decide to break into the big man’s office and steal his gold. A flash-back sequence reveals the secret to Mac’s success: years ago he stole his wealth and a magic flute from a leprechaun who had been turned to stone. Our boys botch the heist, and awaken the wrath of the leprechaun, sending the little man after them, as well as one grumpy Mac Daddy. The remainder of the movie is spent in chaotic violence as both Mac Daddy and the leprechaun hunt for the three rappers. The leprechaun spends his time chillin’ with his zombie fly-girls, and smoking the chronic. “A friend with weed is a friend indeed”, the stoned ghetto leprechaun rhymes. When he’s not smoking a blunt, he’s seducing women with his new urban-flava of seduction, “Come closer, come closer my lass, let me get a look at you before I tap your ass.” The leprechaun even has a sexual encounter with a transvestite male prostitute. As the little green bad-boy hunts down Butch, Stray Bullet, and Postmaster P, he kills a lot of people. He cuts their fingers off, dismembers them and pickles the body parts in separate jars, blows holes clear through their chests, and impales someone with his arm. But our three heroes don’t leave the leprechaun unscathed. They yell insults at him like, “Yo shorty, you ain’t even as big as my dick!” They set fire to him, and with a little help from the book Leprechauns for Dummies they get him stoned off some weed mixed with four-leaf clovers. With a cameo appearance by Coolio, a bumpin’ leprechaun rap sequence at the end, and lines like “Man, bitches and hoes ain’t all the man knows,” Leprechaun in the Hood is one of the finest films I have ever had the pleasure of watching. A++!

Third Man in 1968 "Black Power" Salute Dies.

Peter Norman, the Australian who stood alongside the U.S. athletes staging the civil rights protest from the medal podium at the 1968 Olympics, died Tuesday of a heart attack. He was 64. He still holds the Aussie 200 record.

What? Rick James & Neil Young in First Band Mynah Birds

"Is there blood on his hands?"

(Adam LeBor, The Sunday Times, 2006/10/01)

"As Kofi Annan prepares to stand down as UN secretary-general, Adam LeBor investigates the accusations made against the world’s chief defender of human rights":"Srebrenica is rarely mentioned nowadays in Annan’s offices on the 38th floor of the UN secretariat building in New York. He steps down in December after a decade as secretary-general. His retirement will be marked by plaudits. But behind the honorifics and the accolades lies a darker story: of incompetence, mismanagement and worse. Annan was the head of the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) between March 1993 and December 1996. The Srebrenica massacre of up to 8,000 men and boys and the slaughter of 800,000 people in Rwanda happened on his watch. In Bosnia and Rwanda, UN officials directed peacekeepers to stand back from the killing, their concern apparently to guard the UN’s status as a neutral observer. This was a shock to those who believed the UN was there to help them.Annan’s term has also been marked by scandal: from the sexual abuse of women and children in the Congo by UN peacekeepers to the greatest financial scam in history, the UN-administered oil-for-food programme. Arguably, a trial of the UN would be more apt than a leaving party."

http://www.edge.org/

http://www.edge.org/


Edge.org is a website that specializes in asking scientists and professionals interesting questions, and then posting all the results. At the time I wrote this review, the question on the
site was, "What is your dangerous idea," with folks like Jared Diamond, Brian Greene, and Richard Dawkins responding...