Mississippi Inaugurates New Olympic Event

Yes, the state of Mississippi is the pilot for the newest of the official Olympic© events. That's right, the state where, according to Charlie Rangel, nobody in their right mind would live, is the premier location for the Overhand Pig Toss!

WEST POINT, Miss. - When pigs fly, indeed. Kevin Pugh, 20, of Cedar Bluff, has been fined $279 for tossing a pig over the counter at the Holiday Inn Express in West Point on Nov. 12. Pugh pleaded guilty Tuesday in city court to a charge of disturbing the peace.

West Point Police Lt. Danny McCaskill has said Pugh didn't know the employees of the hotel. There was no evidence intoxication was a factor.

No one was hurt, including the pig, officers said.

"This was the silliest thing I've ever seen," McCaskill said. "Almost every officer we had was involved because the incidents kept happening at different hours."

McCaskill said Pugh was accused of walking into the hotel and throwing the 60-pound pig over the counter.

"He said it was a prank," McCaskill said. "It must be some redneck thing, because I haven't ever heard of anything like it."

The West Point police also said there have been more incidents, one involved another pitched porker, but another two involved a pegged possum. Now under official Olympic® rules, the substitution of a possum for a pig is only allowed when a) there are no available pigs or b) when bacon was on the menu at the official Olympic§ breakfast for Official Olympicƒ Officials (see rule a). This has caused the Mississippi Inaugural Overhand Pig Toss to be invalidated. On the bright side, the pig who was tossed over the counter at the Holiday Inn Express has resolved the equations for the Unified Field Theory. After all, he stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Final Task

On December 7th, 1941, the American battleship USS Arizona (BB-39) was hit by a Japanese bomb and sunk at her moorings in Pearl Harbor. 1,177 of the 1,400 men aboard the ship perished in the attack. Most of those men's remains are still on board the sunken remains of the ship. The US Navy considers the fallen to be buried at sea and the wreck to be a tomb and therefore not to be disturbed. Years later, a memorial was built that spans the ship's midsection. Only the turret ring of one of the Arizona's (removed) gun turrets remain above the surface of Pearl Harbor. The ship had taken on a full load of fuel just the day before the attack that sank her. And that large amount of bunker C fuel oil is the problem right now.

For 65 years, the wreck of the USS Arizona has been leaking oil from its grave at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, staining the water, visitors often say, as if it were the ship's blood.

The leaks come from about 500,000 gallons of thick, bunker C fuel oil that remain trapped in the deteriorating hulk — oil whose "catastrophic" release experts now think is inevitable.

Today, on the anniversary of the attack that plunged the United States into World War II, scientists at a federal research center in Gaithersburg are trying to predict when that might happen. In five years? Or 50? And to do that, they are building a model of the ship: not of plastic and glue, but of data.

The experts at the National Institute of Standards and Technology think it is the first mathematical model to simulate the deterioration of a sunken ship and could be used to predict the deterioration of hundreds of wrecks around the country.

Similar models, which are run with ultra-powerful computers, are used to forecast the weather, design cars and simulate crashes.

"To my knowledge, nobody has published or spoken of modeling the deterioration of sunken ships," said Timothy J. Foecke, a metallurgist at the institute who is supervising the work.

"What we're trying to do is . . . predict stability of shipwrecks," Foecke said. "In particular, we're working on the Arizona, but it also has application to hazardous wrecks . . . all around the coast, dating back to World War I. There's ships with munitions, with hazardous cargoes, with all kinds of different things."

What they are trying to do is fascinating. A final mission for the Arizona as a test bed for this new technology to predict the failure of the wreck's integrity. They are constrained in what they can try to do in advance of the release - which will come - by the designation of the ship as a tomb for the men still aboard her. That is , I think, as it should be. They have extensive plans in place to deal with a sudden release and have dealt with a severe release of oil in Pearl Harbor not related to Arizona in past years.

A great deal more can be found at the National Park website for the Arizona, as well as at the USS Arizona Preservation Project website. Here is a page of photos of the Arizona.

Weblog Awards Update

I really should have put links in the original post I did on this this morning. So here they all are, the folks sharing the nomination for Best New Blog in the Weblog Awards.

the fiveforty

WIMN's Voices!

Blue Crab Boulevard

Jane Lake Makes a Mistake
 
Reformed Chicks Blabbing

jules crittenden
 
LesbianDad
 
TexasFred's

Hang Right Politics

konagod

Best of luck, everyone.

UPDATE: I fixed (I think) some weird link problems. All links should be working correctly now.

Well, It Might Be

A Swedish auction house has sold a painting that was billed as being the work of a student of Peter Paul Rubens. Now, that is what the owners were selling it as. However, word leaked out that at least one art authority thought maybe, possibly, kinda-sorta could be, the painting might actually be by Rubens himself. Whereupon, the bidding went up just a wee, tiny bit.

To 1,000 times the asking price.

Bids for the painting at an auction on Tuesday started at 15,000 Swedish crowns (1,100 pounds), but a buzz that this was a real Rubens set the price soaring to 16.6 million (1.2 million pounds), the second-most ever paid for a painting in Sweden.

The sellers, a couple in their 70s from Sweden's west, put the painting up for auction in Uppsala because they no longer had room for it, according to Sweden's Dagens Nyheter newspaper.

Gorel Cavalli-Bjorkman, professor and head of research at Sweden's Nationalmuseum, told Reuters she had found evidence the painting could well be the real thing.

"This is very exciting, it is looking pretty good. I have found the painting published (as a Rubens) in a book from 1980 but the auction firm didn't know, because it was sold under a different name," she said.

If the picture is a Rubens, then it was a study for a work called Dido and Aeneas, she said, adding that according to the book, the study had been unaccounted for since 1949.

Now we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are not art experts, we rely instead on our expert sources. They tell us that Blue Crab Boulevard may well be actually an original Picasso. No, honest, they do. Ok, we made that up entirely. But we do have genuine experts on call all over the place. For example, here's a brief history of art.

What To Do About Bamiyan

You may have heard about the savage destruction by the Taliban of the gigantic Bamiyan Buddhas. Two huge statues, once the largest standing Buddha sculptures in the world were blown to pieces by the fanatical followers of mullah Omar in 2001. Now the rest of the world as well as the sane Afghans are trying to figure out what to do with the remains. The New York Times has quite a good article on the efforts to salvage what is left.

BAMIYAN, Afghanistan — The empty niches that once held Bamiyan’s colossal Buddhas now gape in the rock face — a silent cry at the terrible destruction wrought on this fabled valley and its 1,500-year-old treasures, once the largest standing Buddha statues in the world.

It was in March 2001, when the Taliban and their sponsors in Al Qaeda were at the zenith of their power in Afghanistan, that militiamen, acting on an edict to take down the “gods of the infidels,” laid explosives at the base and the shoulders of the two Buddhas and blew them to pieces. To the outraged outside world, the act encapsulated the horrors of the Islamic fundamentalist government. Even Genghis Khan, who laid waste to this valley’s towns and population in the 13th century, had left the Buddhas standing.

Five years after the Taliban were ousted from power, Bamiyan’s Buddhist relics are once again the focus of debate: Is it possible to restore the great Buddhas? And, if so, can the extraordinary investment that would be required be justified in a country crippled by poverty and a continued Taliban insurgency in the south and that is, after all, overwhelmingly Muslim?

This valley about 140 miles northwest of Kabul, where in the sixth century tens of thousands of pilgrims flocked to worship at its temples and monasteries and meditate in its rock caves, is attracting new international attention.

In 2003, the United Nations designated the Bamiyan ruins a World Heritage site, but also listed them as endangered, because of their fragile condition, vulnerability to looters and pressures from a post-Taliban boom in construction and tourism. Intensive efforts have been under way to stabilize what remains of the cliff sculptures and murals.

Read the whole thing. It has a lot of background about what is happening over there right now to try and save what remains. Some very nice pictures and video also accompany the article.

Preliminary Analysis

Andrew McCarthy takes a preliminary look at the report of the Iraq Study Group and is really not all that impressed. In fact he labels the entire product, "depressing". There are a lot of platitudes and "shoulds" in the report. While some of these sound great, there is really no plan to actually implement the "shoulds".

According to the ISG, the way forward for the U.S. is not to fight Iran and Syria.  It is to negotiate with them. (Side-note: Although ISG executive summary does not portray Iran’s actions in Iraq as acts of war against the United States, it does acknowledge that Iran is responsible for “the flow of arms and training to Iraq,” which, as noted below, the ISG hopes Iraq will “stem.”)  Iran and Syria, the ISG suggests, could be persuaded to help us in Iraq because, notwithstanding that they have assiduously destabilized the situation for three years running, they are profoundly interested in having a stable Iraq.  “No country in the region,” the ISG believes, “will benefit in the long term from a chaotic Iraq.”  Even if we assume for argument’s sake that this is so, the actions of Iran and Syria certainly demonstrate that they believe they will benefit in the long term from an Iraq that is chaotic for at least a while.

The ISG says:  “Iran should stem the flow of arms and training to Iraq, respect Iraq's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and use its influence over Iraqi Shia groups to encourage national reconciliation….  Syria should control its border with Iraq to stem the flow of funding, insurgents and terrorists in and out of Iraq.”  The ISG does not appear to proffer what concessions it believes the United States should make in order to get Iran and Syria to take these helpful actions.

Implicitly, though, it seems the concessions the ISG has in mind should be made by … Israel.  Despite the fact that our primary enemy in the region, radical Islam, is animated by an ideology (which does not appear to be addressed by the ISG) that provides reasons aplenty, having nothing to do with the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, for opposing the United States, the ISG takes this opportunity to declare:  “The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability.”

Thus, we are told, the U.S. must push for “a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.”  This can only be done by negotiating with Syria, Lebanon, and those Palestinians who accept Israel’s right to exist. 

The ISG does not appear to mention that it is dubious Syria accepts Israel’s right to exist, nor that a defining purpose of the Hezbollah faction dominating today’s Lebanon is to destroy Israel.

There are a lot of people combing through that report right now trying to read the tea leaves. But it does not look at all promising at the moment. Coupled with rumors floating around that Baker wants Israel excluded from any regional conference, this "plan" may be more of a disaster than it looks already.

Others (Obvious hot topic today): Outside The Beltway, The Moderate Voice, The Sundries Shack, Riehl World View, The Strata-Sphere, MK Ham, The Glittering Eye, Blogs of War, Security Watchtower, Jules Crittenden, Just One Minute, A Blog For All, Little Green Footballs, Don Surber, QandO, PrairiePundit, TigerHawk, The Belmont Club, Right Wing Nut House, Political Pit Bull, Confederate Yankee, Democracy Project, Captain's Quarters - Ed is really not impressed and reminds everyone that Baker is no friend to Israel. Heck, in my opinion, Baker is a sworn enemy of that state. It shows in the report.

Santa Is In Real Trouble Now

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have been working overtime documenting the unraveling of this year's Christmas delivery schedule by that right jolly old elf, Santa Clause. We covered the unfortunate, yet tasty, demise of Rudolph the Red-Nosed rib roast and the arrest and subsequent imprisonment of Blitzen on charges of reindeerjacking and joyriding. No we regretfully have to inform all the children of the world that Comet and Cupid have been kidnapped and wrongfully imprisoned in a British reindeer internment camp. They tried manfully - er - reindeerfully - to effect a remake of The Great Escape (with Comet reprising the Steve McQueen role), but it ended much as the movie did. They're right back in the same camp.

Male reindeer Basil and female sidekick Parsley gave staff the runaround and had them chasing across fields for hours Tuesday when they made a bid for freedom from Woodcote Green Nurseries in Wallington, south of London.

Basil gave them the slip for two hours but Parsley proved a tougher task, leading the pack on a nervy chase through traffic and fields before deciding enough was enough and headed back to nursery land.

The reunited escapologists were then left to cool off after their exploits.

Phil Norman, a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals inspector who joined the chase, questioned the wisdom of using reindeer as a festive attraction.

"Given their association with pulling Santa Claus's sleigh, reindeer are increasingly seen in Christmas exhibits," he said.

"However, like all animals, they are likely to be highly stressed when confronted by crowds of people, unfamiliar noise and lights. The RSPCA believes that animals should not be used for entertainment when this is likely to cause distress or suffering."

But Clive Davis, the marketing manager for Woodcote Green Nurseries, insisted that the animals were well looked after and just too popular to axe.

"We have thousands of visitors who come and see the reindeer which is why we keep them," he said.

You'll note the two reindeer were extremely clever and gave false names. Note also the cute name they gave the internment camp. But by our count, Santa is now down to five tiny reindeer and may not be able to generate sufficient lift to clear the Alps. The big guy may be forced to use UPS this year. And we're not at all sure that UPS isn't somehow behind all the reindeer mayhem this year, either.

Deb Frisch In The News Again

This time an arrest warrant has been issued for her by a court in Denver, Colorado. Talk Left has the details:

Meanwhile, Goldstein obtained a restraining order against Frisch in Denver. Alleging she violated the order, he then obtained a contempt citation against her. When she didn't appear last week to show cause why she shouldn't be held in contempt of court, the matter was continued until today.

At the court hearing in Denver this morning, Frisch again didn't show, although her lawyer did. Despite his efforts on her behalf, the Judge ordered the arrest warrant to be activated. (No links, but I did attend the brief hearing.)

Moral of the story: Derogatory posting on the internet carries consequences. So does violating a court order directing you to personally appear in court.

Earlier posts on this whole slow-motion train wreck are all linked at this post. There are more than a few people who should probably try to learn from this incident. She did bring this down on her own head by completely losing all perspective.

I’m Surprised Nobody Has Used This Defense

One hears the occasional story about flashers on the New York City subways. Way back when in my college days, my roommate told a story about a flasher on one that scared heck out of the girl he was riding with. (Andy had a ginormous crush on that girl but she did not return the affection). But I digress. So reading this article it struck me that it's kind of surprising that any flasher caught doing his thing on the subway hasn't tried using this as a defense:

The armrest ate my pants.

NEW YORK (AFP) - New York transport authorities are considering modifying their trains to tackle a problem that has cursed commuters and cost thousands of dollars in compensation: trouser-ripping armrests.

The armrests, which are notorious among frequent users of the city's Metro North and Long Island lines, have a tendency to glide unnoticed into pockets as passengers sit down, only to rip through their trousers when they stand up.

The clingy, rubbery armrests also have a taste for coats and suit jackets.

"This has been going on a long time. It's a well-known issue," Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman Tim O'Brien said, explaining that technicians now thought they had come up with a solution to the curse.

Maybe somebody from that neck of the woods has heard of such a defense? If not, any lawyer who uses this owes me a consulting fee!

You’re Taxing What?

You know, this one is probably one of the weirdest ideas to come out of Denmark in recent history. It appears that the Danish tax authorities have decided to tax sperm donors. That's right. Sperm donors.

COPENHAGEN (AFP) - One of the world's largest sperm banks, Denmark's Cryos, said it feared recent changes to tax laws requiring donors to declare income from their contributions would put their anonymity at risk and lead to a fall in donations.

"The tax authority has introduced new rules that apply to human guinea pigs and sperm donors. This will have consequences, it will be harder to find volunteers," Cryos managing director Ole Schou told AFP.

Each sperm donor in Denmark receives around 250 kroner (45 dollars, 33.50 euros) per donation, primarily to cover travel expenses.

Until now sperm donations in the Scandinavian country were anonymous and sperm banks themselves were not authorized to record donors' identities.

While the tax authority is required to respect donors' confidentiality, Schou feared the system was not infallible.

Cryos has 250 regular donors and attracts between 300 and 500 new volunteers every year. The company undertook a poll among 100 of its donors to discover if the changes to the tax law would dissuade them from contributing.

They amount of money involved is a joke. It's not like someone is going to become fabulously wealthy by making deposits in a sperm bank. Perhaps the tax authority would like to be paid in the appropriate bodily fluid?

The Honorable Thing To Do

Anyone who has read Blue Crab Boulevard for any length of time knows that I have a very low opinion of Jimmy Carter, both as a president and as an thoroughly obnoxious former president. But I did not comment on his latest book even though a lot of others hammered his anti-Israel rant pretty darn hard. Scott Johnson over at Powerline has come into possession of an email written by Professor Kenneth Stein of Emory University. Professor Stein was also the first director of the Carter Center and had remained a fellow of that institution. That is, until he read Carter's latest screed.

Professor Stein is apparently terminating his association with the Carter Center, solely as a result of Carter's new book, Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid. The reaction of Professor Stein — a formerly close associate and collaborator of Carter — to Carter's new book is, as our reader thought it would be, of great interest to us:

This note is to inform you that yesterday, I sent letters to President Jimmy Carter, Emory University President Jim Wagner, and Dr. John Hardman, Executive Director of the Carter Center resigning my position, effectively immediately, as Middle East Fellow of the Carter Center of Emory University. This ends my 23 year association with an institution that in some small way I helped shape and develop. My joint academic position in Emory College in the History and Political Science Departments, and, as Director of the Emory Institute for the Study of Modern Israel remains unchanged.

Many still believe that I have an active association with the Center and, act as an adviser to President Carter, neither is the case. President Carter has intermittently continued to come to the Arab-Israeli Conflict class I teach in Emory College. He gives undergraduate students a fine first hand recollection of the Begin-Sadat negotiations of the late 1970s. Since I left the Center physically thirteen years ago, the Middle East program of the Center has waned as has my status as a Carter Center Fellow. For the record, I had nothing to do with the research, preparation, writing, or review of President Carter's recent publication. Any material which he used from the book we did together in 1984, The Blood of Abraham, he used unilaterally.

President Carter's book on the Middle East, a title too inflammatory to even print, is not based on unvarnished analyses; it is replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments. Aside from the one-sided nature of the book, meant to provoke, there are recollections cited from meetings where I was the third person in the room, and my notes of those meetings show little similarity to points claimed in the book. Being a former President does not give one a unique privilege to invent information or to unpack it with cuts, deftly slanted to provide a particular outlook. Having little access to Arabic and Hebrew sources, I believe, clearly handicapped his understanding and analyses of how history has unfolded over the last decade. Falsehoods, if repeated often enough become meta-truths, and they then can become the erroneous baseline for shaping and reinforcing attitudes and for policy-making. The history and interpretation of the Arab-Israeli conflict is already drowning in half-truths, suppositions, and self-serving myths; more are not necessary. In due course, I shall detail these points and reflect on their origins.

This is the action of a principled and honest man when confronted with an intolerable situation. It also says all you need to know about Carter himself and what depths he has descended to. Read the whole letter. It smokes Carter pretty thoroughly.

UPDATE: Gayle Miller: Phui!

Death Wish

There are some members of the Animal Uprising that behave in a suicidal manner. This has been well documented here at Blue Crab Boulevard. There have been reports of kamikaze pigeons, suicide turkeys and even flaming suicidal kamikaze squirrels. But as far as we can determine from this report, this animal merely had a death wish. How else can you explain what this camel did?

He ate 200 mince pies and washed it down with a six-pack of Guinness.

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Staff at an Irish riding school were forced to postpone festivities after Gus the camel chomped his way through 200 mince pies and several cans of Guinness intended for their Christmas party.

Gus, starring in the riding school's Santa's Magical Animal Kingdom show, helped himself to the feast while staff were getting changed for the party.

"Gus found his way out of his pen and helped himself," Robert Fagan, owner of the Mullingar Equestrian Centre in central Ireland, told Reuters.

The 11-year-old camel, originally from Morocco, cracked open six cans of Ireland's famous stout with his teeth after the door to his stall was left open.

Now, it is doubtful that the riding school's staff had properly filled out a risk assessment for the mince pies, which everyone knows are highly toxic. (Of course, if the staff had been serving fruitcake, the animal would be dead already. Those things are lethal.) But honestly, drinking a man's Guinness should be a death penalty offense.

Water Flowing On Mars?

The Daily Mail has some photos released by NASA that may very well indicate that water is actually still flowing on Mars. There appear to be new deposits of something light colored, possibly frost, in areas where there was none previously.

Dramatic new photographs of Mars have revealed the possible existence of water on its surface.

The images - released for the first time on Wednesday by the US space agency NASA - were taken earlier this year in an attempt to unlock the secrets of the Red Planet.

Experts have long believed water was to be found on Mars, which is subject to extreme weather conditions. This latest discovery may provide vital proof there was life on Mars and that it is possible for man to land on its arid and rocky surface.

NASA researchers have documented the formation of new craters on the plant's surface and found bright, light-coloured deposits in gullies that were not present in previous photos.

They concluded the deposits - possibly mud, salt or frost - were left there when water recently cascaded through the channels.

In another photo a number of gullies on a crater wall can be clearly seen. The scientists believe that they may have been formed in relatively recent Martian history by erosion caused by flowing, liquid water.

Actual liquid water on Mars would be a very, very big deal. As always, stories like this give me a chance to link to the NASA site and some more incredible photographs.

“For The Good Of The Country…”

"This report will give us all an opportunity to find common ground for the good of the country — not for the good of the Republican Party or the Democrat Party but for the good of the country." George Bush's words regarding the Iraq Study Group recommendations.

The long awaited, and frequently leaked, report from the ISG, or Baker Commission, was handed to the president today. It is not quite what was being portrayed in the early leaking and it will not make the vitriolic left happy at all. It does not call for an immediate withdrawal. It does, unfortunately, call for talking to the regional thugs who are causing the violence in the first place.

Despite a list of 79 recommendations meant to encourage regional diplomacy and lead to a reduction of U.S. forces over the next year, the panel acknowledges that stability in Iraq may be impossible to achieve any time soon. "No one can guarantee that any course of action in Iraq at this point will stop sectarian warfare, growing violence or a slide toward chaos," the study group's co-chairmen warn in a joint letter by accompanying the report. "If current trends continue, the potential consequences are severe."

The letter from former secretary of state James A. Baker III and former congressman Lee H. Hamilton (D-Ind.), adds, however, "All options have not been exhausted. We believe it is still possible to pursue different policies that can give Iraq an opportunity for a better future, combat terrorism, stabilize a critical region of the world and protect America's credibility, interests and values."

The study group recommends that the United States withdraw nearly all of its combat units from Iraq by early 2008, sharply reducing the current troop level of more than 140,000 while leaving behind tens of thousands of U.S. military personnel to advise, train and embed with Iraqi forces.

It also recommends that Bush threaten to reduce economic and military support for Iraq's government if it fails to meet specific benchmarks intended to improve security in the country. It suggests that the Bush administration open talks with Iran and Syria about ways to end the violence in Iraq, proposes holding a regional conference to bring together all of Iraq's neighbors and urges Bush to aggressively tackle the Israeli-Palestinian dispute to reduce the broader regional tensions fueling the Iraq conflict.

Bush, who met with members of the study group this morning, pledged to take its recommendations "very seriously" while cautioning that he probably will not agree with all of them. The report includes proposals that Bush has previously rejected.

"This report gives a very tough assessment of the situation in Iraq," Bush said after receiving a copy of it from the study group. "It is a report that brings some really very interesting proposals. And we will take every proposal seriously, and we will act in a timely fashion."

For the good of the country is exactly the right expression here. The ongoing attempts to destroy Bush personally will also severely damage the nation as a whole. I have been saying this all along. And walking - hell, running - away from Iraq as some want will lead to a bloodbath and make a general war more likely. I am on the record as not being in favor of talking to either Iran or Syria under these conditions, hopefully the administration also holds to that until there are some changes in those nation's behavior. Rewarding them for what they are doing now is exactly the wrong move.

More About The Christmas Story House

Longtime readers will recall that I posted about the opening of the house that was used in filming the movie A Christmas Story as a tourist attraction back on Thanksgiving. Today, the New York Times has coverage of the story.

Though originally panned by critics as a dark depiction of the holidays, “A Christmas Story” has earned status as a movie classic, rivaling long-time seasonal favorites like “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Now fans from as far away as Los Angeles and Phoenix are flocking to a gritty Cleveland street overlooking a steel factory to visit the Parker family house restored to its movie glory.

A San Diego entrepreneur, Brian Jones, bought the house sight unseen on e-Bay for $150,000 in December 2004. He grew up watching “A Christmas Story” every year with his family. After Mr. Jones failed the vision test required to become a Navy pilot, his father tried cheering him up by building him a lamp with a woman’s leg as the base, similar to the one that enchanted Ralphie’s father in the movie.

Mr. Jones loved the gift so much that he started manufacturing copies of the lamps himself. Complete with fishnet stocking and a black high-heeled shoe, most lamps sell for $139 each; more than 7,500 have sold. Mr. Jones used the proceeds to cover the down payment on the house.

“When I first saw the house, there was snow on the ground, and I started running around the backyard,” said Mr. Jones, 30. “It felt like I was a little kid again.”

Unlike the Parkers’ single-family home in the movie, the Cleveland house was a duplex. (All the movie’s interior scenes were filmed on a sound stage in Toronto, Mr. Jones said.) Previous owners had installed modern windows, and covered the original wood siding with blue vinyl.

Watching the movie frame by frame, Mr. Jones drew plans of the Parker home. He spent $240,000 to gut the interior and transform the house into a near-exact copy of the movie set. (Darryl Haase, a tour guide, apologizes that the new stairwell is a few inches narrower than the one where Ralphie modeled his pink bunny pajamas.)

They add one really important - and hysterically funny - detail:

At C&Y Chinese Restaurant, the official restaurant of the “Christmas Story” house, waiters copy the movie’s Christmas turkey scene by taking a roasted duck to customer’s tables, where they chop its head off with a giant cleaver. The promotion has doubled the restaurant’s weekend sales to over 1,000 people a day, said Jimmy Fong, the manager.

THAT is absolutely brilliant. The NYT does not provide the helpful link that I did, though. So here it is again, The Red Rider Leg Lamps website.