All Heart

Back in the day, I used to do a few carpentry jobs for people. (I actually trained in a cabinet shop at one time and worked as a carpenter on summer breaks from college.) One guy I worked with hired me to help him build a deck one summer. He was a bit hard to get along with in some ways, but really a very nice guy. He had a dog, named Francis, of a breed I had never seen before. He told me that Francis was a Jack Russell terrier. Francis was very small, less than a foot high but acted very much like a big dog. He had no notion at all that he was physically very small. He used to dive down woodchuck burrows and kill them. He always won - and woodchucks can be very, very aggressive.

My friend explained to me that there was at that time a battle going on about what form of the Jack Russell terrier would be recognized as the American Kennel Club standard. There were the short, stocky Jacks like Francis or the longer-legged rangy types. The taller Jacks were nice, but they acted more like small dogs. The shorter ones did not. They really had a big dog attitude despite their stature. (All this is based on what my friend told me, I have never owned a Jack Russell.)

All that is a preface to this story out of New Zealand. A Jack Russell had to be put down after he took on two pit bulls. In order to save the five children he was with.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A plucky foot-high Jack Russell terrier named George saved five New Zealand children from two marauding pitbulls, but was so severely mauled in the fight he had to be destroyed, his owner said Wednesday.

George was playing with the group of children as they returned home from buying sweets at a neighborhood shop in the small North Island town of Manaia last Sunday when the two pitbulls appeared and lunged toward them, his owner Allan Gay said.

"George was brave — he took them on and he's not even a foot high," Gay told The Associated Press. "He jumped in on them, he tried to keep them off.

"If it wasn't for George, those kids would have copped it."

One of the children, Richard Rosewarne, 11, was quoted in the Taranaki Daily News on Wednesday as saying George fought with the pitbulls to keep them off his four-year-old brother, Darryl.

"George tried to protect us by barking and rushing at them, but they started to bite him — one on the head and the other on the back," Rosewarne said. "We ran off crying and some people saw what was happening and rescued George."

I rather suspect from the description that George, like Francis, was the short, stocky Jack.

And he was all heart. His size meant nothing.

Going One Better!

Sheryl Crow, environmental diva extraordinaire, made the suggestion that people only needed to start using one square of toilet paper to make a difference in the fight to save humanity from Al Gore. Or something. (Yes, I am aware she now is saying it was only a joke.) But Sheryl will be glad to know that one town has taken it a step further. Yes, even more extreme than the suggestion to go really green and use both sides. The town of Walkersville, Maryland has upped the ante.

You get no toilet paper at all.

WALKERSVILLE, Md. - Bring your own toilet paper if you're visiting a park in Walkersville. Last week, vandals set some paper on fire in a men's bathroom at the Walkersville Community Park.

On Monday, Town Manager Gloria Long Rollins announced that all paper products have been removed from bathrooms at the town's four parks.

Hand dryers will replace paper towels and visitors will have to bring their own TP, Rollins said.

Gee, even Sheryl won't shake those folk's hands.

Three Bedrooms, Two Baths….

….Nice view and extras.

A corpse.

Linda Chabucos-Galow, a real estate agent with Shorewest, stood in the dining room while Justin and Colleen McKeen walked through a house Monday night.

Before long, she heard Colleen scream as the couple stood at the doorway.

"I thought, 'What's wrong?' Maybe it was a dead mouse or something," Chabucos-Galow said.

But then she peered into the bedroom and saw the body of Linda L. O'Leary, 55, the owner of the home. She had been dead for about two weeks, officials say.

"It looked like a Halloween prop," Chabucos-Galow said.

The uncovered body was wearing dark shorts. Chabucos-Galow said her legs were wrapped in material that appeared similar to cheesecloth or support hose.

"If we spent five minutes in there, I'd be stretching it," Chabucos-Galow said.

She said she then told the couple: "'We need to leave. This is not right. We need to get out of here.'"

Talk about a dead real estate market……

Good News, Bad News

The good news: some of those missing bees that the media is suddenly so worried about showed up! The bad news: some of those missing bees that the media is suddenly so worried about showed up! At the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Medical Center emergency room.

Although no one was stung, the Little Rock emergency room still decided to be closed for ambulance traffic.

"We'll take walk-ins, but ambulances are being diverted to other hospitals," UAMS spokeswoman Andrea Peel said.

Doctors did not see any patients with bee stings, but emergency room physician Dr. Delaney Kinchen said it was an important precaution to close the ER while clearing out the bees.

"I've been stung thousands of times and never had any problems, but I know people who've been stung twice and almost died," he said.

Beekeeper Harvey Johnston arrived Monday afternoon to remove the beehive.

"Somewhere around here was a beehive that got overcrowded," he said. "When bees get crowded, (the queen) leaves and takes a portion of the bees with her."

Puts a whole new spin on it when a doctor tells you, "This is going to sting a little," doesn't it?

Vetoed

As expected, Bush has vetoed the supplemental spending bill.

WASHINGTON - President Bush vetoed legislation to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq Tuesday night in a historic showdown with Congress over whether the unpopular and costly war should end or escalate.

In only the second veto of his presidency, Bush rejected legislation that would require the first U.S. combat troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by Oct. 1 with a goal of a complete pullout six months later.

He vetoed the bill immediately upon his return to the White House from a visit to MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, including Iraq.

He was to comment on television at 6:10 p.m. EDT.

If the money runs out for the troops in the field, the Democrats will be in real trouble real fast. They have dragged this out for the sake of a political stunt. It will not go unnoticed by the voters.

Oddity

While searching for some animal stories, I came across this article - which made no sense to me when I first read it.

Sixty of the city's most prominent citizens will receive notices this week that they are to be assessed fines of $250 each to help cover operating and maintenance costs of the Historic Pottawattamie County Squirrel Cage Jail and preservation of historic artifacts therein, officials have announced.

"The people we're targeting are well-known in the community and have an interest in history," said Michele Stephens, executive director of the Historical Society of Pottawattamie County, which operates the museum.

These outstanding individuals will be expected to exercise their influence to raise monetary donations for said cause by June 1, Stephens said.

"They have the opportunity to either raise the money to pay the fine or sell enough memberships to equal that amount," she said.

In the event that a sufficient sum of money has not been submitted by the stated deadline, offenders may be subject to arrest and incarceration in above facility during the week of June 4, Stephens said. Prisoners will be given a tip sheet on how to sell memberships.

Having never heard of a squirrel cage jail, I went looking for some explanation of what that term meant. And it turns out to be a real oddity. The Pottawattamie County Squirrel Cage Jail is one of three that still exist (seventeen were built in total in different cities) and the only one with three full levels. The cells in the jail are mounted on a lazy susan arrangement. The only way to get out of the jail cell is when the cage is rotated to the only doorway on each level. By a hand crank.

Built at a cost of about $30,000,  our unique jail has three floors of revolving pie-shaped cells inside a cage.  The front part of the building had offices for the jailer, kitchen, trustee cells, and quarters for women.

The design was the invention of William H. Brown and Benjamin F. Haugh, both of Indianapolis, Indiana.  A patent issued to them on July 12, 1881, declared, "The object of our invention is to produce a jail in which prisoners can be controlled without the necessity of personal contact between them and the jailer."  It was to provide "maximum security with minimum jailer attention."  As one deputy put it, "If a jailer could count … and he had a trusty he could trust … he could control the jail".

The jail was in continuous operation from 1885 until 1969.

You learn something new every day.

As Predicted

I noted in April that there was a lot of buzz about Michael Dell admitting he was running Ubuntu Linux on one of his personal laptops. I speculated that it meant a new operating system for some Dell offerings. Told ya so.

Responding to user pressure, Dell Inc. confirmed it will preinstall the Ubuntu distribution of the Linux operating system on some of its computers.

Dell made the announcement Tuesday with Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu.

Speculation had been rife for some time that Dell would embrace Ubuntu, after Dell reached out to the vendor's customers via the computer maker's IdeaStorm Web site. Users made it clear on that site that they wanted Dell to offer more support for Linux and promote the open-source operating system as an alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows on its home and office notebooks and desktop computers.

Ramping up the rumor mill was Michael Dell's own public penchant for the Linux distribution. The Dell chairman and CEO uses the latest version of Ubuntu, release 7.04, also known as "Feisty Fawn," at home on his Dell Precision M90 laptop, according to his executive biography on the Dell Web site.

"This ends the speculation," said Jane Silber, director of operations at Canonical. "We wanted to move quickly and give a response to the reports."

"The relationship with Canonical came about as part of our ongoing evaluation of distributions that customers asked for in our Linux survey," Dell spokesman Jeremy Bolen wrote in an e-mail request for comment. "Ubuntu was the most requested [distribution] by a wide margin."

I've noted that Dells appear to run Ubuntu flawlessly. This is a good move for Dell and for Canonical. I don't think Microsoft will be very happy about it, though. Ubuntu just may be the OS that breaks Linux out and popularizes it to the general public. Heck, my son has asked me to zero his older computer and turn it into a Ubuntu box. So I'll be able to tell you if HPs are as good at running Linux as the Dells are.

Playing The Church

Musicians often say they are playing a given venue, you know, "I'm playing the Palace," or some such. But in this case musicians performing a concert on May 18th at the 15th Century Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland will not only be playing the church, they'll be playing the church. As in, playing a musical composition decoded from the artwork in the church.

A father and son who became fascinated by symbols carved into the chapel's arches say they have deciphered a musical score encrypted in them.

Thomas Mitchell, a 75-year-old musician and ex-Royal Air Force code breaker, and his composer and pianist son Stuart, described the piece as "frozen music".

"The music has been frozen in time by symbolism," Mitchell said on his Web site (www.tjmitchell.com/stuart/rosslyn.html), which details the 27-year project to crack the chapel's code.

"It was only a matter of time before the symbolism began to thaw out and begin to make sense to scientific and musical perception."

The 15th Century Rosslyn Chapel, about seven miles south of the Scottish capital Edinburgh, featured in the last part of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" — one of the most successful novels of all time which has been turned into a Hollywood film.

Stuart Mitchell said he and his father were intrigued by 13 intricately carved angel musicians on the arches of the chapel and by 213 carved cubes depicting geometric-type patterns.

"They are of such exquisite detail and so beautiful that we thought there must be a message here," he told Reuters.

Years of research led the Mitchells to an ancient musical system called cymatics, or Chladni patterns, which are formed by sound waves at specific pitches.

The first public performance of the piece, called the Rosslyn Motet by the Mitchells, will be at the church on May 18th. There is a sample of the piece at Mitchell's website, along with recordings and books to be purchased. Dan Brown, eat your heart out. They actually deciphered the code.

I Don’t Think It Will Sell Very Well

Brazilian doctors have discovered a cure for erectile dysfunction that is unlikely to catch on with the public any time soon. It works really well, but there's a serious side effect: agonizing pain throughout the body. Besides, who wants to let a spider bite them?

In Brazil, emergency room staff can immediately spot the victims of a bite from the Brazilian wandering spider (Phoneutria nigriventer). Patients not only experience overall pain and an increase in blood pressure, they also sport an uncomfortable erection.

“The erection is a side effect that everybody who gets stung by this spider will experience along with the pain and discomfort,” said study team member Romulo Leite of the Medical College of Georgia. “We’re hoping eventually this will end up in the development of real drugs for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.”

The research was presented here at a poster session at the American Physiological Society (APS) annual meeting.

The television ads would be kind of amusing, however. And what if your partner shrieks when she sees the treatment? Kind of spoils the mood.  

A Serious Warning

It appears that a bear has been captured in West Virginia using some unusual bait. Little Debbie honey buns and bacon grease.

For three nights, the bear rummaged through garbage cans, climbed on porches and tore down bird feeders in the subdivision outside Clarksburg, said Gary Foster, a wildlife biologist with the state Division of Natural Resources.

Alarmed residents called the DNR, which advised them to leave the bear alone and keep their garbage inside. When that didn't work, DNR officials decided it was time to find a new home for the bear.

"It just appeared he was going to be a problem so we had to capture him," Foster said.

Foster set and baited the trap Sunday night. He said bears are known to like honey and bacon.

"You just use what you've got," Foster said Monday.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard just want to point out that bears are notorious gossips. Word of the tempting new food, Little Debbie snacks, will spread like wildfire through the bear grapevine. Which means that the next time you give your child a honey bun to take to school, you will effectively be baiting the child. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Forget Sheep Dogs…..

Japan has lamb-poodles. Or actually, they don't but the world media keeps reporting that they do. Stories have been circulating about a racket where shady operators in Japan have been importing lambs from Australia and selling them as poodles. No, really. And it all started when a Japanese actress recounted having heard about something like that. Somehow, that got changed around and she was reported to have been the victim of the switcheroo.

The actress on Tuesday denied foreign media reports that she had been the victim of a scam by tricksters importing lambs from Australia and Britain to sell as poodles to thousands of unsuspecting rich Japanese women.

News of the reported hoax reached as far as Britain, the United States and Australia before police and Kawakami quashed it as untrue.

The British tabloid The Sun reported that the scam came to light after Kawakami complained on a television talk show that her new poodle refused to bark or eat dog food and that she was devastated when told it was a lamb.

"Ms. Kawakami is very surprised by how much this has spread overseas. She was just recounting on television how she had heard of such a story while she was at a nail salon," a spokeswoman for her talent agency said.

"Ms. Kawakami does not even own a poodle!" she added.

Which is quite true. Her new bulldog, however, only says "baaaa".

Grand Theft Oil

It's not a new video game. (T)Hugo Chavez is set to seize control of Venezuela's oil fields from the Western companies that have invested $20 billion dollars in recent years there. (Read steal their assets). He's calling it glorious, oil analysts are calling it stupid. With good reason. (T)Hugo will be facing an economic disaster if oil prices decline because his state-run oil company is acting more like a welfare operation than a business. And production is falling as a result.

The shift is being greeted with revolutionary fervor. "For the country's workers, it's a day to celebrate," Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said recently.

Despite the pomp of the occasion, many oil analysts question whether the state company, Petroleos de Venezuela, is prepared to oversee the development of projects in the country's north that, if fully exploited, could give Venezuela the largest certified oil deposits in the world.

The firm, which previously had a minority stake in each of the projects, will now be better positioned to make key decisions on production and refining, and on how to manage the workforce. It will also assume more responsibility for investments. But the fields contain a heavy, molasses-like oil that is highly expensive and problematic to refine — and the state company could face severe financial and technical challenges, analysts say.

On the surface, PDVSA, as the company is best known, appears stronger than ever. It is among the world's top five oil companies and exports to the United States, Europe and distant China. Last year its revenue, including refineries and the Citgo retail arm in the United States, topped $100 billion.

PDVSA has also become a tool for social change in the president's self-styled revolutionary government, spending nearly $12 billion last year to alleviate poverty and helping run programs from home building to literacy training.

But oil analysts say the pace and scope of the expenditures on social programs, up from $549 million in 2003, are hitting the company hard, leaving it vulnerable.

Company filings and interviews with oil analysts show that PDVSA has failed to invest in infrastructure and is unable to ratchet up production. If prices tumble — unlikely in the near term, but almost certain in a historically volatile industry — the company would have difficulty making up for the shortfall, troubling for a country that depends on PDVSA for three-quarters of its export revenue.

Given the relatively difficult extraction of Venezuela's low grade crude oil, investment in the infrastructure is vital. (T)Hugo, like socialists everywhere, doesn't understand that wealth is not created by government decree. It will require capital to build that infrastructure and (T)Hugo has effectively killed any interest in companies providing foreign capital. Why bother? When production falls further, (T)Hugo will have to seize more to keep up the illusion of oil revenue. Meanwhile what revenue the country gets from oil is being squandered rather than reinvested. Give (T)Hugo a few years and he will have run the entire Venezuelan oil production into the ground. Where the oil will stay.

Remodeling History

After three years and $104.5 million, the renovation of Virginia's state capitol is complete. The building was designed by Thomas Jefferson, so renovating it was a daunting task. Architect George C. Skarmeas couldn't pass up the job of a lifetime, though. And he appears to have handled the challenge admirably. The "Temple on the Hill" has been reborn.

"If you think about it, it is possibly one of the most significant buildings in America," said Skarmeas, 52, who believes that Jefferson was the nation's most important architect. "It was designed by Jefferson. . . . He is the person who wrote the Declaration of Independence . . . and was president. I am very fortunate to have the opportunity to work on something designed by a genius like Jefferson. When a commission like this appears on the radar screen, you say, 'My God, this is probably the job of a lifetime.' I had absolutely no hesitation."

After three years and $104.5 million, the renovated and expanded Capitol will be officially opened today by Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) and a host of other dignitaries. The completion of the project, which includes renovations inside and outside the building, didn't come a minute too soon. The nation's second-oldest working statehouse will host a visit by Queen Elizabeth II of England on Thursday.

I've always loved old buildings, they have character. This one is magnificent. The Washington Post was kind enough to provide a very nice interactive tour of the renovated capitol which includes commentary from the people involved and some neat panorama displays that you control.