Relatively Obscure Friday Music

I have no idea who told me about this band 'way back in the day. But for some reason, I went out and bought the album (not CD - real live vinyl). I still have it. Furthermore, I have no idea why I thought to look for a clip on YouTube, but lo and behold, I did and I found several videos. Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel were fairly big in the UK, but not very well known in the US. I do remember that this song was always popular when I played it at various parties back in the '70s - people would ask me who did that song. Maybe I spurred a little buying boom for the band's records back in the city I went to college in. Who knows? But here's the song I remember best from Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel, Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me).(Wikipedia reports that Steve Harley is now a presenter for a BBC radio show on the BBC about '70s music.)

Sparkles From The Wheel

By the curb, toward the edge of the flagging,
A knife-grinder works at his wheel, sharpening a great knife;
Bending over, he carefully holds it to the stone—by foot and knee,
With measur’d tread, he turns rapidly—As he presses with light but firm hand,
Forth issue, then, in copious golden jets,
Sparkles from the wheel.
- Walt Whitman “Sparkles from the Wheel”

The Anchoress describes the difference between "give me" and "please take" and does so in a wonderfully written essay on a bootstrap nation. Anything I could write here would sound empty next to the power of her words. Go read what she wrote.

Live From Pasadena Bangalore Mumbai Wherever

The Guardian reports that an online website that reports local news has two new ace reporters to cover the local beat. Local being a highly relative term, since the two reporters are physically located in India.

It is a story destined to chill the soul of even the most diligent and productive of journalists. A news website in Pasadena, California, has recruited a pair of reporters who will be expected to write one or two 500 word stories each day detailing the business of the local council, as well as two in-depth pieces each week.

They do not need to come into the office. In fact, it is unlikely they will visit the office, meet their editor or even see Pasadena. The two new recruits to PasadenaNow.com are based 7,979 miles away in India, one in Bangalore, one in Mumbai.

"This is a revolutionary idea," said James Macpherson, the website's editor. "A few of the people who applied for these posts got the idea and see themselves as revolutionaries at the frontier."

Unsurprisingly, Macpherson recruited his cub reporters through the internet. "We seek a newspaper journalist based in India to report on the city government and political scene of Pasadena, California, USA," said the posting placed on an equivalent of Craigslist earlier this week.

"We do not believe that geographic distance between India and California will present unsurmountable problems, and that working together with you will result in you developing a keen working knowledge of this city's affairs. This will result in accurate and authoritative reports."

The two reporters, who will watch council proceedings live on the internet, come cheap by Californian standards: the Mumbai post will attract $12,000 (£6,000), the one in Bangalore, $7,200.

For Macpherson recruiting in India was an obvious solution to his staffing problems. "I've had unfortunate experiences with low-cost articles," he said. Interns and students, "are extremely demanding and produce inferior work."

Oh, and lest you think this is unusual:

Macpherson is not the first to outsource writing. Reuters news agency has a staff of 1,000 in Bangalore, including 100 journalists writing financial news stories. The Boston Globe also recently announced some jobs would be outsourced to India. But this is the first time that a reporting brief has been handed to journalists on the other side of the world.

Gee, isn't the Boston Globe owned by those friendly folks at the New York Times? And haven't they hyperventilated about outsourcing American jobs? Just asking. Incidentally, I rather suspect that Mr. Macpherson (and the Globe) are, to quote a former boss of mine, barking up a dead horse (he wasn't real good at old sayings). In the long run, they'll save a whole lot of money; more than the reporter's salaries. When they close their doors.

Stealthy Recon Foiled

An Alert British woman foiled the latest plot by the Animal Uprising™ to insert an intelligence operative into her home. Because of her sharp observational skills, the agent was captured.

The toad is on ice.

HUNTINGDON When Sainsbury’s began urging customers to “try something new today”, it’s unlikely that anyone at the supermarket chain had toad on a bed of herb salad in mind.

Jessanne De’Ath, from Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, was unpacking her groceries when she found a natterjack toad, an endangered species in Britain, in her bag of salad. The 7cm (2in) toad is thought to have travelled from Portugal, where the salad was packed.

Ms. De'Ath received a £10 reward from the grocer for having located the secret agent. For some reason, she is reluctant to try to capture any other enemy agents, however and promises that she will not buy more salad with her reward money. As for the unsuccessful enemy agent, his mistake was to have tried to use salad as an infiltration vehicle.

Everyone knows that natterjack toads go much better in an omelet.

Shuttle Tank Repaired

The external fuel tank for the space shuttle Atlantis, which sustained damage to the foam insulation of the main fuel tank in a freak February hailstorm, has been repaired and is ready to roll out onto the launch pad. But NASA officials held a special news conference to warn the media that the repairs to the foam make the tank look a bit odd.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The U.S. space shuttle and its newly repaired hail-damaged fuel tank are ready to return to the launch pad for a June 8 launch, NASA managers said on Friday, even though the tank is a bit of an eyesore.

Instead of being a uniform orange color, Atlantis's tank now has a patchwork of white spots where technicians sprayed, scraped and filled fresh foam into more than 4,200 areas that
were damaged during a freak hail storm in February.

"I want to prepare all of you for what this tank is going to look like when we roll it out," fuel tank manager John Chapman told reporters on a teleconference call. "It's going to look pretty speckly."

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard managed to obtained spy pictures of the repaired tank. We think it looks kind of festive.

If You Thought You’d Be Safe

If you thought you'd be safe in the winter from alligators, think again. The Animal Uprising™ has developed a special alpine alligator for use in snowy climates. Don't believe us? Just go to the Knoxville Animal Detention Facility (the signs say, "Zoo," but we know what they really are.) They have a captive alpine 'gator.

In an exhibit made to look like the Louisiana bayou with tree stumps and hanging moss, the 12-year-old American alligator spent one recent afternoon basking under a heat lamp beside a warm pool with one claw lazily dipped in the water. If outside, her skin would burn in the sun.

An albino gene makes the alligator's skin white and her eyes pinkish, and the rare find creates a popular exhibit at zoos around the country.

The exhibit in Knoxville — marketed with the slogan "Look in Dem Eyes" in reference to a legend that good luck will follow those who see the animal — will last through Labor Day.

Zoo visitors paused in a dark lobby and peered through the glass window at her. Occasionally, one eyelid would open and reveal an inner membrane that makes the eye look milky, but otherwise the alabaster-tinted body was still.

"Is she real?" is the most common question from visitors, says Phil Colclough, assistant curator of herpetology at the zoo.

"Nobody believes she's real. They stare until she takes a breath or moves her eyes or jumps in the pool."

Other zoos and tourist attractions have white alligators in the United States, totaling around 50.

Some white alligators are albino, meaning they lack a dark pigment called melanin, and their eyes appear reddish because of the blood vessels underneath.

Another kind of white alligators are leucistic, meaning they have white pigment and blue eyes. The Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans has leucistic alligators found in a Louisiana swamp in 1987.

The reptile legions will now be able to launch winter offensives with self-camouflaging alligators. Just wait until skiers begin disappearing off the slopes. Picture the terror as a mogul eats one of your friends!

Underwear Knotting 101

This is absolutely hysterical. The left is positively foaming at the mouth, screeching their heads off and busily knotting their collective shorts over CBS News decision to fire General John Batiste. The network fired him after he made a fundraising, anti-war video ad slamming the president. Which is a violation of a basic rule of journalism. You cannot simultaneously present yourself as a neutral journalist while being a public and vocal political activist. In this case, in particular, the worry is that the general's opinions could be colored by his political activities, calling the network's coverage into question.

CBS News Vice President, Standards and Special Projects Linda Mason confirmed to me that Batiste was asked to vacate his position.

“When we hire someone as a consultant, we want them to share their expertise with our viewers,” she said. “By putting himself front and center in an anti-Bush ad, the viewer might have the feeling everything he says is anti-Bush. And that doesn’t seem like an analytical approach to the issues we want to discuss.”

She said that Batiste's appearance in the ad marked a violation of CBS News standards, in which “we ask that people not be involved in advocacy.”

Added Mason: “We might still go to the general to ask about things, but not as a consultant to CBS News.”

UPDATE: Mason contacted me this afternoon to expand on her comments.

“General Batiste took part in a commercial that’s being shown on television to raise money for veterans against the war,” she said. “It isn’t just that he took an advocacy position.” She also said that the decision would have been the same had Batiste appeared in a similar ad in support of the president.

I will personally bet a large sum of cash that if the general had filmed a pro-Bush ad, the left would have been in an even bigger frenzy than they are right now. Only they'd be demanding the general's head on a plate. You can go find the frothing over at Memeorandum.

UPDATE: A bit more from the Rochester, New York Democrat and Chronicle newspaper:

(May 11, 2007) — CBS News has cut ties with retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste of Brighton as an on-air military consultant after he appeared this week in television ads critical of President Bush and the war in Iraq.

Batiste and CBS said the decision was amicable.

“Gen. Batiste inadvertently violated our standards by appearing in the advertisement,” said CBS News spokeswoman Sandy Genelius. “Therefore, we and the general mutually agreed to end his consultants’ arrangement with CBS News.”

Batiste said he understood the station’s decision, but feels it’s important to continue to speak out against the war. Batiste, who led the Army’s 1st Infantry Division in Iraq for 2½ years before retiring in 2005, was featured in a national television ad this week sponsored by the group VoteVets.org.

Buzzards Foil Body Farm

Plans to create a "body farm" in Texas have suffered a setback. It seems the planned site was fairly close to the local municipal airport. Officials were extremely worried that the body farm would attract buzzards and increase risks to airplanes. (In case you aren't familiar with the term body farm, it is a place where human bodies are left outside to decompose. This is to study the forensics of dead bodies, not some weird scheme to grow something. Although we could have a lot of fun with a phrase like this.)

Texas State University in San Marcos, 175 miles (280 km) west of Houston, has been looking for sites for a forensic research facility for months, but has run into opposition from residents, and now, the local airport.

Vultures, known locally as buzzards, are large birds native to the state that eat carrion. They circle around in the sky, often in groups, when dead meat is spotted.

"There's a lot of people who don't want it their backyard, and that's certainly understandable," Mark Hendricks, a university spokesman, said on Thursday. "It's a controversial project, there's no doubt about it."

He said the body farm would have six to nine bodies at any given time, in various states of decomposition.

Some would be partially buried, and others might be left on the ground under cages to protect them from vultures, Hendricks said.

Texas State University decided not to use the site near the municipal airport after officials expressed concern that buzzards attracted to decomposing bodies might strike incoming or outgoing airplanes, Hendricks said. University officials said they would look for other possible sites for the project.

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have noted that the Germans appear to have come up with a solution to Texas' problem: Indoor body gardening.

BERLIN (Reuters) - The decomposed corpse of a German man was found alone in his bed after nearly seven years, police in the western city of Essen said Thursday.

The police said in a statement the man was 59 and unemployed at the time of his death. He most likely died of natural causes on November 30, 2000, the date he received a letter from the Welfare Office found in the apartment, police said.

Next to the dead man's bed police found cigarettes, an open television guide and Deutschemark coins, which came out of circulation after the euro was introduced in 2002.

Kind of a grim harvest. The man was never reported missing and apparently was never noticed by the neighbors.

Heading For Trouble

A new poll just out spells trouble for the members of Congress. A AP-Ipsos poll puts the approval rate for Congress at the same 35% level that Bush bashers love to beat the president with.

The survey found only 35 percent approve of how Congress is handling its job, down 5 percentage points in a month. That gives lawmakers the same bleak approval rating as Bush, who has been mired at about that level since last fall, including his dip to a record low for the AP-Ipsos poll of 32 percent last January.

“It's mostly Iraq'' plus a lack of progress in other areas, said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who heads the House GOP's campaign committee. “These are not good numbers for an incumbent, and it doesn't matter if you have an R or a D next to your name.''

Democrats agree the problem is largely Iraq, which has dominated this year's session of Congress while producing little more than this month's Bush veto of a bill requiring the withdrawal of U.S. troops. It has also overshadowed House-passed bills on stem cell research, student loans and other subjects that the White House opposes, they say.

I'd also point out that these numbers are a disaster for those members of Congress who are running after their party nomination for president in 2008. It is extremely unlikely that the voters are going to reward a member of the current Congress with a promotion. As has been pointed out before - by Democratic party campaign adviser Doug Schoen - the Democratic party has a very, very real danger of bearing a disproportionate share of the blame for the public's perceptions of Congressional failings.

Odd Things On The Expressway

I've mentioned before how odd things with weird similarities seem to pop up in the news at nearly the same time before. Today is no different. First we have the story of a man who has been arrested after leading police on yet another high-speed chase. This is not this man's first run-in with the cops. Michael Francis Wiley of New Port Richie, Florida has been arrested for his dangerous driving on at least two other occasions. So why is this all that unusual?

Wiley has no arms and is missing a leg as well.

Michael Francis Wiley taught himself to drive after losing both arms and a leg in an electrical accident when he was 13. He spent time in prison for kicking a Florida Highway Patrol trooper after an accident in 1996. He led police on a 120 mph chase in 1998.

On Tuesday, Wiley sped off in a Ford Explorer when police approached him at a convenience store, New Port Richey police Capt. Darryl Garman said. Officers pursued, but called off the chase after eight minutes because they did not want to put others in danger, Garman said.

Wiley was arrested the next day on charges of fleeing from police and habitually driving without a license. He also is awaiting trial on separate drug charges and traffic violations. He faces up to five years in prison if convicted.

Defense attorney John Hooker said his client has paid off previous traffic fines that got his license suspended and tried to get a new driver's license, but he was rebuffed by state officials. Wiley's license has been revoked so many times it is now a felony to drive.

Believe it or not, that is the less bizarre story. A Spanish man has dug deep and actually been able to top Wiley. Police in the Northwestern area of Galicia pulled over a man hurtling down the expressway at a high rate of speed. Mind you, the man was not actually going so fast as to break the speed limit. So why did the police pull him over?

His wheelchair lacked the proper safety equipment to be on the expressway.

The 42-year-old man, who is tetraplegic, drove the specially-designed wheelchair which keeps him in a stretched position with the use of his chin and mouth, regional newspaper El Ideal Callego reproted.

He was stopped by police while traveling "at considerable speed" overnight Friday on the highway linking Ferrol with As Pontes in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia, it said.

A policewoman in the town of Naron in Galicia told AFP the man was not driving at excessive velocity, "but he nonetheless posed an obvious danger to traffic and to himself."

The kicker to the story: the man was on the expressway because he got lost while looking for a brothel.

Pandering, Posturing And Playing Dumb

Kimberley Strassel, writing in the Opinion Journal, point out the blatant political posturing that is driving the recent ruckus over allowing Canadian drugs to be imported. The vote in the Senate failed a few days ago. The media reported all that. What the media is silent on is the failure of Americans to be actually interested in obtaining Canadian drugs.

Listen to Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe discuss importing drugs from Canada, and you'll hear endless happy talk about "more competitive prices," "substantial savings" and how "crucial" reimportation is to "the American consumer." What you won't hear Ms. Snowe mention much is the drug-import program of Portland, Maine.

Interesting that, since Portland was one of those cities that gained notoriety a few years back for defying federal law and setting up a Canada import program that it promised would save its thousands of city employees and their dependents a bundle on drugs. Three years in, it has attracted all of 350 participants.

That was also the flame-out fate of a statewide plan by Gov. John Baldacci to empower the Penobscot Indian Nation to build a distribution center to import price-controlled Canadian drugs for some 325,000 uninsured and underinsured Mainers. The tribe in February unceremoniously closed the program (which never got its hands on Canadian drugs, but morphed into a domestic mail-order business), having attracted just 3,000 Medicaid recipients.

Programs all over the country that were started up with enormous fanfare and positive press pontifications are already either closed or failing. Because, it turns out, that while politicians may be getting lots of positive press for their efforts, Americans are not really interested.

If anything, Portland is a success compared to the more high-profile state programs that got rolling in 2004. When Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich introduced his I-Save-RX program, which was initially joined by neighboring Wisconsin, he dramatically declared that "the nearly 13 million people who live in Illinois and the more than five million people who live in Wisconsin will have the opportunity to save hundreds–and in some cases even thousands–of dollars each year on the high cost of their medicine." Mr. Blagoevich spent nearly $1 million in taxpayer dollars developing it, including some 500 state workers from two dozen agencies who spent 5,600 hours flacking the program.

All this caused Illinois Auditor General William Holland to get curious about just how much benefit this wonder program was producing, and last fall he issued a stunning report. Over 19 months of operation, a grand total of 3,689 Illinois residents had used the program, which equals approximately 0.02% of the population. Results from the four other participating states were even more laughably dismal. Wisconsin had 321 people use the program; Kansas 267; Missouri 460; and Vermont 217. Mr. Holland also noted that the program was, er, illegal, and that the state had failed to implement quality control.

Things haven't been much rosier for Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican who felt it expedient to throw over the U.S. drug industry in favor of a few populist headlines. Mr. Pawlenty promised in 2003 that his Minnesota RxConnect program would serve some 700,000 people. A representative from Minnesota's department of human services explained to me this week that the state (conveniently) does not break out the number of people who use its program. But according to its latest statistics, Minnesota RxConnect last month filled a total of 138 prescriptions. That's for the whole state. Programs like those in Springfield, Mass., have simply closed.

This has a lot more to do with a union-driven agenda than it has with any real issue. In point of fact, Wal-Mart is selling generic drugs even cheaper than the much-ballyhooed Canadian ones. (I'm not sure that program has gone completely nation-wide yet, however). What you have operating here is political pandering to a union agenda, populist posturing by politicians and the media cooperating by playing dumb to the failures of these programs to attract American consumers.

The High Cost Of John Edwards

The Edwards campaign has the dubious distinction of being the first of the Democrat presidential hopefuls to announce just how expensive his proposals would be. The bill for his ideas would be very, very steep. The tax increases required to fund the programs, staggeringly high.

WASHINGTON - Presidential candidate John Edwards is offering more policy proposals than any other candidate in the primary and his ideas are winning loud applause from Democratic audiences.

The question is whether other voters will cheer when they see the price tag — more than $125 billion a year.

Edwards is quick to acknowledge his spending on health care, energy and poverty reduction comes at a cost, with more plans to come. All told, his proposals would equal more than $1 trillion if he could get them enacted into law and operational during two White House terms.

To put the number in perspective, President Bush has dedicated more than $1.8 trillion to tax cuts. The cost of the Iraq war is nearing $450 billion. And this year's federal budget is about $2.8 trillion.

Edwards says fixing the country's problems takes precedence over eliminating the deficit or offering middle-class tax relief like he proposed when running for president in the last election.

"I think for me, as opposed to the additional tax relief for the middle class, what's more important is to give them relief from the extraordinary cost of health care, from gasoline prices, the things that they spend money on every single day that are escalating dramatically," Edwards said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

To pay for some of his priorities, Edwards would roll back Bush's tax cuts on Americans making more than $200,000 a year. He also said he would consider raising capital gains taxes to help fund his plans and raise or eliminate the $90,000 cap on individual earnings subject to Social Security taxes to help cover the projected shortfall in the system.

And don't think Edwards is planning only on robbing the "rich" to pay for all this. He also wants to cut subsidies for student loans and by cutting the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One of the things that likely cost the Republicans a number of Congressional seats in the last election was a failure to exercise fiscal responsibility. I don't think the American voters are going to be overly pleased with the plans Edwards has revealed. Personally, I suspect Edwards is trying to gain support from the unions with this set of proposals. The problem for him is, he's going to pretty much lose everyone else.