Deforest First, Infest Second

Ok, we'll provide a proper beating to the Daily Mail in a few moments, but this story is interesting even though it is, to put it mildly, factually challenged. It seems a British man bought a nice new bed for his daughter. The daughter was immensely pleased. That is, until, she was awakened in the middle of the night by gnawing sounds which appeared to be coming from said new bed. Let's turn it over to the Daily Mail now:

Cassie Hindry was thrilled with her new bed, a gift from her father when they moved house.

But five weeks of blissful sleep later she woke in the middle of the night to hear an ominous scratching sound in her room.

Fearing the worst, the family called in pest exterminators who discovered her new bed was teeming with termites.

Her father John, who bought the £300 leather-look double bed from Argos, has since had to spend more than £1,000 having the house fumigated.

"I do not know what to do really," said Mr Hindry, a 55-year-old company director.

"I have this bed stuck in my house full of termites and I can't move it or they might get into the wood elsewhere.

"I have kept the bed and propped it up on tin foil so the little critters can't eat their way out.

"I have managed to catch a couple but the others seem to have burrowed their way back into the bed.

"The exterminators have told me these termites are incredibly rare in the UK and are usually native to North America."

His daughter, a 19-year-old sales co-ordinator, said: "I did not know what it was at first. There was a little pile of sawdust by my bed and I thought I may have dropped some make-up.

"I thought, 'my dad will kill me if he finds out' so I covered it up and kept it quiet but then the noise just carried on.

"When I found out what it was it made me feel quite sick. As long as the bed stays I am not sleeping in that room."

The bed was imported from China. Ok, we've reported on the efforts of China to deforest the planet. That's bad. But improper handling of green wood (as in not kiln drying it properly) is the proximate cause of the infestation of Ms. Hindry's bed. Now the beating for the Daily Mail. They identify the pest:

The termites have been identified as powder post beetles.

Take it from one who knows a bit about wood. Powder post beetles are in no way, shape or form termites. We're talking a completely different beast here.  Are they destructive? Sure. Are they termites? Not even close. Powder post beetle information here, termite information here. Good news, bad news for Mr. Hindry, who "propped it up on tin foil" to keep them from escaping. The ones that escape are adults looking for a new place to lay eggs. They are already out (bad news). Good news, powder post beetles like relatively fresh hardwood, so your house should be fairly safe. The furniture, not so much.

So the drive for ever cheaper goods from China has a downside, folks. Aside from the denuded forests, the dead orangutans and the massive pollution, that is. You know, China, who is exempt from Kyoto? This time it might get someone's attention.

When their beds collapse.

Paging Captain Ahab

Please retrieve your harpoon. Thank you. A 50-ton bowhead whale recently killed by native Alaskans had a surprise embedded in it: the lance point of a 19th century "bomb lance". The finding gives scientists insight into the whale's age, estimated at between 115 and 130 years old.

BOSTON - A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3 1/2-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale's age, estimated between 115 and 130 years old.

"No other finding has been this precise," said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

Calculating a whale's age can be difficult, and is usually gauged by amino acids in the eye lenses. It's rare to find one that has lived more than a century, but experts say the oldest were close to 200 years old.

The bomb lance fragment, lodged a bone between the whale's neck and shoulder blade, was likely manufactured in New Bedford, on the southeast coast of Massachusetts, a major whaling center at that time, Bockstoce said.

It was probably shot at the whale from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The small metal cylinder was filled with explosives fitted with a time-delay fuse so it would explode seconds after it was shot into the whale. The bomb lance was meant to kill the whale immediately and prevent it from escaping.

The device exploded and probably injured the whale, Bockstoce said.

"It probably hurt the whale, or annoyed him, but it hit him in a non-lethal place," he said. "He couldn't have been that bothered if he lived for another 100 years."

The whale harkens back to far different era. If 130 years old, it would have been born in 1877, the year Rutherford B. Hayes was sworn in as president, when federal Reconstruction troops withdrew from the South and when Thomas Edison unveiled his newest invention, the phonograph.

The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month, and the older device was found buried beneath its blubber as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting.

"It's unusual to find old things like that in whales, and I knew immediately that it was quite old by its shape," said Craig George, a wildlife biologist for the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management, who was called down to the site soon after it was found.

Here's a Nantucket antiques dealer who actually has one of these devices - including the gun (manufactured by C. C. Brand of Norwich, Connecticut) that launched it and instructions for using it up for sale. Here's more on the C.C. Brand guns that were used extensively in whaling back in the day.

Giuliani And His Twelve Commitments

Rudy Giuliani has come out with 12 commitments to the American people that he intends to base his candidacy on. And, as a high-level overview, they look pretty good.

I will keep America on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us.
I will end illegal immigration, secure our borders, and identify every non-citizen in our nation.
I will restore fiscal discipline and cut wasteful Washington spending.   
I will cut taxes and reform the tax code.
I will impose accountability on Washington.
I will lead America towards energy independence.   
I will give Americans more control over, and access to, healthcare with affordable and portable free-market solutions.   
I will increase adoptions, decrease abortions, and protect the quality of life for our children.
I will reform the legal system and appoint strict constructionist judges.
I will ensure that every community in America is prepared for terrorist attacks and natural disasters.
I will provide access to a quality education to every child in America by giving real school choice to parents.
I will expand America’s involvement in the global economy and strengthen our reputation around the world.

Number two on the list is a winner with the vast majority of Americans. As always with things of this nature, the devil is in the details. But it's a good start.

A Bouncing Baby Girl

More heartwarming than hurtling Saint Bernards falling on a convenient passersby. More delightful than a ripe burglar falling from a burglar tree. Infinitely more pleasant than being beaned by an aerial, prehistoric, armor-plated fish. We bring you the tale of a bouncing baby girl. And we mean that quite literally. Because the 1-year old fell four stories from her bedroom window - and survived without a single scratch.

The baby, Tara, had somehow managed to crawl out of her cot in the incident which happened in the northwestern town of Novi Grad at the weekend, the Nezavisne Novine newspaper said.

"We are still in shock," her father, Danijel Zec, told the daily.

"We couldn't believe it when the doctors told us that she didn't break anything and she was unharmed," said Zec, adding he believed she "was saved by some invisible force."

Doctors who examined her said it was a "mystery" how she escaped without the slightest injury.

Has the kid ingested a large amount of rubber lately? That is one lucky little girl.

Tapdance

You know, there was a big push by the media back before the last election to call the situation in Iraq a "civil war". It is more than a little ironic in light of the desperate tapdance the media is performing right now to avoid calling the situation in Gaza a civil war. Let's see, you have dueling mortar attacks on the homes of the leaders of both factions involved, armed assaults of strongholds from either side, gangs of gunmen fighting one another and ever so much more. But the AFP reporters and editors call that "getting closer to" a civil war.

GAZA CITY (AFP) - Hamas fighters armed with guns and rocket launchers besieged two Fatah security headquarters on Tuesday as deadly clashes threatened to topple the government and drive Gaza closer to civil war.

Gunmen from the radical Islamist movement ambushed two seats of the Fatah loyalist national security — the main Palestinian security force — in Gaza City and Jabaliya provoking clashes with those holed up inside.

Security officials and witnesses at the scene reported heavy fighting but were unable to give immediate reports of any casualties.

The attack came after mortar shells slammed into prime minister Ismail Haniya's home and the seafront compound of president Mahmud Abbas in the latest bout of fighting that has killed 18 people in 24 hours.

The apparently no-holds barred conflict threatens the very foundations of a Hamas-Fatah coalition that took office less than three months ago in a bid to halt the feuding that has killed nearly 180 people since December.

Abbas's office called for an immediate ceasefire but accused leaders in Hamas of plotting a coup and leading Gaza toward civil war while his secular Fatah faction warned it could pull out of the shaky, Hamas-led government.

"All the information and all the facts point to a faction, to which political and military leaders of Hamas belong, who are plotting a coup against Palestinian legitimacy," the presidency said.

It charged that the Hamas leaders in question were "pushing the homeland towards the throes of a dreadful civil war" and issued a plea on behalf of Abbas for an immediate ceasefire and serious dialogue.

We'd hate to see what the AFP definition of a civil war actually is.

Outage

Some people who tried to reach the site this morning undoubtedly ran into what I did myself. A page showing that Blue Crab Boulevard had been suspended. After I got done screaming at the walls, I got in touch with the hosting company. It seems that the "Bad Behavior" plug-in for WordPress has been causing massively slow queries and the hosting company shut me down as a result. In order to get the site back up, I would have to switch to a very expensive high-CPU server or get the problem resolved with the Bad Behavior folks. (I have not contacted them as yet). But I chose to kill the Bad Behavior module for now until I can get the issue addressed. I may have to disable comments and trackbacks if spam becomes a problem, though.

Precisely Nothing

The Economist takes a look at the track record of Congress since the Democrats took power. Their judgment is not exactly flattering. They say that it would appear that precisely nothing of any real value is likely to be passed.

ROUGHLY half a year after the Democrats seized Congress, nobody could deny that politics has grown more interesting. Judging from the newspapers today it is Capitol Hill, not the White House, where the action is in Washington, DC.The new Democratic majority certainly started strong. In its first 100 hours the House passed six popular bills to show that this was no “do-nothing Congress”, as its Republican-controlled predecessor had been labelled. The Iraq debate heated up with congressional calls to pull the troops home. The Senate has held public, sometimes riveting, hearings with the attorney-general and other administration officials, holding their feet to the fire as Congress is meant to do. And recently, the Senate unblocked the debate on immigration by considering a vast compromise bill that would overhaul America’s system for welcoming foreigners.

And yet the past six months has also shown how painfully blocked-up America’s checks-and-balances system can be. For all of the attention-grabbing ctivity, nothing concrete has yet been achieved. That 100-hours plan? Except for changes to the House’s own rules, none of the other bills has become law; most are languishing in the Senate. A bill on stem-cell research recently passed both chambers, but it now faces George Bush’s veto. The “100 Hours” may be remembered as a catchy campaign slogan, but it may produce precisely nothing of legislative substance. At least the 1994 “Contract with America” elped to get the ball rolling on welfare reform.

Believe it or not, the Reid-Pelosi regime has actually accomplished something. They have managed to drive already appalling poll numbers for Congress to entirely new depths. It isn't exactly an accomplishment to be proud of. The rank and file will regard the Reid-Pelosi tenure in office with revulsion soon enough. Couple the low numbers for Congress with the fact that the two front-runners for the Dem's nomination for president happen to be members of that Congress and there is a potential trainwreck coming. Reid and Pelosi will take the blame if that train jumps the tracks. Bet on it.

The Psychotic Sturgeon Of The Suwannee

They're at it again. This time the airmobile terrorist fish took out a 32-year old Florida woman who was out minding her own business on the river. It's not like this is the first time we've reported on the flying fish. Or even the second.

Tara Spears, 32, of Bell, was knocked unconscious by the animal on Sunday while boating on the river north of Rock Bluff, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission reported.

She was taken to a hospital with non-life-threatening injuries and was expected to recover, the agency reported.

The large, prehistoric-looking sturgeon have hard plates along their backs. They can grow up to 8 feet long and up to 200 pounds.

In April, a leaping sturgeon severely injured a 50-year-old woman from St. Petersburg who was riding a personal watercraft on the Suwannee River. She suffered a ruptured spleen and had three fingers reattached by surgeons, but she lost her left pinkie finger and a tooth.

It is time to get serious about this mounting threat to the freedom of the seas. Or river in this case. We demand that the government provide free anti-airfish artillery for the boating public. Just the sight of a "Ma Deuce" on a SeaDoo should strike terror in the hearts of the prehistoric, fishy miscreants. If not, There's always the Phalanx. A "See-wiz" on a SeaDoo. Although that might be a bit tricky to mount. In the meantime, we recommend wearing full plate armor when riding a personal watercraft on the Suwannee River. Just don't fall off, whatever you do.

When The Left Loses….

…..They cheerfully set to work to undermine whoever beat them at the polls. Most recent example: France. Despite what appear to be landslide-level acquisition of seats in Parliament and the election of Nicolas Sarkozy himself, the socialists are warning that there will be riots. Oh, and that mandate he just won: just a fluke because they gave up rather than fight . Yeesh.

PARIS — President Nicolas Sarkozy appears to have won a mandate for change after his party swept first-round parliamentary elections, and he is picking up speed in his plans to overhaul France's welfare state. But rivals say he should watch out.

Sarkozy's expected parliamentary majority is inflated by French election rules and because many opponents threw up their hands and did not vote in Sunday's first round. Immigrant-heavy suburbs are still seething after 2005 riots, and students are dead-set against some of Sarkozy's reforms.

A major misstep, critics warn, and the streets again could explode in anger.

Sarkozy's conservative UMP party dominated Sunday's vote, the opposition Socialists fared poorly and fringe parties all but disappeared _ leaving the UMP well-placed to expand its majority in the National Assembly in Sunday's decisive second-round vote.

Sarkozy, well aware of the risk of resistance to his plans, has reached out to the people most threatened by them: negotiating with unions, bringing a leading Socialist into his government and naming a woman of North African descent as justice minister. On Monday, he bowed to labor union demands and scrapped longer hours for teachers.

So far, the strategy appears to be working. Anti-Sarkozy protests after last month's elections left hundreds of cars burned nationwide but quickly fizzled, and no other major resistance has been mounted.

Sarkozy has an uphill battle to change the massive welfare state that France has become. His enemies are telegraphing that they fully intend to make it worse. Unfortunately, that is exactly how the left are representing themselves, as enemies, not as the opposition. And even the American press is willing to give cover for it. The WaPo calls the warnings of riots "facing dissent". One cannot help but speculate what the headlines would have been if Segolene Royal had eked out a victory by a single vote. It is very likely that would have been described as a mandate in glowing terms.