The Ultimate “Man Bites Dog” Story

The phrase "man bites dog" is usually attributed to a former editor of the former New York Sun newspaper, John B. Bogart. He supposedly said: "When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news." But regardless whether he said it, this is the mother of all man bites dog stories. Because not only did the man bite the dog, the man killed the dog by biting it.

A man in Hebei Province tried to chase off a dog that was attacking his puppy, and when that failed, he threw himself on the dog and bit it on the neck, eventually killing it, according to the local Yanzhao Cosmopolitan News. He suffered deep cuts to his arms, it said. The puppy survived. Villagers said that a wound on the dead dog’s neck could have been caused only by biting. They also said the man was known for biting people in fights.

We hasten to point out that this has no relation to the American man who just seized the world record for eating dogs.

NEW YORK - In a gut-busting showdown that combined drama, daring and indigestion, Joey Chestnut emerged Wednesday as the world's hot dog eating champion, knocking off six-time winner Takeru Kobayashi in a record-setting yet repulsive triumph.

Chestnut, the great red, white and blue hope in the annual Fourth of July competition, broke his own world record by inhaling 66 hot dogs in 12 minutes — a staggering one every 10.9 seconds before a screaming crowd in Coney Island.

"If I needed to eat another one right now, I could," the 23-year-old Californian said after receiving the mustard yellow belt emblematic of hot dog eating supremacy.

Kobayashi, the Japanese eating machine, recently had a wisdom tooth extracted and received chiropractic treatment due to a sore jaw. But the winner of every Nathan's hot dog competition from 2001 to 2006 showed no ill effects as he stayed with Chestnut frank-for-frank until the very end of the 12-minute competition.

Once the contest ended, the runner-up suffered a reversal — competitive eating-speak for barfing — leading to a deduction from his final total. Kobayashi finished with 63 HDBs (hot dogs and buns eaten) in his best performance ever.

We'd "reversal" in either case.

Parsing The Eye Of The Needle

Media Matters spends an inordinate amount of time splitting hairs. Their gyrations to "prove" things have reached the point of the ridiculous, though. Because they are attempting to attack Neal Boortz for saying that Bill Clinton was convicted of perjury by dancing about screeching that Clinton was never convicted. Strictly speaking, they are correct, mind you.

Because rather than being "convicted", Bill Clinton directly admitted in a sworn plea agreement that he had lied under oath. Period. No "conviction", per se, although the typical media shorthand calls that a conviction. No, this was a flat-out admission of guilt to avoid the conviction that would have occurred had the matter gone to court - which even Media Matters must know - otherwise why would Clinton have made the plea bargain?. Clinton admitted his guilt, in public, with no parsing and with no tortured reasoning trying to push an elephant or a camel through the eye of a needle.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Clinton will leave office free of the prospect of criminal charges after he admitted Friday that he knowingly gave misleading testimony about his affair with Monica Lewinsky in a 1998 lawsuit.

Under an agreement with Independent Counsel Robert Ray, Clinton's law license will be suspended for five years and he will pay a $25,000 fine to Arkansas bar officials. He also gave up any claim to repayment of his legal fees in the matter. In return, Ray will end the 7-year-old Whitewater probe that has shadowed most of Clinton's two terms.

"I tried to walk a fine line between acting lawfully and testifying falsely, but I now recognize that I did not fully accomplish this goal and am certain my responses to questions about Ms. Lewinsky were false," Clinton said in a written statement released Friday by the White House.

The admission, which came on the president's last full day in office, stems from the same allegations that led to Clinton's 1998 impeachment by the House of Representatives, and the later acquittal by the Senate.

Clinton surrendered his law license and paid a fine because of his direct admission that he had lied under oath. Which is what perjury is.

Next up, how many Media Matters posts can dance on the head of a pin.

The March Of The Frogs

The overlords of the Animal Uprising™, not content with unleashing just two or three plagues of animals on Florida, have sent in the big guns. No, this is in addition to the mice, the pythons and the giant rats. This time it's personal. They are sending in the top guns, the cream of the crop, the true menaces. The mother of all gross outs.

Toilet frogs.

People scream after finding huge frogs in their toilet bowls. Electrified amphibians cause multiple blackouts. Frogs hitch rides in cars, later surprising unsuspecting drivers.

It's all real, and, according to the University of Florida, the invasive Cuban tree frog is responsible for the chaos. The species has colonized over half of Florida and is now moving in on the rest of the state. The 6-inch-long frogs, which dwarf native tiny tree frogs, have also been found in Georgia, South Carolina, California, Hawaii and Canada.

UF amphibian expert Steve Johnson told Discovery News that the frog "toilet surprise" has startled himself, numerous students and several friends.

"They come in through bathroom PVC vent pipes on the roof," Johnson explained. "Once they find moisture, they may just keep moving down until they make their way to the toilet, one of their favorite indoor destinations."

He added that the creamy white to light brown frogs can also clog up sinks. The bathroom attraction has to do with the frogs' preference for "confined, cozy" spaces, such as pipes.

The frogs first became established in Florida in the early 20th century, after the amphibians stowed away on boats. On land, almost any form of transportation can carry them from one region to another.

Johnson said Florida, California and Hawaii remain particularly vulnerable to such invasions.

And, what's even worse? The frogs are toxic - no really. They release a toxin through their skin. So if you're sitting on your toilet and you get the feeling that you are being watched it may not be your imagination. (We personally guarantee that everyone who reads this will be checking their toilets - twice - before descending onto the throne.)

Pennies From Heaven

That's what storms were made for
And you shouldn't be afraid for
Every time it rains it rains
Pennies from heaven.
Don't you know each cloud contains
Pennies from heaven.
You'll find your fortune falling
All over town.
(Johnston/Burke, Pennies From Heaven)

Or, in this case, Euros from the sky. A 24-year old woman in the German city of Worms drove her car through a swirling mass of Euro notes. Displaying great presence of mind, she slammed on the brakes, jumped out and collected a "substantial" sum of money. Which she dutifully turned in to the police, mind you.

And nobody knows where it came from.

A police spokesman in the small western town said the 24-year-old woman saw the money flying through the air in her rear view mirror late on Wednesday. She pulled over and tried to collect all the notes, unsuccessfully.

When police went with her to the scene they could not find any more cash.

A spokesman at Worms city hall said police were withholding details on the exact sum and location of the find in the hope of learning more about the money's origin.

Personally, we here at Blue Crab Boulevard are hoping for a blizzard of $100 bills. That is our kind of weather.

Sturgery

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard have been reporting on the psycho sturgeon of the Suwannee for some time now. These are the evil, armor-plated, flying attack fish that have been targeting boaters with precision airstrikes. Shock and awe with fins, so to speak. Well, the British press is finally catching up with the news and reporting about the ferocious, finned fiends.

Leaping sturgeon are inflicting severe injuries on boaters as low water levels on the famous Suwannee River have increased the number of collisions between the armoured fish and passing pleasure boats.

Florida police report that the traditional summer season of "sturgeon strikes" has been particularly bloody this year along the picturesque river, made famous by Al Jolson in the Gershwin song "Swanee".

The Gulf sturgeon - which can grow to eight feet and is covered with sharp, bony plates that can cut flesh like knives - has inflicted broken bones, fractured skulls, severed fingers and a slashed throat.

The number of incidents has risen dramatically in the past 18 months. Four people have been injured so far this year, including a woman whose leg was shattered after a sturgeon jumped on board a pleasure boat. Ten people were similarly injured last year. Previously only the occasional strike was reported.

Its bad enough that they launch themselves with uncanny accuracy at the nearest jet ski rider. But now we have unlicensed fish practicing surgery on innocent boaters, too. This must stop. We have suggested the proper course of action against the prehistoric cruise missiles before. We have rethought our recommendation on wearing full plate armor, however. Several volunteers who tried it out swam straight to the bottom of the river and stayed there. While we're busy finding new volunteers to locate the old ones, we'd recommend not wearing armor until we figure out what happened. 

Brave Jihadis Use Children As Human Shields

After their gutless. "fiery" cleric leader dressed up in women's clothing to escape, the pusillanimous holdouts still inside the Red Mosque in Islamabad, Pakistan, have taken women and children as human shields to protect them from the authorities. The level of "bravery" in these jihadis is sickening.

Pakistan's Deputy Information Minister Tariq Azim Khan said the few students who had quit the mosque spoke of a nightmare scenario for security forces trying to keep casualties down.

"A large number of women and children are being held hostage by armed men in room," Khan told a news conference, adding that the brother of the captured cleric was hiding in the basement of an attached madrasa with 25 "women hostages."

"Yes, they're using them as human shields, because the people who have come out, they told us that they're telling women and children not to worry because as long as you're here forces will not attack us," he said.

In an interview broadcast earlier on state television, the leader of the Red Mosque's Taliban-style student movement, caught the previous evening trying to escape wearing a woman's burqa, said 850 students remained inside, including 600 women and girls.

Abdul Aziz, clad in a woman's all-enveloping garment like the one he was caught in, began the interview by dramatically lifting the black veil to reveal a face dominated by a bushy grey beard.

He said 14 men were armed with Kalashnikovs in the mosque.

Aziz is proud of his transvestite tendencies and craven behavior, apparently.

Simple Yet Deadly

The Washington Post reports on the use of simple, easy-to-get ingredients for bombs. Such homemade kitchen chemistry bombs are the weapon of choice for terrorists operating in Western countries.

So far, however, al-Qaeda and its affiliates have relied almost solely on simple, homemade bombs crafted from everyday ingredients — such as nail-polish remover and fertilizer — when plotting attacks in Europe and the United States.

The makeshift bombs lack the destructive potential of the conventional explosives that rake Iraq on a daily basis. They are also less reliable, as demonstrated by the car bombs that failed to go off in London last week after the culprits tried to ignite them with detonators wired to cellphones.

But other attempts have generated plenty of mayhem and damage, including the kitchen-built backpack bombs that killed 52 people in the London public transit system on July 7, 2005.

"It makes no difference to your average person if somebody puts a car bomb out there that is crude or one that is sophisticated," said Chris Driver-Williams, a retired British major and military intelligence officer who studies explosive devices used by terrorist groups. "If it detonates, all of a sudden you've got a very serious device and one that has achieved exactly what the terrorists wanted." (Emphasis added)

The advantages of homemade explosives are that they are easy and cheap to manufacture, as well as difficult for law enforcement agencies to detect. According to one expert, the peroxide-based liquid explosives that an al-Qaeda cell allegedly intended to use to blow up nine transatlantic airliners last summer would have cost as little as $15 a bomb.

It is technically simple to make such explosives. Instructions are widely available on the Internet. Experts added, however, that it takes skill and sophistication to construct a viable bomb by adding timing devices, detonators or secondary charges.

The recently captured group of terrorists in Britain were, thankfully, technically inept. That does not mean that they could not have gotten it right enough to kill quite a few people. People can point out that the devices are crude and not all that powerful. But will those arguments mean anything to the people the devices kill?

Heisenberg Would Be Miffed

Mike Murphy and Mark Mellman invoke the Heisenberg uncertainty principle to describe the ridiculously long presidential primary process that has started an absurdly long way out from the elections. Heisenberg would not be amused.

It is reminiscent of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle we all heard about in high school physics class. Professor Werner Heisenberg postulated that "the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known." Applied to the presidential race, this suggests that the more we measure how the candidates stand now, the less we may know about where things are going to end up — because the measurement itself can render the findings inaccurate.

The noisy onslaught of public opinion polling in the media so early in the process would amuse the good professor, because the numbers are really little more than a vain attempt to measure something that hasn't happened. Although the political and media elites may think the campaign is in full swing, with the fortunes of each candidate rising and falling with every new poll, the truth is that voters — the ones who are really going to decide this race — don't start the campaign until much later.

Because voters are not required to make a decision until election day, they remain open at this stage in the race to new information, alternative perspectives and late-breaking developments — all of which render today's poll results, to one degree or another, meaningless.

Consider this: More than two-thirds of the Democrats who voted in the 2004 Iowa caucuses didn't decide who to vote for until a month before the caucuses. Four in 10 decided in the last week. In 2004, 54% of New Hampshire Democrats decided within a week of the primary. It's no surprise, then, that in the 2004 election, John Kerry was lagging in third place until only a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses. Kerry then more than doubled his vote in Iowa and nearly quadrupled it in New Hampshire — all in less than 20 days.

They are right that the polling is virtually completely meaningless at this point. The polls are more about generating news than about any real measurements of the actual voters. But that doesn't mean it is harmless, either:

Meanwhile, the press ignores Heisenberg's principle — that the measurements themselves, printed in bold type on Page 1, create their own distorted results, inaccurately advantaging some while disadvantaging others. By creating a potentially illusory sense of momentum or of failure, these pseudo-measures affect the extent of media coverage, fundraising, endorsements and the willingness of volunteers to engage. 

Murphy and Mellman are making a classic error - the Heisenberg principle actually has a very specific meaning and applies at the atomic and subatomic level. What they are actually describing is the "observer effect": the act of measuring something causes distortions in the phenomenon being observed. That distortion is quite real and it is exactly what is happening right now. The media declares winners and losers based on polling and one set of poll numbers drives the reporting and the next set of polls and reporting.

Force

John Stossel, in his column over at Real Clear Politics, points out a fact that appears to completely elude the folks on the left: government is force. The fact that we get to elect a few of the people that exercise that force does not change that.

That same week I happened to interview filmmaker Michael Moore for "20/20." Moore wants government to monopolize health care. His new film, "Sicko," argues that Canada and France approach paradise because their governments provide health care and more. This brought him standing ovations in Cannes.

"But government is force," I said to him. He was incredulous.

Michael Moore: Why do you see it as force?

Me: Because government takes money with force from people and gives it to others.

Moore: No, it doesn't, actually. The government is of, by, and for the people. The people elect the government, and the people determine whether or not they'll allow the government to collect taxes from them.

Is it really necessary to explain that government is force? When the Salvation Army asks you for a donation, you are free to say no, and you suffer no consequences. When the U.S. government demands a tax return and a check on April 15, you can't say no and go about your business. You comply or face fines or imprisonment. Yes, you get to vote for candidates periodically. But having an infinitesimal say in who will coerce you doesn't change that fact that they are using force.

Increasingly, it seems that the biggest difference between conservatives and "liberals" is that the conservatives know government is force. But that doesn't stop them from using it.

Michael Moore may not have thought about it, but there are only two ways to get people to do things: force or persuasion. Government is all about force. Government has nothing it hasn't first expropriated from some productive person.

Stossel then goes on to point out that the private sector can and will provide superior service to almost any government-run program because they have to compete for people's money - not take it by force. Because government does not have to compete, government programs tend to bloat rapidly and become entrenched bureaucratic fiefdoms in short order. There is no incentive to keep costs under control - quite the opposite. There is always pressure to increase the amount of money a program or department gets - taken by force from the people.  

Yet Another Brave Jihadi

Yet another case of a "fiery" islamist cleric who cheerfully preaches jihad then dresses up in women's clothing to try to run away when surrounded. The leader of the "Red Mosque" in Islamabad, Pakistan, Maulana Abdul Aziz, attempted to flee the siege of the mosque in a burqa. Pakistani authorities had a grand old time parading Aziz for the cameras - still dressed in his transvestite finery. (Don't tell me they didn't do that on purpose, either.)

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - A radical cleric captured by security forces while fleeing in a woman's burqa said Thursday that the nearly 1,000 followers still inside his government-besieged mosque in Pakistan's capital should escape or surrender.

Sporadic gunfire, meanwhile, could be heard around the mosque, though no large-scale fighting was reported.

The comments from Maulana Abdul Aziz — head cleric of the Red Mosque, or Lal Masjid — indicated that the tense standoff in the heart of Islamabad might soon end without further bloodshed.

The Pakistani army surrounded the mosque Wednesday, a day after at least 16 people were killed in clashes between security forces and armed activists from the mosque, whose clerics have defied the government for months with a drive to impose Taliban-style Islamic law in the city.

In recent months, the clerics have challenged the government by sending students of the mosque to kidnap alleged prostitutes and police in an anti-vice campaign.

The tensions erupted into a daylong battle on Tuesday between security forces and student followers of the mosque — some of whom were heavily armed and masked. Officials have reported at least 16 people killed and scores injured.

In an interview on state-run television, Aziz said that as many as 700 women and about 250 men remained inside the mosque compound and an adjacent women's seminary, some armed with more than a dozen AK-47 assault rifles provided by "friends."

"If they can get out quietly they should go, or they can surrender if they want to," he said. "I saw after coming out that the siege is very intense … Our companions will not be able to stay for long."

Officials said over 1,100 militants had given up and more emerged early Thursday as police using loudspeakers urged the hold-outs to surrender.

The gray-bearded Aziz, still dressed in a burqa, appeared calm as he said his mosque has "a relationship of love and affection with all jihadist organizations" but no actual links with them.

As usual, he's more than willing to fight to the last drop of someone else's blood. His own, not so much.