Great News For Aging Boomers!

The Telegraph reports that the fastest growing age group among surfers is the over 50 crowd! Dude! And they are calling themselves (or the reporter is, it is not clear which) "Silver Surfers".

There was a time when the waves were ruled by the young but now there's a new and rather unlikely surfing set taking to the water.

Members of the Women's Institute are leading the rise of the "silver surfers", the growing number of over-50s taking up the sport.

Surf schools across the country estimate that about 10 per cent of people taking up the sport are members of the new breed.

Clad in a grey wetsuit, Felicity Penneycard now spends some of her time carrying her surfboard across Porth beach in Cornwall, having moved to the area from London with her husband Peter six years ago. The 59-year-old treasurer of her local Women's Institute branch began surfing as a youngster on family holidays in Cornwall, and still has the wooden board she bought in 1962 for 10 shillings and sixpence (52½p).

But her passion for what she calls "stand up surfing" began last month during a group outing of Women's Institute branches.

She said: "It is a great sport for older people because it is good all-round exercise. And when you catch the wave it is the greatest feeling.

Catch a wave and you're sittin' on top of the world!

Catch a wave and you're sittin' on top of the world
Don't be afraid to try the greatest sport around
Everybody tries it once
Those who don't just have to put it down
You paddle out turn around and raise
And baby that's all there is to the coastline craze
You gotta catch a wave and you're sittin' on top of the world
(Brian Wilson, Catch a Wave)

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard applaud those who will not go gently into that good night. After all, "Old age should burn and rave at close of day." (And heck, we're getting up there, too.) We would remind our "silver surfers" of one thing, however. This is a wetsuit. This is a seal (properly a sea lion in this case). Seals are a favorite food of great white sharks. You've lived this long, you should be able to draw your own conclusions. Surfin' turf's up!

And In Today’s Goat Headlines

The citizens of Ireland will be ecstatic to know that they are now living in a monarchy! The new king, Jimmy I, has been crowned at a coronation ceremony in Killorglin. The reign of peace, prosperity, drinking and music has begun! The great monarchy will last for an eternity. Or three days, whichever comes first. 

DUBLIN (Reuters) - Jimmy, a feisty white mountain goat, was crowned king of Ireland on Friday at one of the country's oldest fairs.

Dating back centuries, the Puck Fair is an annual festival of drinking, music and dancing celebrated in the town of Killorglin in southern Ireland.

Each year a male goat is caught in the surrounding mountains, paraded through the town to a beat of drums and pipes, and then placed in a 40-feet (12 metre) stand where he reigns as king for three days.

The origins of the fair are not totally known, but it always falls on August 10-12.

One theory suggests mountain goats alerted residents of the town to an impending attack by leader Oliver Cromwell's forces in the 17th century.

Another says it may have pre-Christian links due to the goat being a pagan fertility symbol like the god Pan.

"Its origins go way back to the mists of time," the fair's financial controller Declan Falvey told Reuters. "There is a mingling of fact and fantasy."

Around 100,000 to 150,000 visitors are expected to attend this year.

All hail Jimmy I, the goat-king of Ireland. We here at Blue Crab Boulevard recommend that Jimmy I not visit Tacoma, Washington on a goodwill tour, however.

TACOMA, Wash. - A man accused of having sex with a goat is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday on a animal cruelty charge. Charging papers say a witness saw 63-year-old Arthur Lawton having sex with a goat May 8th in a barn at Eatonville's Pioneer Farm Museum where he worked.

Lawton said he was trying to milk the goat.

We absolutely refuse to take the cheap shot here. Tempting as it is.

Prisoner No More

Francisco Chaviano González Was, in 1994, documenting the deaths of people trying to flee from the communist worker's paradise of Cuba. The authorities harassed him relentlessly; sending thugs to beat him in an effort to silence him. Finally, he was arrested by Fidel Castro's goons and tried in a secret military court. Convicted of "revealing state secrets" after a government setup, he was sent to prison for 15 years by the benevolent Castro regime.

He has served the longest amount of time as a prisoner of conscience in the Western hemisphere according to Amnesty International.

Today, two years short of completing his sentence, the Cuban Government finally freed him.

Francisco Chaviano, now 54, was released on parole after serving 13 years, three months and three days, said Elizardo Sanchez of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

"He was among the longest-held prisoners of conscience in the world," Sanchez wrote in a statement.

Chaviano was president of the Cuban National Council for Civil Rights when he was arrested in May 1994. He was sentenced behind closed doors by a military court about a year later for allegedly revealing state secrets while documenting the cases of rafters who disappeared or died trying to leave Cuba. Chaviano denied revealing state secrets, and his supporters said no defense evidence was presented during the trial.

As Chaviano's release was being announced, a group of other top dissidents told international journalists at the Havana residence of U.S. Interests Section head Michael Parmly that repression continues for critics of the communist government, even though the number of political prisoners has dipped in recent years.

There has been a slight drop in the number of people held in Cuban prisons in the past year for disagreeing with the government. But the levels of harassment have not changed. Dissidents are still treated mercilessly by the government. But who in San Francisco will do an interpretive dance to praise the release of Francisco Chaviano González?

Remember Francisco Chaviano González when you hear the hysterical pronouncements of the left about America, won't you?

NASA Finds Damage To Endeavour

It may not be serious, they still need to determine the extent. But a three inch square area of the underside of space shuttle Endeavour appears to have been damaged.

The gouge — about 3 inches square — was spotted in zoom-in photography taken by the space station crew shortly before Endeavour delivered teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan and her six crewmates to the orbiting outpost.

"What does this mean? I don't know at this point," said John Shannon, chairman of the mission management team. If the gouge is deep enough, the shuttle astronauts may have to patch it during a spacewalk, he said.

On Sunday, the astronauts will inspect the area, using Endeavour's 100-foot robot arm and extension beam. Lasers on the end of the beam will gauge the exact size and depth of the gouge, Shannon said, and then engineering analyses will determine whether the damage is severe enough to warrant repairs.

The gouge — white against the black tiles on the underside of Endeavour — is several feet from the starboard main landing gear door. It appears to be the result of ice, although engineers are not positive; the damage could have been caused by a piece of foam insulation that came off the external fuel tank.

Radar images show a white spray or streak coming off Endeavour 58 seconds after liftoff. Engineers theorize that if the debris was ice, it pierced the tile and then broke up, scraping the area downwind. Pictures from Friday's photo inspection show downwind scrapes.

Even though it was an extremely hot day in Florida, the fuel tank was loaded with super-cold fuel, which could have allowed dangerously big chunks of ice to form on its surface.

Shannon said it is uncertain how big the debris was. A 1.67-pound chunk of foam led to Columbia's catastrophic re-entry in 2003.

Ice is heavier than foam, however, and would cause more damage.

In all, nine pieces of debris, mostly foam, came off the fuel tank during Wednesday evening's liftoff, and three were believed to have struck the shuttle. Shannon said further analysis of the photos from Friday's inspection could uncover more damage.

Not a real good start, then. It had been going pretty well until this point. USA Today has a picture. The NASA Shuttle website does not have anything on this as yet.

Genuine Reuters-Grade News®

The Guardian appears to be none too pleased after having been the victim of Genuine Reuters-Grade News®. It seems that Reuters illustrated their story about Russian submarines planting a flag at the North Pole with some really snazzy pictures. Why they were so snazzy that they could have come from a Hollywood movie. In fact they did come from a Hollywood movie! The 1997 James Cameron blockbuster Titanic, to be precise.

News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic.

The images were reproduced around the world - including by the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited - alongside the story of Russia planting its flag below the North Pole on Thursday last week.

But it has now emerged that the footage actually showed two Finnish-made Mir submersibles that were employed on location filming at the scene of the wreck of the RMS Titanic ship in the north Atlantic some 10 years ago.

This footage was used in sequences in James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster about the 1912 disaster.

Reuters has issued a statement:

"On August 2, 2007 in a TV story about two Russian submersibles planting a flag on the seabed under the North Pole, we used file shots of MIR submersibles as part of this story.

"Reuters mistakenly identified this file footage as originating from the Arctic, and not the North Atlantic where the footage was shot.

"This footage was taken during the search for the Titanic and copyright is held by Russian State broadcaster RTR.

"This location error was corrected as soon as it was brought to our attention. A still image of the submersibles was also taken from the footage and put out on the Reuters photo wire. The caption has been corrected."

In addition Reuters also admitted that their front line "war correspondent" stories are actually written by a retired schoolteacher in Cleveland, Ohio, that they make up figures out of thin air when they need to sex up a story and that their editorial staff all graduated from the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Clown College. (Mastering in seltzer bottle usage.) Ok, you got us, we made that last bit up. Do we qualify for a job at Reuters now?

Good Sharkkeeping Seal Of Approval

Well, the folks in Britain who were terrified by reports of a great white shark off the coast can breath easy. It was a hoax.

Doorman Kevin Keeble sparked the media feeding frenzy when he sent pictures to his local paper of a shark he photographed during a fishing trip to South Africa, jokingly claiming the photo was taken near the British surfing resort of Newquay.

"I didn't expect anyone would be daft enough to take it seriously."

Never underestimate the press, Kevin. Meanwhile, off the coast of Massachusetts, a shark seen munching on a nice, fresh seal has been confirmed to be a great white. Experts could tell because all that was left to wash up on shore were the head and the fins.

Lisa Capone, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, said that a shark specialist for the state had examined photos of the seal's carcass and interviewed witnesses and that the case "has the look of great white shark predation."

She said great whites are lone animals that travel 30 to 50 miles a day and have a slow metabolism, so that they can go several weeks or even up to a couple of months between feedings.

"It's likely far away, not going to eat again, and it was alone," she said.

A mammoth, bloodthirsty great white was featured in the movie "Jaws," which made many people think twice before going into the water. In 2004, a 1,700-pound great white made news in the state when it was trapped in a lagoon on Naushon Island off Falmouth for two weeks.

Tony LaCasse, a spokesman for the New England Aquarium, said great whites tend to stay offshore.

Large sharks are potential threats to people, he said, but "we're not part of their normal prey base. . . . We're not on their menu." The last shark-related death in New England was in 1936.

Nonetheless, experts recommend that swimmers learn to levitate out of the water if they see a great white. While we quite agree that the sight of a shark fin cutting through the water is ominous it is not even remotely as frightening as some other things. For example, savage Swedish beavers. (And if you have no idea what that is all about, see this post.)

Well, Thank Heavens That’s Cleared Up

A former British spy, who was jailed after "blowing the whistle" on wrongdoing in the British intelligence services has a new gig. Oh, David Shayler has tried his hand at a number of things since he left MI5 in 1996. He's tried his hand at writing novels, being a conspiracy theorist about the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and even a brief flirtation with politics. But finally, he's found his true niche in life.

He's the new Messiah.

David Shayler told British cable channel More4 News that he had visited a psychic who he believes channelled the spirit of Mary Magdalene and anointed him as the Messiah.

"Suddenly my whole life made sense," the 41-year-old former officer with Britain's domestic intelligence service MI5 said in an interview broadcast Thursday evening.

"I felt a sense of peace, I suddenly realised why it had been how it had, why I seem to get such a strange deal from the universe, when I seem to be trying to tell the truth about everything."

Shayler told the programme his new powers included the ability to change the weather and that he had helped prevent the attempted car bombings in London and Glasgow in June through meditation.

He also claimed that his favourite football team, English Premiership side Middlesbrough, won a place in the 2006 UEFA cup final against Spanish side Seville because he had "channelled the light". Boro lost.

Shayler was released from prison in in 2002 after serving seven weeks for breaching Britain's Official Secrets Act.

He left MI5 in 1996 and subsequently made a number of allegations, including that Britain's overseas intelligence service, MI6, plotted to assassinate the Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi.

We look forward to Shayler's revelations on new truther evidence. This will ad soooo much credibility to that group. This announcement is not going to sit well with former BBC sports announcer David Icke who proclaimed himself the "son of God" a while ago. Icke has a charming theory that the world is actually controlled by shapeshifting reptiles… . 'l. ..  l l  Oh, sorry, got one of my talons caught on the keyboard.

Knives Out

The Boston Globe - proudly in the tank for Hillary! Clinton - rips into Barack Obama. They uncover just how much support from lobbyists and PACs he has received during his entire political career. Not just his presidential campaign. This would be political payback for Obama's recent attacks on Hillary! for taking money from lobbyists, of course.

"The people in this stadium need to know who we're going to fight for," Obama said at Soldier Field. "The reason that I'm running for president is because of you, not because of folks who are writing big checks, and that's a clear message that has to be sent, I think, by every candidate."

But behind Obama's campaign rhetoric about taking on special interests lies a more complicated truth. A Globe review of Obama's campaign finance records shows that he collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from lobbyists and PACs as a state legislator in Illinois, a US senator, and a presidential aspirant.

In Obama's eight years in the Illinois Senate, from 1996 to 2004, almost two-thirds of the money he raised for his campaigns — $296,000 of $461,000 — came from PACs, corporate contributions, or unions, according to Illinois Board of Elections records. He tapped financial services firms, real estate developers, healthcare providers, oil companies, and many other corporate interests, the records show.

Obama's US Senate campaign committee, starting with his successful run in 2004, has collected $128,000 from lobbyists and $1.3 million from PACs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit organization that tracks money in politics. His $1.3 million from PACs represents 8 percent of what he has raised overall. Clinton's Senate committee, by comparison, has raised $3 million from PACs, 4 percent of her total amount raised, the group said.

Obama's poll numbers are beginning to slip rather badly. This won't help. The media is starting to turn on him.

TNR In Trouble

The New Republic has a real problem on its hands. The MSM is not letting the "Scott Thomas" Beauchamp story die quietly. There are reports on the wire services and in national publications. And the general form of the narrative is that Beauchamp is a fabulist and that TNR was, again, taken to the cleaners by a guy with literary ambitions. Charles Krauthammer weighs in today using words like a scalpel to dissect Beauchamp and his enablers at TNR.

Amid these conflicting claims, one issue is not in dispute. When the New Republic did its initial investigation, it admitted that Beauchamp had erred on one "significant detail." The disfigured-woman incident happened not in Iraq, but in Kuwait.

That means it happened before Beauchamp arrived in Iraq. But the whole point of that story was to demonstrate how the war had turned an otherwise sensitive soul into a monster. Indeed, in the precious, highly self-conscious literary style of an aspiring writer trying out for a New Yorker gig, Beauchamp follows the terrible tale of his cruelty to the disfigured woman by asking, "Am I a monster?" And answering with satisfaction that the very fact that he could ask this question after (the reader has been led to believe) having been so hardened and brutalized by war shows that there is a kernel of humanity left in him.

But, oh, how much was lost. In the past, you see, he was a sensitive soul with "compassion for those with disabilities." In a particularly treacly passage, he tells us that he once worked in a summer camp with disabled children and in college helped a colleague with cerebral palsy. Then this delicate compassionate youth is transformed into an unfeeling animal by war.

Except that it is now revealed that the mess-hall incident happened before he even got to the war. On which point, the whole story — and the whole morality tale it was meant to suggest — collapses.

And it makes the rest of the narrative banal and uninteresting. It's the story of a disgusting human being, a mocker of the disfigured, who then goes to Iraq and, as such human beings are wont to do, finds the company of other such human beings who kill dogs for sport, wear the bones of dead children on their heads and find similar amusement in mocking the disfigured.

Note also that the left is actually very quiet about this story. I have not seen any of the majors on the left even really address this. Could that be because Kos has reason to dislike TNR? Townhouse, anyone?

The Cliff On The Left

Kimberley Strassel from the Opinion Journal interviewed Harold Ford, Jr, former Senate candidate and current chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. Ford was unusually blunt in his assessment of his party's chances in the 2008 if candidates keep heading left instead of pulling toward the center. Those heading left are heading for a cliff.

Today, the DLC is again battling for the souls of those Democrats who would occupy the White House, urging them toward a centrist agenda that will seek to convince the broad middle that Democrats can be trusted on national security, values and fiscal responsibility. Mr. Ford's colleague, DLC founder Al From, thinks the stakes are giant, and that the public's unease over the war, health care and the economy has created the "first time in modern political history" that his party has the opportunity to "build an enduring majority in the progressive center."

That is, if his party doesn't blow it. And Mr. From's problem is that a whole lot of folks still think him a heretic, and this time they're louder, ruder and more coordinated. The far left has found something to unify it–hatred of George W. Bush. Technology has given it the means to organize; what the right found in talk radio, liberals have found in the "netroots" Internet, from MoveOn.org to Daily Kos. Its activism has of late overshadowed groups like the DLC, which still believe in such creaky notions as ideas. Even Mr. Ford, who took over the DLC chairmanship in January, is willing to admit his outfit has been eclipsed: "The DLC and other moderate groups have struggled a bit to find not only our voice, but a way to be heard."

Making it harder is that this newly energized left is directing inordinate firepower on the DLC itself, in a crazed, purist drive to purge any group that would exert a moderating influence on the Democratic Party. New Republic scribe Noam Scheiber let loose a few weeks back in a New York Times hit piece, calling the DLC "radioactive" and "quaint," gloating that its "fading influence was good news for the entire party," and arguing that it should just get lost. Markos Moulitsas, chief flogger-blogger on the Daily Kos, this week slammed the DLC as a group that wants to "blur distinctions with the GOP," and reveling that Democrats had won in 2006 because liberals like himself had "forced" Americans to pick sides.

The leftward journey of Congress under Reid and Pelosi have driven the legislative body to an all-time low in opinion polls. That should be a clear warning - but the left does not see it. Despite the evidence that DLC-type candidates are what made the difference in 2006, the left claims credit and is out to destroy the centrist faction of the party. Ford's assessment of the chances for the party if it does not swerve back to the center are grim.

"The reality is, without the DLC, and without candidates who subscribe to our platform, Democrats wouldn't be in the majority today. If we abandon that group, we will lose the majority and we will lose the White House," says Mr. Ford.

Mr. Ford will now be targeted by the left even more than he already was. Wait for it.

Bad News For The Media: They’re On To You

Pew Research finds that the majority of Americans believe the media is biased. Among internet users, that number skyrockets. In other words, the camouflage is getting a bit tatty over at the New York Times, et al.

The American public continues to fault news organizations for a number of perceived failures, with solid majorities criticizing them for political bias, inaccuracy and failing to acknowledge mistakes. But some of the harshest indictments of the press now come from the growing segment that relies on the internet as its main source for national and international news.

The internet news audience – roughly a quarter of all Americans – tends to be younger and better educated than the public as a whole. People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance. As many as 38% of those who rely mostly on the internet for news say they have an unfavorable opinion of cable news networks such as CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, compared with 25% of the public overall, and just 17% of television news viewers.

The internet news audience is particularly likely to criticize news organizations for their lack of empathy, their failure to "stand up for America," and political bias. Roughly two-thirds (68%) of those who get most of their news from the internet say that news organizations do not care about the people they report on, and 53% believe that news organizations are too critical of America. By comparison, smaller percentages of the general public fault the press for not caring about people they report on (53%), and being too critical of America (43%).

The blogosphere can now look forward to another string of articles from the MSM explaining how the blogs are all screwed up and only the MSM can rightly interpret the news. That's the usual reaction.