Shakespeare Code Broken

Despite the efforts of the monkey staff in the back room here at the Crabitat, we have been unable to crack the Shakespeare Code. Oh, they produce some interesting stuff, but most of it resembles either television commercials or political speeches. (Ok, so there is a bit of redundancy in that statement.) Now comes word that Cheeta will be writing his memoirs. We're devastated.

He is a true Hollywood star, plucked from obscurity to play a leading role in a series of hit films before overcoming an addiction to alcohol and cigars.

Now, Cheeta the Chimp who is 75 and is listed in the Guinness World Records as the oldest living non-human primate, is to publish his memoirs.

The chimpanzee, who lives in California and whose real name is Jiggs, has been approached by the publisher Fourth Estate.

Cheeta starred in 12 Tarzan movies and has a literary agent. Oh great. Now the back room staff will be demanding agents, too. And more bananas. There goes the budget.

UPDATE: Oh, NO! They want to direct.

Open War?

This is interesting. Apparently, IBM has declared war on Microsoft and is producing software that will run on Linux - and is about to release another version of that software to run on Ubuntu Linux. IBM's Symphony office suite software is - get this - free.

IBM has increased support for Linux with the introduction of versions of its Lotus Notes collaboration suite and Symphony productivity tools built to run on the open source OS — and it's hoping the effort will help unseat Microsoft as the king of desktop software.
 
The company this week said it plans to ship what it calls its "Open Collaboration Client," made up of Lotus Notes 8 and Symphony, for Canonical's popular Ubuntu Linux distribution.

Lotus Notes 8 includes e-mail, calendaring, and contact management modules, while Symphony — available as a free download — features word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications build on the open source OpenOffice.org standard.

IBM also said this week that it's working with Red Hat to develop a version of the Open Collaboration Client for small and midsize businesses, which are increasingly a focus for IBM.

Under the plan, Red Hat will offer to its customers a version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform packaged with Lotus Notes, Symphony, and IBM's Domino messaging server.

Red Hat also will offer technical services to help resellers implement the package for customers.

IBM last year said it would offer versions of Lotus Notes and Symphony for Novell's SUSE Enterprise Linux distribution.

By porting key software to Linux, IBM is looking to give businesses one less reason to buy products from rival Microsoft — which IBM said offers "a proprietary desktop model."

I've just downloaded a copy of Symphony and am installing it on a backup computer to see what it does. Warning to IBM, though. The registration process is onerous compared to the free - and easily usable - OpenOffice product. You might want to rethink that.

More Bad News For Clinton

This is not good news for Clinton at all, I suspect. Hotline On Call reports:

SC primary voters overwhelmingly ranked the economy as the top issue, and close to 90% of all primary voters view the economy as not good or poor;
74% ready for a woman president;
77% ready to elect a black president .

* AP early exit poll results:

African-Americans Obama 81%, Clinton 17%, Edwards 1%
African-American women Obama 82%, Clinton 17%, Edwards 0%
Whites Edwards 39%, Clinton 36%, Obama 24%
Edwards winning white men, Clinton white women.

But even with the women's vote, Clinton polled worse than Edwards among whites. Think about that for a moment. Now think about this ugly gem that even the left is unhappy about.

This time Bill may have overplayed the hand, once and for all. I have been thinking that Hillary would somehow make it through the primaries and still secure the nomination - but only by inflicting real and lasting damage on the party to do so. Right now, these poll numbers indicate that Clinton might be in worse shape than I thought.

Obama Wins, Clinton Loses

Bill Clinton, that is. CNN is reporting that Bill Clinton's negative campaigning and harsh - completely Clintonian - attacks on Obama backfired rather badly.

(CNN) — Bill Clinton's aggressive campaigning in South Carolina in the days leading up to the state's primary may have had a net negative effect among South Carolina’s Democratic primary voters, CNN exit polls indicate.

Roughly 6 in 10 South Carolina Democratic primary voters said Bill Clinton's campaigning was important in how they ultimately decided to vote, and of those voters, 48 percent went for Barack Obama while only 37 percent went for Hillary Clinton. Fourteen percent of those voters voted for John Edwards

Meanwhile, the exit polls also indicate Obama easily beat Clinton among those voters who decided in the last three days — when news reports heavily covered the former president's heightened criticisms of Obama. Twenty percent of South Carolina Democrats made their decision in the last three days and 51 percent of them chose Obama, while only 21 percent picked Clinton.

That is a really, really bad backfire, folks. CNN is also predicting what could best be described as a landslide win for Obama:

With 67 percent of precincts reporting, Obama had 54 percent of the vote. Clinton was second with 27 percent, followed by Edwards, with 19 percent.

Obama beat Clinton and Edwards combined, for heaven's sake. Clinton was smashed in South Carolina. This was a decisive loss.

Well, At Last We Know

The secret is finally out there for all the world to see. The great mystery of what a Scotsman wears under his kilt has been revealed.

Who knew it was a hot air balloon?

There's no secret about what this particular Scotsman has under his kilt.

Like me, around 20,000 people are staring straight up it to discover nothing more than a lot of hot air.

The sound of amplified bagpipes is ringing round the valley and when there is finally sufficient heat beneath these vast folds of tartan, this giant piper slowly drifts off towards Mont Blanc.

It's an extraordinary sight - a 156ft flying Scotsman floating over the cuckoo-clock chalets, snow-caked slopes and rocky peaks of Switzerland. But the view is even more impressive from where I'm standing. Because I happen to be in his sporran.

This is not exactly a conventional, purse-shaped sporran, but a wicker basket containing five people plus four tanks of propane which will heat up the air to keep us aloft.

From here, I see the spectators shrinking into ants as we are wafted away from the Swiss village of Chateau d'Oex and down the valley.

We pass over the simple graveyard where a much-loved former resident, David Niven, is buried. The pretty little mountain train chuff- chuffs its way up the hill in the opposite direction. The edge of the village gives way to farmland and the sunlit Alpine landscape is pure Heidimeets-Toblerone.

An awesome silence is broken only by the occasional roar from the propane tanks as the skipper, Muir Moffat, fires another burst of hot air into the piper's bowels. This thing would put the burn into any Burns Night party.

Now 69, Muir took up ballooning at the age of 48 when injuries forced him to give up rugby. "I was hating weekends until I had my first ride in a balloon and that was it," says the retired Unipart executive.

"And being 110 per cent Scottish, I thought it would be fun to have a balloon like this. It's meant to look like me. What do you think?"

Erm, what we think here at the Crabitat is that the Flying Scotsman looks like a character from The Simpsons. Or maybe a bad case of the DTs.

24/7 Looney Tunes

Mark Steyn:

As Martin Niemoller famously said, first they came for Piglet, and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character and, if I was, I'm more of an Eeyore. So then they came for the Three Little Pigs, and Babe, and by the time I realized my country had turned into a 24/7 Looney Tunes it was too late, because there was no Porky Pig to stammer "Th-th-th-that's all, folks!" and bring the nightmare to an end.

Steyn's weekly column focuses on the excessive deference Britain is showing toward Islam. It is not enough to be considerate of others. Instead the British government is all but genuflecting. Take renaming terrorism conducted by people who happen to espouse Muslim beliefs. They have renamed that as "anti-Islamic activity."

My favorite headline of the year so far comes from the Daily Mail in Britain:

"Government Renames Islamic Terrorism As anti-Islamic Activity' To Woo Muslims."

Her Majesty's government is not alone in feeling it's not always helpful to link Islam and the, ah, various unpleasantnesses with suicide bombers and whatnot. Even in his cowboy Crusader heyday, President Bush liked to cool down the crowd with a lot of religion-of-peace stuff. But the British have now decided that kind of mealy-mouthed "respect" is no longer sufficient.

So, henceforth, any terrorism perpetrated by persons of an Islamic persuasion will be designated "anti-Islamic activity." Britain's Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, unveiled the new brand name in a speech a few days ago. "There is nothing Islamic about the wish to terrorize, nothing Islamic about plotting murder, pain and grief," she told her audience. "Indeed, if anything, these actions are anti-Islamic."

Well, yes, one sort of sees what she means. Killing thousands of people in Manhattan skyscrapers in the name of Islam does, among a certain narrow-minded type of person, give Islam a bad name, and thus could be said to be "anti-Islamic" – in the same way that the Luftwaffe raining down death and destruction on Londoners during the Blitz was an "anti-German activity."

That last sentence pretty well wraps it up. It is a twisted sort of logic that beggars belief. Yet the British are doing it more and more often and rapidly eroding their own values in a misguided effort to avoid offending someone. Unfortunately, as Steyn points out, many of those the Brits appear to be afraid of offending are openly bragging that they fully intend to conquer Britain. And the West. Go read it all.

Surprise!

A patient in a hospital in Finland found the food was not to his liking. Nobody likes furry Brussels sprouts.

HELSINKI (Reuters) - A hospital patient in Finland found a mouse head among the steamed vegetables on his plate.
 
"Understandably, he lost his appetite," said Sakari Kela, chief administrator at the Northern Karelia Central Hospital.

The health of the patient in Joensuu, eastern Finland, had not been compromised by the dead rodent, Kela said on Saturday.

The severed head most likely originated in a bag of Belgian vegetables.

The hospital administrator immediately added a charge for extra protein to the patient's bill. Ok, we made that up. But nobody has a clue where in Europe the rest of the rodent might be.  Bon Appétit, Europe!

A Sense Of Betrayal

Jonathan Chait admits to being sick of Bill and Hillary Clinton. The sense of betrayal in his column is quite obvious.

I crossed the Clinton Rubicon a couple of weeks ago when, in the course of introducing Hillary, Clinton supporter and Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson invoked Obama's youthful drug use. This was disgusting on its own terms, but worse still if you know anything about Johnson. I do — I once wrote a long profile of him. He has a sleazy habit of appropriating the logic of civil rights for his own financial gain. He also has a habit of aiding conservative crusades to eliminate the estate tax and privatize Social Security by falsely claiming they redistribute wealth from African Americans to whites. The episode reminded me of the Clintons' habit of surrounding themselves with the most egregious characters: Dick Morris, Marc Rich and so on.

The Clinton campaign is trying to make it seem as if the complaint is about negativity, and it is pointing out that Obama has criticized Hillary as well. That's what politicians are supposed to do when they compete for votes. But criticism isn't the same thing as lying and sleaze-mongering.

Am I starting to sound like a Clinton hater? It's a scary thought. Of course, to conservatives, it's a delicious thought. The Wall Street Journal published a gloating editorial noting that liberals had suddenly learned "what everyone else already knows about the Clintons." (By "everyone," it means Republicans.)

You can read the rest. Chait sill believes some of the stuff the Clintons injected into politics in this country - like the 'vast right wing conspiracy' meme. But he appears to have woken up to the Clintons and isn't happy with them at all. He points out that many of the party faithful would still vote for her if she wins - which is exactly what the Clintons are betting on. But he makes an interesting observation:

If Hillary wins the nomination, most of us will probably vote for her because the alternative is likely to be worse. But what happens if she's embroiled in another scandal? Will liberals rally behind her, or will they remember the Democratic primary?

The Clintons and scandal are riveted tightly together at the wrists and ankles. That one will arise is practically a foregone conclusion. I'll only point out again something that a number of my commenters disagree with. The behavior of the Clintons stands a chance of fracturing the party and could potentially keep some people away from the polls. Their behavior also stands to disgust a number of moderate and non-party voters.

When a candidate has the high negatives of Hillary Clinton, she cannot afford to bleed off very many votes before the damage is too great. It would not take the loss of very many votes to cause her to lose.

Inadvertent Slip

AFP has a dramatic, sob-story article about how Arizona's anti-illegal immigration law is beginning to cause what they dub 'Hispanic Panic.' It seems employers are firing illegals, many of whom are fleeing the state, either back to Mexico or to other states. But they apparently slipped in telling this narrative and left something in that bears paying attention to.

PHOENIX, Arizona (AFP) - One month after Arizona introduced a law cracking down on businesses which employ illegal immigrants, Latino workers are fleeing the state and companies are laying off employees in droves, officials and activists say.
 
Arizona has become one of the frontlines of the US immigration debate and broke new ground on January 1 with a law that threatens to put of business companies which knowingly hire undocumented workers.

The effects of the law have been immediate, according to businessmen, workers and rights activists who spoke to AFP, with companies driving up wages to attract labor while being forced to part company with prized employees.

Even though a federal judge ruled last week that there will be no prosecutions under the law until March, it has done little to prevent a phenomenon being dubbed "Hispanic Panic."

"There's a lot of fear and some people are leaving," said Salvador Reza, an immigrant-rights activist who runs a day labor center in Phoenix.

"The fear is not only at the worker level, it's at the employer level. I've never seen that before in my life."

Workers are going back to Mexico or to other states, Reza said. He predicted small businesses forced to lay off skilled employees like welders will now pay them in cash, creating a black economy.

"The underground economy is going to take hold now, and there will be less money for the state," Reza said.

Ten men were laid off at Ironco, a steel fabrication company in Phoenix which builds large-scale construction projects.

"We had to let them go," president Sheridan Bailey said. "Unfortunately some of these people were our best workers. This is terribly tragic."

Two out of three men who apply at Ironco, a construction firm that specialises in buildings and parking garages made with heavy steel, are Hispanic or foreign-born Hispanic, the company said.

Ironco has raised steel fitters' wages 30 percent from a year ago, according to Bailey. "We've raised wages, competing for a diminishing supply (of workers)," he said. "WeÂ?ve been on a campaign of quality improvement, training, scouring the waterfront, so to speak, for American vets, ex-offenders trying to find their way back into society."

Catch that? Wages have risen 30% for legal workers. They have been trying to hire people who have been forced to the margins of society due to a flood of cheap, illegal workers. And they are paying much better wages in order to do so. High fence, wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who play by the rules. And higher real wages for those who do.

I don't think they meant to tell that in their narrative.