Blue Crab Boulevard

…but things, later on, didn't turn out that way." A rant from Rod Liddle in The Daily Mail about 1968 and what it meant - and, unfortunately - still means 40 years on. 

Britain experienced some pretty bleak years in the last century, years you'd want to forget. 1940, for example, when - on the brink of defeat - we stood alone against Hitler.

Or 1926, the year of the General Strike. But it's difficult to imagine a year more ludicrous, or more damaging to the country, in the long term, than 1968.

A year chock full of deluded teenagers, of fatuous slogans, of bombs and sit-ins and bad music and worse films.

A year when everything the country believed in was turned on its head by extremely ill-kempt people who perhaps went a long time between baths. And even longer between shaves. People we should, by rights, have entirely ignored, or just smiled at indulgently.

A year of drugs, violence, "free sex" and the lionising of congenital idiots like the Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing, the German social theorist Jurgen Habermas and a multitude of self- styled freedom fighters wearing frankly embarrassing headgear.

If you are looking for a year when things first started to go bad, when the lunatics at last got their grubby paws on the controls of the asylum, 1968 is it.

The remarkable thing is that the half-baked and narcissistic ideologies of that dismal 12 months are still with us, in our schools, in our law courts, in our social services; they have permeated every facet of our lives.

A disrespect for authority, contempt for the family unit, multiculturalism, "yoof culcha" and an emphasis upon rights rather than responsibilities.

A permissiveness and indulgence shown towards every anti-social phenomenon from the use of illegal narcotics to single mothers and suicide bombers ("We really need to understand them better") - all that stuff was forged in the rather tepid British spring and summer of 1968.

It was not just Britain, of course. It was America and pretty much all of the West. We are still feeling those tendrils of Marxism, progressivism and half-baked liberationalism wrapped around us today. Go read the entire venting of Liddle's spleen to get the full flavor of the venom he feels toward that year that too many yearn for.

The estate of J.R.R. Tolkien has just sued New Line Cinema over royalties for the hugely successful Lord of the Rings movies. Or rather, the lack thereof. The estate - a charitable trust - has never received a penny from New Line other than a pittance of an up-front payment.

LOS ANGELES - The estate of "Lord of the Rings" creator J.R.R. Tolkien is suing the film studio that released the trilogy based on his books, claiming the company hasn't paid it a penny from the estimated $6 billion the films have grossed worldwide.

The suit, filed Monday, claims New Line was required to pay 7.5 percent of gross receipts to Tolkien's estate and other plaintiffs, who contend they only received an upfront payment of $62,500 for the three movies before production began.

The writer's estate, a British charity dubbed The Tolkien Trust, and original "Lord of the Rings" publisher HarperCollins filed the lawsuit against New Line Cinema in Los Angeles Superior Court. If successful, it could block the long-awaited prequel to the films.

Robert Pini, a spokesman for Time Warner Inc.'s New Line, declined to comment.

The films — 2001's "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," 2002's "The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers," and 2003's "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" — have reaped nearly $6 billion combined worldwide, according to the complaint.

The suit seeks some $150 million in compensatory damages as well as punitve damages. What is going to be a bigger problem for New Line is that the estate is also seeking to bar New Line from making any other films based on Tolkien's work. That would kill the plans for The Hobbit. New line has been sued repeatedly over this now:

In 2004, Zaentz sued New Line, claiming the studio cheated him out of $20 million in royalties from the film trilogy, which he optioned to New Line for a percentage of the movies' profits.

He and the film studio reached an out-of-court settlement a year later.

Jackson's production company also tangled with New Line in 2005 over profits from the films. A lawsuit was settled last year.

They appear to have a bad hobbit on this sort of thing.

It appears that there is a major disruption in the Blackberry service that is hitting across all wireless carriers. The Wireless services say the problem is not theirs, but with Blackberry - but nobody at the company is answering the media inquiries about the problem.

 NEW YORK - A major service outage afflicted users of the popular, addictive BlackBerry smart phones across the United States and Canada on Monday, wireless carriers said.

Officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.

It was not immediately clear how many BlackBerry subscribers had problems, as some users reported being able to access their service normally Monday afternoon.

The BlackBerry service, which lets users check e-mail and access other data services on their handheld devices, has become a lifeline for many business executives and is increasingly popular among consumers with models like the BlackBerry Pearl.

There was no word what caused the outage or when service would be restored.

RIM officials did not return phone calls.

My sister - who is a huge technophobe - became, ironically, a Crackberry fiend a few years back. I should call her and see how she's weathering the forced cold turkey. Nah, probably best not to push her buttons when she can't retaliate.

A ruthless gang of chickens invaded a high school in Philadelphia earlier today, leaving biological graffiti in their wake.

PHILADELPHIA - Monday mornings are hard enough. Imagine finding 50 chickens running loose in your high school.

Workers arriving about 5:30 a.m. to open Northeast High School in Philadelphia found dozens of hens and roosters wandering around the hallways. The birds were apparently brought to the school sometime over the weekend, said school district spokesman Fernando Gallard.

"We don't know where the chickens came from or who they belong to," Gallard said. "I'm pretty sure there is a very upset poultry farmer somewhere who wants them back."

The floors were covered with droppings and chicken feed. Most of the school's 3,600 students were sent home for the day because the school required extensive cleanup, he said.

Obviously, this is connected with the animal uprising. Unless it's merely a case of the chickens coming home to roost.

The New York Times reports that local governments in many areas are running critically short of a vital resource needed to keep the roads open.

They're running out of salt.

Local governments in New England and in the Midwest are running critically low on road salt, the result of a stream of winter weather that has hit the regions in recent months.

“We are, for all practical purposes, out of salt,” said Bruce Hoar, director of public works in South Burlington, Vt., adding that other towns in the area face the same problem.

With so many municipalities in need of salt, suppliers cannot ship it out quickly enough. Public works departments are left waiting for days or weeks to receive their orders.

“It’s supply and demand,” said Richard L. Hanneman, president of the Salt Institute, a nonprofit trade association. “We’re scrambling. We haven’t heard of any agency that hasn’t been able to keep the roads open or safe, but there’s a lot of anxiety.”

Some cities, towns and counties are turning to smaller suppliers, which are charging more.

Christine Daleiden, the highway accounting manager in Fond du Lac County, Wis., said the county, which has used up almost all of its salt, was buying more from a supplier in Minnesota at a price 70 percent higher than the $39.29 per ton the county typically paid.

Ms. Daleiden said that was the cheapest price she could find.

“As far as our budget, it’s going to hurt us,” she said.

The county used 3,357 tons of salt in December, compared with 464 tons in December 2006, Ms. Daleiden said. It is now limiting salt use to hills, curves and intersections. The county is putting sand on roads, but some say it is less effective than salt.

Bryan Osborne, the director of public works in Colchester, Vt., is going to Canada to get extra salt for the town while waiting on a delayed shipment from his normal supplier, which gets salt from western New York. When a storm dumped 14 inches of snow on Colchester last week, Mr. Osborne’s crews were spreading sand rather than salt on the roads.

Back in the early 1980s, one of my duties was to call the Retsof salt mine to bring in large shipments of salt for the utility I worked for. The salt was used mainly for water treatment, although some was also used on the drives and walkways in winter. I remember there was one winter when it became very difficult to get a shipment due to heavy snow and high demand. (The Retsof mine is the one that collapsed back in the mid 1990s.) 

It has been a brutal winter in the Midwest, that's for sure. It is currently 0°  F outside my door with a nasty wind blowing. The bad salt situation indicates that it has been hard all over the northern regions of the nation.

There is mayhem brewing between Ohio and Kentucky. The Kentucky House of Representatives has passed a resolution as has the Ohio House. There are threats of raiding parties and of armed resistance.

All because of a rock.

An eight-ton rock rested for generations at the bottom of the Ohio River, minding its own business as time and currents passed. It favored neither Ohio to the north nor Kentucky to the south. It just — was.

Occasionally, when water levels dropped, the boulder would break the surface long enough to receive the chiseled tattoos of mildly daring people seeking remembrance. But it stopped playing peek-a-boo nearly a century ago, leaving only ephemera in its wake, including a sepia photograph of a well-dressed woman in a frilly hat, standing in the middle of the Ohio, on this rock.

Now, because of one man’s obsessive good intention, the fabled rock sits on old tires in the municipal garage of this river city, awaiting the outcome of a border dispute that goes something like this:

Some Ohioans say the rock is an important piece of Portsmouth history and should be put on display. Some Kentuckians say the rock is an important piece of Kentucky, period, and should be returned. And some in both states say: I’ve been distracted by war, recession and a presidential campaign, so forgive me. But are we fighting over a rock?

Last month the Kentucky House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding the rock’s return to its watery bed, with one of its members suggesting that a raiding party to Portsmouth might be in order. Not to be outdone, the Ohio House of Representatives is considering a resolution that asserts the rock’s significance to Ohio, and its speaker has said he is ready to guard the boulder with his muzzle-loading shotgun.

All this has stunned Steve Shaffer, 51, the earnest local historian who rediscovered the rock, raised the rock and anticipated a more enthusiastic celebration of the rock. But at least the rock is happy, he said. “It loves to be the center of controversy.” 

This is one of those silly things that politicians get sidetracked on instead of doing anything useful. 

Theodore B. Olson the former solicitor general of the United States who represented George W. Bush in front of the Supreme Court in a rather famous case, indulges in a little schadenfreude this morning.

Imagine that as the convention approaches, Sen. Clinton is leading in the popular vote, but Sen. Obama has the delegate lead. Surely no one familiar with her history would doubt that her take-no-prisoners campaign team would do whatever it took to capture the nomination, including all manner of challenges to Obama delegates and tidal waves of litigation.
[Barack Obama]

Indeed, it has already been reported that Sen. Clinton will demand that the convention seat delegates from Michigan and Florida, two states whose delegates have been disqualified by the party for holding January primaries in defiance of party rules. The candidates agreed not to campaign in those states. But Sen. Clinton opted to keep her name on the Michigan primary ballot, and staged a primary-day victory visit to Florida, winning both of those unsanctioned primaries. Her campaign is arguing that the delegates she won in each state be recognized despite party rules and notwithstanding her commitment not to compete in those primaries. Of course. "Count every vote."

As the convention nears, with Sen. Clinton trailing slightly in the delegate count, the next step might well be a suit in the Florida courts challenging her party's refusal to seat Florida's delegation at the convention. And the Florida courts, as they did twice in 2000, might find some ostensible legal basis for overturning the pre-election rules and order the party to recognize the Clinton Florida delegates. That might tip the balance to Sen. Clinton.

We all know full well what could happen next. The array of battle-tested Democratic lawyers who fought for recounts, changes in ballot counting procedures, and even re-votes in Florida courts and the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000 would separate into two camps. Half of them would be relying on the suddenly-respectable Supreme Court Bush v. Gore decision that overturned the Florida courts' post-hoc election rules changes. The other half would be preaching a new-found respect for "federalism" and demanding that the high court leave the Florida court decisions alone.

Would the U.S. Supreme Court even take the case after having been excoriated for years by liberals for daring to restore order in the Florida vote-counting in 2000? And, would Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, the dissenters in Bush v. Gore, feel as strongly about not intervening if Sen. Obama was fighting against an effort to change a presidential election by changing the rules after the fact? Will there be a brief filed by Floridians who didn't vote in their state's primary because the party had decided, and the candidates had agreed, that the results wouldn't count?

Will it happen? Well, it could. Certain factions within the Democratic party are already openly threatening to shatter the party if the superdelegates decide the nomination the "wrong" way. The problem is that who defines what is wrong is at issue. This could get very ugly. But Olson has offered to let Obama borrow the legal briefs he used successfully in that earlier case, should it come to that.

He's really having a lot of fun with this, go read the whole thing. 

Jackson Diehl at the Washington Post wonders if (T)Hugo Chavez is beginning to unravel. Looking at the increasingly erratic behavior of the would-be dictator, he suspects that to be the case. But he also points out that the opposition in Venezuela is becoming more mature and hopes to beat Chavez legitimately at the polls. They do not want Chavez to collapse or the country to suffer a coup.

Is Hugo Chávez crashing?

It's hard to believe that a strongman who commands more than $40 billion in annual petroleum revenue, who has been granted the right to rule by decree by a rubber-stamp parliament, who controls his country's courts and television media, and who has recently spent billions on new weapons for his army could have much to worry about. Yet as Venezuela's president held a parade to celebrate the 16th anniversary of his unsuccessful military coup against a former democratic government last week, his own nine-year-old administration was struggling to pull out of a tailspin.

The trouble began in early December when Venezuelan voters rejected a new constitution that would have turned Venezuela into a socialist state along the lines of the Cuban model and made Chávez its de facto president-for-life. The self-styled "Bolivarian revolutionary" accepted the democratic verdict, according to multiple Venezuelan accounts, only after the country's military commanders told him they would not support him if the announcement of a fraudulent result touched off a popular rebellion.

Since then an increasingly erratic Chávez has dug his political hole steadily deeper. He shocked both Venezuelans and leftists across Latin America by publicly embracing the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a onetime Marxist guerrilla group that long ago morphed into a syndicate of kidnappers and drug traffickers. Last week hundreds of thousands of people from Bogota and Caracas to Madrid and Tokyo responded with anti-FARC marches. Chávez then struck a bellicose posture toward Colombia's democratic government — which only served to generate broad international sympathy for Colombia's conservative president, Álvaro Uribe, while once again provoking jitters among Venezuelan military commanders.

Venezuelans not worrying about war are increasingly obsessed with the remarkable result of Chávez's disastrous economic policies: worsening shortages of consumer goods and soaring prices, a combination previously seen only in such benighted places as Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Almost every day, newspapers report another addition to the items missing from store shelves: from milk, bread, sugar, chicken, eggs, rice and cheese to auto parts and over-the-counter drugs. A black market thrives; food is smuggled across the border to Colombia, while cocaine in increasing quantities is trafficked back to Venezuela. Chávez recently raised the price of milk 37 percent, contributing to an inflation rate that hit 22 percent in 2007 and 3.4 percent in just the month of January. But he also threatened to seize private banks, farms, supermarkets and food distributors, thereby ensuring that the investments needed to end the shortages will not take place. 

Chavez is increasingly belligerent toward Colombia and has now threatened to cut off oil to the US. He seems intent on starting something, possibly as a way to preserve his rapidly floundering presidency. Diehl points out that the opposition is ready to contest upcoming governor elections and could well win a number of those contests. If they do, Chavez will effectively be contained and his "revolution" will be over. We can hope.

Actor Roy Scheider has died . He is probably best known for his role as the police chief in Jaws, but he did many other films and stage productions in his career. (I absolutely loved his performance in All That Jazz, a movie I haven't seen in years now.)

Roy Scheider, a stage actor with a background in the classics who became one of the leading figures in the American film renaissance of the 1970s, died on Sunday afternoon in Little Rock, Ark. He was 75 and lived in Sag Harbor, N.Y.

Mr. Scheider had suffered from multiple myeloma for several years, and died of complications from a staph infection, his wife, Brenda Seimer, said.

Mr. Scheider’s rangy figure, gaunt face and emotional openness made him particularly appealing in everyman roles, most famously as the agonized police chief of “Jaws,” Steven Spielberg’s 1975 breakthrough hit, about a New England resort town haunted by the knowledge that a killer shark is preying on the local beaches.

Rest in peace.