Blue Crab Boulevard

Being a guitar player, I have visited many guitar stores through the years. Once I even made a longish side trip on a drive to Florida to stop at Gruhn Guitars in Nashville. I'm still alive, a testament to my wife's patience. In a fair number of those stores, there is (or was) a sign declaring the store to be a Stairway to Heaven free zone. Why? Because after hearing thousands of budding rock stars fumble through the opening to that tune, most guitar store employees had heard it butchered enough. Well, there is an Irish variant of that. One bar in the US is declaring a Danny Boy free zone for St. Patrick's Day. 

"It's overplayed, it's been ranked among the 25 most depressing songs of all time, and it's more appropriate for a funeral than for a St. Patrick's Day celebration," says Shaun Clancy, who owns Foley's Pub and Restaurant, just off Fifth Avenue opposite the Empire State Building.

The 38-year-old, who started bartending when he was 12 at his father's pub in County Cavan, promises a guest free Guinness if he or she sings any other traditional Irish song at the pub's March 11 pre-St. Patrick's Day karaoke party. On other nights, guests will be rewarded with a surprise.Not everyone agrees.
Foley's is going head to head with a pub near Detroit — AJ's Cafe in Ferndale, Mich. — which is staging a "Danny Boy" marathon on St. Patrick's Day weekend, offering 1,000 renditions of the song over 50 hours.

Funniest thing about Danny Boy? It was written by an Englishman who never visited Ireland at all.

The lyrics for the song published in 1913 were written by an English lawyer, Frederick Edward Weatherly, who never even visited Ireland, according to Malachy McCourt, author of the book "Danny Boy: The Legend of the Beloved Irish Ballad." Weatherly's sister-in-law had sent him the music to an old Irish song called "The Derry Air" and the new version became a huge hit when opera singer Ernestine Schumann-Heink recorded it in 1915.

Well, we'd like to propose a substitute song. While it may not be any better or more uplifting than Danny Boy, it has a certain demented charm. Heck, what could be more fitting on St. Patrick's Day than Another Irish Drinking Song?

Mustn't one? Prince Charles of Britain and his wife Camilla are doing their bit to save the planet. The pictures - and the sanctimonious tone speak for themselves. 

They'll wave from the yacht.  

You might put an eye out, but the extravagant claims by an expert in this Daily Mail article are ridiculous.

The SwissMiniGun is the size of a key fob but fires tiny 270mph bullets powerful enough to kill at close range.

Officially the world's smallest working revolver, the gun is being marketed as a collector's item and measures just 2.16 inches long (5.5cm). It can fire real 4.53 bullets up to a range of 367ft (112m).

The stainless steel gun costs £3,000 although the manufacturers also produce extravagant, made-to-order versions made out of 18-carat gold with customised diamond studs which sell for up to £30,000…

…Jonathan Spencer, consultant forensic scientist and firearms expert, said that although the gun, which fires bullets at a speed of 399 feet a second, was tiny, it could still prove fatal and in the eyes of the law was as dangerous as a machine gun.

He said: "The general threshold for perforating the skin is about 330 feet a second.

"Apart from bone, skin offers the greatest resistance to penetration. If it can pass through the skin it is potentially lethal, even if the bullets are small.

"If you shoved something 3mm across into someone's chest you could kill them. It's the same with these bullets, they could penetrate the heart.

"It is capable of killing someone. Under section 5 of the Firearms Act it would be a prohibited weapon. It would be on the same scale as a machine gun."

According to the firm's website , the tiny bullet delivers 0.7154 ft-lbf of energy when fired. A .22 caliber long rifle bullet delivers 104 ft-lbf. The bullet weighs 1.9753 grains versus the .22 LR's 40 grains. By comparison, the Red Ryder BB gun yields a whopping 350 fps but delivers a .177 caliber pellet compared to the Swiss bullet with a massive .09 caliber. 

I'd rather take a SwissMiniGun bullet than a BB.  

It appears that British criminals eat considerably better than the patients in National Health Service hospitals. About four times better, in point of fact.

Prisoners held in police cells are having up to four times as much spent on their food as hospital patients.

Justice Secretary Jack Straw admitted that forces are given as much as £12 a day to feed inmates, who often have a choice of food from local takeaways.

By comparison, just £3 is spent per head in hospitals a day, while 70p is spent on ingredients for a single school meal.

It costs an average of £385 to keep a prisoner in a police cell overnight.

In a letter to Tory MP Andrew Rosindell, Mr Straw said the £12 meal figure might even be exceeded in "exceptional cases".

Mr Rosindell said there would be anger among patients at the news that prisoners are better fed.

He said: "I think it's inexplicable that prisoners should be eating food which costs four times what a patient gets in the NHS."

"I want to know why only £3 per head is being spent on patients in hospital, where you would expect to have good quality food, and £12 is being spent on prison food.

"It's an astonishing revelation. I think every NHS patient will want to know why people who are up for committing a crime are being treated in a style which is inappropriate.

"It is an issue many people will find it hard to understand."

Not hard at all, old man. The health bureaucracy simply does not have to answer to you. You're merely a burden on the system to them.

New York City police report that a small bomb or incendiary device has exploded near a military recruiting station in Times Square. WCBS reports that a hole has been blown through the window of the office and that witnesses report a loud bang that shook their hotel at about 4 AM EST. Traffic, including subway trains, have been diverted from the area.

Members of the police department's emergency services unit and fire department blocked cars early Thursday from entering the area surrounding a military recruiting station at 43rd Street and Broadway. A gaping hole was in the front window and shattered glass was on the ground.

Police could not immediately confirm that an explosive device was set off in the area. 

It's feeling even more like 1968 these days, isn't it. I sincerely hope they catch the bomber(s) and throw the book at them. If they don't nip this in the bud, so to speak, it will be deja vu all over again. 

The Washington Post reports that the Clinton campaign is going even more public with their internal political backstabbing even in the wake of Tuesday's victories. Anyone who couldn't see the Clinton campaign lining up Mark Penn as the fall guy had Tuesday been a disaster wasn't paying attention. But even in the wake of the wins, senior advisors are still going after Penn - and even more publicly than they had been before the Texas and Ohio primaries.

For the bruised and bitter staff around Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tuesday's death-defying victories in the Democratic presidential primaries in Ohio and Texas proved sweet indeed. They savored their wins yesterday, plotted their next steps and indulged in a moment of optimism. "She won't be stopped," one aide crowed.

And then Clinton's advisers turned to their other goal: denying Mark Penn credit.

With a flurry of phone calls and e-mail messages that began before polls closed, campaign officials made clear to friends, colleagues and reporters that they did not view the wins as validation for the candidate's chief strategist. "A lot of people would still like to see him go," a senior adviser said.

The depth of hostility toward Penn even in a time of triumph illustrates the combustible environment within the Clinton campaign, an operation where internal strife and warring camps have undercut a candidate once seemingly destined for the Democratic nomination. Clinton now faces the challenge of exploiting this moment of opportunity while at the same time deciding whether the squabbling at her Arlington headquarters has become a distraction that requires her intervention.

Many of her advisers are waging a two-front war, one against Sen. Barack Obama and the second against one another, but their most pressing challenge is figuring out why Clinton won in Ohio and Texas and trying to duplicate it. While Penn sees his strategy as a reason for the victories that have kept her candidacy alive, other advisers attribute the wins to her perseverance, favorable demographics and a new campaign manager. Clinton won "despite us, not because of us," one said. 

Actually, I think the unnamed source of that quote is correct. Clinton pulled it out on Tuesday because of Obama's spectacular unforced error with the Canadian-NAFTA story. With his huge stumble on that one - which was actually more of a pratfall - the true believers noticed that the messiah, who they thought could walk on water, had gotten his pant legs wet. And had clay feet.

But do read the whole thing (warning, it is a long piece). The story makes it clear that there is a strong move afoot to drive Penn out despite the wins. Frankly, I think they anti-Penn faction is probably right, though. I said that Clinton needed a miracle to pull off wins on Tuesday. She got one when Obama made the first major misstep of his campaign. Counting on lightning striking twice is not much of a strategy. 

Robert Novak reports that a political burial detail had already been organized at the top levels of the Democratic party to force the corpse of the Clinton campaign into the ground. That detail hastily backed off when the staggering campaign managed the wins in Tuesday's primaries. 

The scope of Hillary Clinton's latest resurrection can be appreciated only in light of the elaborate preparations that had been made for her expeditious burial. That she is very much alive can be attributed to her true grit but also to the revelation that Barack Obama is not a miraculously perfect candidate after all.

Assuming that Clinton would at best eke out a victory in Ohio on Tuesday to end her long losing streak, prominent Democrats were organizing a major private intervention. A posse of party leaders would plead with her to end her campaign and recognize Obama as the Democratic standard-bearer. To buttress this argument, several elite unelected superdelegates (including previous Clinton supporters) were ready to come out for Obama. Those plans went on hold Tuesday night.

Clinton's transformation of the political climate with her decisive victory in Ohio and unexpected narrow win in Texas coincided with Obama facing adversity for the first time in his magical candidacy, and he did not handle it well. The result is not only the prospect of seven weeks of fierce campaigning by the two candidates, stretching out to the next primary showdown April 22 in Pennsylvania, but also perhaps what Democratic leaders feared but never really thought possible until now: a contested national convention in Denver the last week of August. 

Hey, I was surprised by the resurgence of the Clinton camp. I guess I shouldn't have been. After all, I once pointed out that Clinton apparently had Baron Samedi on staff. Go read all of Novak's column. He points out the major flubs (and they were major) of the Obama campaign and the hideous prospects the Democrats face as a result. They have a real problem and a very real political train wreck coming.

Well, the Obama campaign appears to have gone green. They're recycling all the old viciousness the left has been using on George Bush for years now and applying it to Hillary Clinton. Today, it's prying the Most Secretive® label off Bush and attempting to slap it onto Clinton.

The Obama campaign is stepping up the rhetoric. Campaign Manager David Plouffe went so far as to call Hillary Clinton the "most secretive politician in America today."

The tough talk underscored not only the negative shift in tone of the Obama campaign in the past 24 hours, but just how contentious this fight for the nomination is becoming.

Part of what the Obama campaign would like the focus to be on is ethics — something adviser David Axelrod said they would be glad to have a debate over. But the Obama campaign may be a victim of time, since an argument on ethics could be tough to steer with the ongoing Rezko trial.

"I think that you know Sen. Clinton has talked a lot about disclosure in the last few days,” Plouffe told reporters. “Sen. Clinton is the most secretive politician in America today. This has been a pattern throughout her career of the lack of disclosure.”

Well, a lot of people on the right have pointed out the murky politics of the Clintons for years. But really, can't the left stop running against George Bush? Don't they have any original material? I can't wait for Haliburton to get worked in somehow.