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He moves amongst us… in a Celica?!
Well, a couple of weeks have gone since the usual festival of excess generally known in these parts as Christmas. When I turn on the television, the radio, or look at the adverts plastered on the walls of the London Underground, it is hard to escape the messages urging us all to lose weight, give up X or Y, go to the gym, blah, blah. Well I do my best to stay in some form of shape by attending a gym fairly regularly, but I must admit there is almost something rather reassuringly predictable about this annual burst of puritanical preaching about the need to turn over a healthy leaf and get into shape. It is like the passing of the seasons.
However, I realise that many of the fine Epicureans who read and write for this blog take a more robust view of these matters and have no time for such asceticism. Well, I have great news. Medical research reveals that you can lose weight by sleeping longer.
That is what I call good news.
Here is another health scare to add to the pile. It seems that Pakistani cricketer Abdul Razzaq has been overdosing on … spinach:
Abdul Razzaq’s mysterious illness, that he suffered during the Melbourne Test, may be related to his curious addiction to spinach. Razzaq suffered a bout of vomiting, dizziness and breathing difficulties on the third morning of the Boxing Day Test and though he batted in the second innings, he hadn’t recovered fully in time for the final game at Sydney.
Razzaq had experienced dizziness and nausea during Pakistan’s tour of New Zealand, in early 2004, and he was put on a diet of spinach by a medical guru in Pakistan. “Somebody told him to have spinach all the time,” Zakir Khan, the Pakistan board’s operation manager, told The Melbourne Age. “So he loves spinach and wherever he goes he says spinach should be part of the diet, in Pakistan particularly. The other team-mates tease him and call him Popeye the Sailor Man.”
It is with such stories at this that I am now consoling myself for this fiasco.
… certain people who need to know.
This was too good to pass on… while browsing the Telegraph pages and stumbling across their Review of 2004, I must have caught one of the billion monkeys at work!
You need to click on the thumbnail and read the image title.
Lt. Charlie William of the British Army survived a 3500 foot fall with minimal damage to his person after his parachute rigging tangled upon exit from the airplane during training over Kenya.
He broke through a corrugated iron roof and gave some Kenyans a bit of a start. I have heard of dropping in for tea unexpectedly, but Charlie seems to have taken it a bit farther than most.
It does not appear to have been reported whether the home owners supplied their guest with a hot cuppa as he awaited assistance.
This is an excellent story. I got to it from here.
A bag of bills stolen from a casino was snapped up by beavers who wove thousands of dollars in soggy currency into the sticks and brush of their dam on a creek in eastern Louisiana.
“They hadn’t torn the bills up. They were still whole,” said Maj. Michael Martin of the St. Helena Parish Sheriff’s Office.
The money was part of $70,000 to $75,000 taken last week from the Lucky Dollar Casino in Greensburg.
Is there not some kind of law saying that you are not allowed to do this kind of thing in the USA? No doubt the beavers have by now appointed a lawyer to represent their interests. An eagle perhaps? Never mind.
Over on Fox News website:
LATEST HEADLINES
– Official: Arafat in Coma
– Arafat Congratulates Bush
Food for thought.
Current blogger enthusiasm of mine Harry Hutton says that this is an interesting story. It is.
Nguyen was discovered trying to enter Hong Kong illegally hiding beneath a truck crossing the border with the mainland. A routine search revealed the Nguyen was carrying two bullets inside his right shoe and a small kitchen knife wrapped in plastic.
Despite the grave threat to public order posed by these weapons, Judge Sweeny contemplated waiving jail time and deporting this dangerous felon … at which point Nguyen became indignant and insisted that he be imprisoned for the maximum possible term.
The defendant explained that he had paid HK$1,500 (US$200) to a snakehead to arrange his illegal entry into the SAR, with the hope of being caught and jailed on immigration and weapons charges. The fee included transportation the cost of the two bullets and a knife, which were provided by the smugglers. Once captured, Nguyen counted on receiving, courtesy of Hong Kong’s taxpayers, room, board and prisoner’s pay of HK$5,600 (US$720), or about US$25 per month, after deducting the snakehead’s fee.
Nguyen considered this a better prospect than those on offer in Vietnam.
Applying the Solomonic wisdom for which he is renowned, His Lordship pondered the situation for a while and then declared that the law is, after all, the law and, moreover, releasing Nguyen wouldn’t be fair to other Vietnamese immigrants – of whom it turns out there are quite a few – currently serving time for trying to cross the border with two bullets and a kitchen knife …
The Washington Times further elucidates:
Hien is the latest in a series of mostly young Vietnamese men arriving in Hong Kong on the “two bullet tour,” for which they pay a fee to a gang in their homeland. The package deal includes transport to mainland China, instructions on how to cross into Hong Kong, plus two bullets and a knife.
The weapons are to ensure that the immigrant will get a long prison sentence. For Hien it means free shelter, food and $50 a month in pay while he is incarcerated. He paid about $200 for the package deal.
Goodness, they must be short of prisoners in Hong Kong. They pay people to attend. Oh well, I suppose this is a nice, simple, market-based solution to the problem of getting udesirables off the streets.
Everyone says how clever those Vietnamese were to defeat the USA in the Vietnam War. But winning was stupid. The clever thing to do would have been to lose.
This being Sunday, let us turn our minds towards matters otherworldly. Today’s Telegraph contains this devilishly diverting story:
Chris Cranmer, a naval technician serving on the Type 22 frigate Cumberland, has been officially recognised as a Satanist by the ship’s captain. That allows him to perform Satanic rituals aboard and permits him to have a funeral carried out by the Church of Satan should he be killed in action.
My immediate reaction was, of course: What the hell is the world coming to? But thinking about it some more, I reckon that a Satanist would be able to throw himself into a battle at least as enthusiastically as your average Christian.
A spokesman for the Royal Navy – echoing that Rowan Atkinson Church of England Bishop, who noted the forces of good, and of evil, and who said that the role of the Church of England is to strike a balance between the two – assures us that all is well:
A spokesman for the Royal Navy insisted that Mr Cranmer’s unconventional beliefs would not cause problems on board ship. “We are an equal opportunities employer and we don’t stop anybody from having their own religious values,” he said.
The report ends with this further quote from the same source:
“Nobody is suggesting there is anything at all dark about this.”
Perish the thought.
On this day when the prize for private space flight was finally won I tuned in to the Conservative Party Conference – the Conservative Party is (at least since the Liberal party was taken over by radicals like Harcourt in the 1890’s) the closest thing we have to a party of private property and free enterprise in Britain.
Dr Fox (the Chairman of the Conservative Party) made the first speech. “We must reclaim the colours of the national flag from the extremists [I believe that Dr Fox meant the BNP], we must reclaim the Red, White and Blue” said Dr Fox whilst pointing to the great board behind him.
Unlike some people, I rather like this patriotic stuff (indeed I type this in sight of my own little Union flag). However the great board to which Dr Fox pointed was not Red, White and Blue – it was a blue board with black writing on it.
Now I have nothing against blue and black, they are the colours of the Estonian flag (a nation I much admire) and, in heraldry, blue and black are the colours of loyality and constancy (steadfastness) – things that the Conservative party lost in 1989 and is now (I hope) trying to get back to.
However, to the television viewers, Dr Fox and the people who cheered him in the conference hall seemed to be either colour blind or insane. I can only assume that what was seen by the people in the conference hall was different from what was seen by the people at home.
Perhaps the great board was a screen and at a key moment the Union flag appeared on it, and the television cameras did not capture the key moment… a plot by the BBC?. But it was all very odd.
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We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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