glory be

My favourite foody has a sizzling post here.

O yummy yummy, yummy yummy har har..

And Gianna is running amuk with the quality paras as well.

barista returns to sanity

This BBC snap records the essential thrill of this year's tour - our man Robbie the Rabid, Crusher of Giants, the Dingo Napoleon, the fastest man on the Tour, talks to some foreigner shortly after the start of the last stage.

To be serious for the first time in this account, I have to concede that the last stage of the Tour de France brought Armstrong his expected sixth victory, the first person ever to do it. A triumph, even though some commentators have suggested the field was too weak to oppose him.

But today also brought the moment the Australians were waiting for so patiently. With a flat road and a sprint finish and the citizens of Paris lining the roads, the stage result looked like this
1. Tom Boonen (QSD) 163km in 4h08'26" (39.366km/h)
2. Jean-Patrick Nazon (A2R) at same time
3. Danilo Hondo (GST) at same time
4. Robbie McEwen (LOT) at same time
5. Erik Zabel (TMO) at same time
6. Jimmy Casper (COF) at same time
7. Stuart O'Grady (COF) at same time
8. Baden Cooke(FDJ) at same time
9. Massimiliano Mori (DVE) at same time
10. Bram De Groot (RAB) at same time

Robbie took the Green Jersey for the second time - a huge achievement. One day an Australian will win the Tour.

rocking and rolling

Chris Sheil of Back Pages is stimulating in anybody's terms, but he does a great riff on rock and roll as well. In the last month he has let loose on Elvis, R&B;, Muddy Waters, The Stones and foully revisionist history twice - here and here.

The fun is often in the comments. Chris posted a lovely list of Keef Richards quotes, from which I provide just one taster:

"Rock 'n' roll is the rhythm of our generation ... Each generation has its own rhythm ... Now, sadly, they've got typewriter rhythms. People pushing buttons with fingers. But maybe that's the feeling this generation has. ('91)"

As a qwerty riffer for a lifetime I can tell you the rhythm ain't in the kiss of the keys, but I do wonder if we are learning to dance to the pulse of a big machine.

dog day afternoon

This is why a good joke ring is a beautiful thing.

I have no idea where this originated, and who has been rendered anonymous by disrespectful carriage around the email system. All the searches reveal previous posts which also say "author unknown.."

Maybe the writer will google it and tell us who she is, and accept some accolades..

JASPER AND THE UNBAKED YEAST ROLLS

We have a fox terrier by the name of Jasper. He came to us in the summer of 2001 from the fox terrier rescue program. For those of you, who are unfamiliar with this type of adoption, imagine taking in a 10 year old child whom you know nothing about and committing to doing your best to be a good parent. Like a child, the dog came with his own idiosyncrasies. He will only sleep on the bed, on top of the covers, nuzzled as close to my face as he can get without actually performing a French kiss on me. Lest you think this is a bad case of 'no discipline,' I should tell you that Perry and I tried every means to break him of this habit including locking him in a separate bedroom for several nights. The new door cost over $200. But I digress.

balconian discourse

There's good stuff on The Balcony at the moment. Saying what I think better than I could put it.

the long tour lurcheth on

Stage 19 of le Tour was a 55 km time trial, which favours a certain kind of loner - strong, rhythmic, focussed, able to ride fast for an hour. A hard endurance athlete. But this stage was rippled with hills, which gives an edge to a different kind of athlete again - not necessarily fast but strong. The Douglas Fir against the oak.

There was bad blood too. Yesterday Simeoni clashed with Armstrong. Simeoni has testified against athletic doctor Michel Ferrari, acusing him of doping athletes. He is being built up as a sinister, Faustian figure. But Armstrong has consulted him and defends him, setting tongues wagging in a sport with the chemical vampire in the shadows, and coffins in the team baggage.

Armstrong has been very public about surviving testicular cancer which had spread to both this lungs and his brain. I think his attitude to medicine is unique. Other athletes see doctors as people who provide a winning edge. He sees them as his angels. There is a raging ego inside Armstrong, dominant enough to keep him alive, disciplined enough to keep him genial and human.

No other bugger is going to tell him which angel to visit. I would not be surprised if Armstrong uses drugs, but then his relationship with chemistry is different from the rest of us. They keep him alive. How can we apply the same rules?

Armstrong and Simeoni are very angry with each other. Armstrong called Simeoni a liar, and Simeoni is suing him. It exploded yesterday, when Simeoni broke from the peleton to hunt the leaders but the sinewy Texan went after him and shouted an ultimatum. It seems he threatened to stay by him and outride him to snatch the jersey from the whole breakaway, so Simeoni gave up. You wouldn't say that was fair and it's a high price for Simeoti to pay. Tell the truth and you will be prevented from winning a stage. Maybe.

TDF explores this mroe fully, and links to a fuller account of the incident at Velonews. In some ways, professional cycling offers the scenario we all fear in other sports - through the Nineties they could choose to drug themselves, or surrender to obscurity in the peleton. Entire teams were systematically drugging their riders.

For standing up in public against a drug doctor, it seems Simeoni was mocked in the peleton itself and ended the race in tears in the belly of the beast.

According to SBS, Michael Rogers, seen in the photo above, was on song at the beginning of today's race:

"Australian Michael Rogers has set his sights on being one of the five fastest riders in the 55km stage 19 Tour de France time trial.

Rogers, who is a strong climber and time trial specialist, is currently the best-placed Australian in the field, at 22nd overall, and he wants to have a strong ride in the final time trial to boost his overall position.

Prior to the race, Rogers declared his intentions to finish in the top 20, but he has admitted 22nd overall would be just as good.

"I'm pretty happy with how it's gone," Rogers told Cyclingnews.com.

"After I crashed I thought I might aim for the top 20. It looks like I'll finish just outside that which isn't too bad so that's what I'm aiming for."

"Hopefully I can … get in the top five tomorrow," he said."

But he didn't. SBS provides the full eucalyptine list:
50 ROGERS Michael AUS QSD at 07' 28"
55 O'GRADY Stuart AUS COF at 07' 46"
101 McEWEN Robbie AUS LOT at 10' 46"
118 DAVIS Allan AUS LST at 11' 29"
126 SUNDERLAND Scott AUS ALB at 12' 16"
129 COOKE Baden AUS FDJ at 12' 20"
131 WILSON Matthew AUS FDJ at 12' 29"

Rabid Robbie leads Zabel for the points tropy by 11 points. I think only a bazooka could stop him now, or perhaps the human chicken who interrupted yesterday's race to celebrate the Norwegians. A huge cod would have been more apt.

no absurdity left untried

Hypocrisy is an extraordinary spectator sport. I keep thinking I have seen it all, and then I find some other new slimey twist, ectoplasm dripping off its logical coils.

Bush is claiming that his "No Child Left Behind" campaign is working. So now he can impose a literacy requirement on the vote.

Or has he? Tickle your satire detector and get to work on ...this article (via Librarylink.

chug chug bling bling

How do Olympic athletes entertain themselves? After all, almost all the competitors are not medals chances and are really only there for the experience.

"Christo Doyle of Atlanta recalls "delivering boxing equipment that had come in late for Moldova, and it was 105 degrees outside. They were so appreciative that they insisted we come in and do vodka shots with them. It was horrific."

The Moldovans, though, do not get the gold medal for the most boozed-up partners in Olympic Town. That award - based on an informal athlete poll - is split between the Canadians and the Australians. "The Aussies truly know how to party," says Dick Roth, an American who set a world swimming record in Tokyo in 1964. "The main reason I hung out with them is that their coach didn’t mind them drinking beer. It was fun - lots of drinking. They were more relaxed than everybody else."

Rennae Stubbs, an Australian Olympic tennis player who competed in Atlanta and Sydney, does not dispute the characterisation. "We’re a free-loving, fun-loving group of people," she says. "We’re not as worried as some countries about repercussions."

Why am I not surprised by this loving but family friendly description of extracurricular Olympic antics from The Scotsman, the Scottish rag that still has an editor.

le Tour grinds on

Stage 18 of the Tour was flatter though spiced with a few climbs, and our lads were back in the points. It was won in a sprint by Spaniard Juan Miguel Mercado, with Thor Hushovd the Hammer of the North edging Robbie the Dingo Napoleon out of the meadhall to give them seventh and eighth. Gentle O'Grady, his mind on transcendent things, was tenth, behind the sweaty shanks of Hondo.

Robbie is still the resident deathbeast of the Green Jersey, with Thor eleven points behind. If the vast Norseman has Beowulf's luck, and Robbie has Grendel's suffering, Robbie might just be pipped at the post. Beowulf held Grendel under water for eight days; I am not sure that is really matched by Rabid falling flat on his face at 40 km in front of the Arc de Triomphe and being ridden over by 150 exhausted cyclists.

Pie-eyed as I am by a late night Japanese film - Azumi, about a martial arts heroine in long white socks which is truly ludicrous but ultimately mesmeric for so much murder with so few real wounds - I pulled the results straight from the estimable TDFblog.

TDF also links to the best riders' diaries on the net.

the dance of the sea cucumber

Australians are very used to El Nino - it's become part of our conversation about the weather.

"When the pressure is persistently low over the mid-Pacific, it is high over Australia and the Indian Ocean. A persistent below average atmospheric pressure in the mid-Pacific is associated with an El Niño and dry conditions. The opposite set of conditions to El Niño, known as La Niña, is frequently associated with heavy rains and flooding."

Drought here and Indonesia, rain in Peru while the anchovies disappear.

Now, for the first time, we have evidence that El Nino affects deep ocean conditions as well.

"Henry Ruhl and his colleagues at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, regularly visit a site off the California coast to study the ocean floor, 4,100 metres below.

They retrieve samples in sediment traps and measure the amount of organic matter, such as dead or dying plankton and faeces, that drifts to the bottom. And they send down a camera on a sled to photograph which animals are present.

At the bottom of the ocean, the sea cucumber is king. These animals live off the gentle rain of organic particles and come in species of various colours, including some that look like purple balloons.

The researchers report in this week's Science that different species are more prevalent at different times, and that these population fluctuations correlate with food availability and major climate events, including the El Niño weather system."

Orange or purple sea cucumbers may sound unimportant, but it tells us that deep ocean ecologies are affected by surface effects which seem trivial, because the food supply comes from above.

That is not good news for climate change.

(found in Nature).

unreadable eyes

The British use a curious legal regulation called an "Anti-social Behaviour Order", which can limit children by court order. An ABO is a civil matter, decided by balance of probabilities, but breaking one is a criminal offence, possibly leading to five years' incarceration. They are widely advertised, so the names and faces of delinquent children are posted on telephone poles in the community. The highest proportion of ABO's are made out by the ardently socialist Manchester City Council.

The whole extraordinary saga is in the the Guardian. Lives beyond horror.

Here is just one story:

random is as random does

Here's a true toy - typogenerator "is a random generator for 'typoPosters'. a typoPoster is a poster, created from images and letters/text that doesn´t have any sense, just to look good

how does typogenerator work?

the user types some text; typoGenerator searches images.google for the text and creates a background from the found images, using randomly chosen effects. then it places the text, using random effects too."

(via an unrude bit of Goodshit).

le Tour, stage 17 as the road becomes a blur

Hills.
Armstrong.
Leading.
Basso down at fourth.
Michael Rogers prominent for a while.
Robbie part of "the autobus", the mob at the back trying not to be eliminated cos they are just plain slow.

Static, static, static.

Infro from TDF blog.

carpe diem yeh bluidy fleetstreet jock

The Scottish Sunday Herald is a snappy rag with a youngish readership. It has also lost its editor, Andrew Jaspan, to The Age, which could do with a bit more snap and a deal less physiological age. The reporting of this very fact is particularly damp.

At least the northern rag has a blog section, even though it is just a kind of index to the stories that make them look hard hitting and respectable.

The rival Scotsman - which is a good paper and a ready source of baristafun - says that he was the editor of the Observer for a troubled year, ran the Big Issue for a brief time, and launched the Sunday Herald. They said, churlishly, he could be leaving because the paper is losing three million per.

The paper was also sued for defamation over a comment on its blog.

The media insider magazazine all mediascotland is interesting on the top of the Herald and its editor:

and you thought the sixties was new

Here is a cute piece of trivia which would probably not interest Paul Watson, who loathes baby boomers even though he is otherwise intelligent and sometimes illuminating.

I discovered TANSTAAFL - There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch - in the pages of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, deep in a particularly odious phase of antiracist hippy elitism in the late sixties. See me in my commune. See my group marriage. See me, alpha male, lead all.. It seemed to me to part of the way in which an older generation projected its prurience onto the youth of 1966. At that point, of course, I have to concede this is similar to the way Paul feels about babyboomers.

Now John Quiggin has revealed a more complex history which I am puppetblogging. He first brings in Milton Friedman, and then links to Mahalanobis which says it was coined first by "the 1 June 1949 edition of the San Francisco News (although this is claimed to be a reprint of a 1938 editorial so it may be even older, but the original has not been found)....a 1952 article in the journal Ethics about nationalizing industries, attributes the saying to "Professor Alvin Hansen in his famous TINSTAAFL formula - 'There's no such thing as a free lunch.'" (Professor Hansen was a prominent economist and professor at Harvard University.)"

Every time I hear the phrase it makes me think that power can be defined as the "ability to make someone else pay."

The word Heinlein definitely did coin is "grok". To quote an online dictionary:

"grok: /grok/, var. /grohk/ vt. [from the novel "Stranger in aStrange Land", by Robert A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning literally `to drink' and metaphorically `to be one with']The emphatic form is `grok in fullness'. 1. To understand, usuallyin a global sense. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. Contrast zen, which is similar supernal understanding experienced as a single brief flash. See also glark. 2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient understanding. "Almost all C compilers grok the `void' type these days."

Grok was said to be a favourite of Charles Manson. According to Wikipedia, Heinlein sicced his lawyers onto this, and established that it was not true, and Manson was barely literate. Not that this was an impediment to a genuinely interesting meme.

Heinlein revealed this in his posthumous memoir "Grumbles from the Grave.", published in 1989.

the mills of the gods grind slowly

According to Crooked Timber, Bush is in deep trouble.

I hope for his sake John Howard doesn't prowl the internet. That post would put him right off his Coco Pops.

mouthbreathing in the dark

Addicted as I am, gentle reader, to posting on Barista, I paced the city streets trying to resist the call of the Melbourne Film Festival. My wallet urged me to go home and fire up the computer.

Unfortunately I found myself wandering past the Forum Theatre and I saw the usual dim yellow lights, the traditional smell of stewed coffee and bad red wine and I couldn't stop myself. There was a queue and my body joined it all by itself.

Posting is likely to be light for the next couple of weeks, though I will strive to keep youse all amused. If I don't, it is entirely possible I will be sitting in some chop sockey film watching the sliced bottoms and burning brains fly around a yakuza hideout when a hairy arm will come out of the dark, slip around my throat and tighten. "You have failed us, bastard," a voice may hiss.

The image above is part of Whatchagot. This is the Festival's games component, which contains work by the godlike Dave Jones.

By the way, I heard Michael Gawenda, retiring editor of the Age, on the ABC admitting he had failed because he didnt bring on new voices. If he had sent some nerdy assistant out to make a systematic investigation of the blogosphere, he would have found some new voices which have developed very nicely by themselves, thank you very much.

You know who you are. You will probably be sitting somewhere nearby in the dark, sharing my trash passion for Asian ghosts, midwestern trailer parks and those Australian films which will never be shown again.

up up and slowly away

The 16th stage of le Tour was very simple. Go up a mountain for 15.5 km. First in best dressed, and exploded hearts can be left with the butler at the door.

Armstrong won. Ulrich was second and Basso was eighth today, but still second overall although he is falling slowly behind. Soon Armstrong would be able to cross the finishing line on a unicycle wearing a space suit and juggling stingrays and still win. It feels like a procession.

Rogers was 12th, O'Grady was 63rd, Sunderland was 108th, Rabid Robbie was 138th, probably because he stopped to bite some photographers.

Robbie is still sleeping with the green jersey in his pouch, clear of Hoshovd by 12 points, Zabel by 13 points , O'Grady by 21. Cooke is 14th, and Sunderland is 18th. It is still tight for Robbie, since two intermediate stage wins with him out of the points would do it. He could still be mugged in the criterion on the last day - after all, that is what Cooke did to him last year.

As TDF blog said of our dingo larrikin: "Robbie McEwen came in at 47:22, which is unlikely to get him disqualified. He popped a wheelie over the finish line", which is exactly what the BBC photo above records.

Velonews has a diagram/photo of the whole muscle melting route.

the teeniest bit incomplete

The Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts currently heading out of the Solar System into deep space each have a plaque on them, instigated by Dr Carl Sagan, which is a greeting card to whatever might find it. This is the pictorial part of the plaque:

It remains one of the truly dumb jokes of my lifetime.

I presume it is designed in such a way that aliens can make a guess at the functions of the various parts of the bodies.

The gentleman in question has a neat little nutbag and a resting (probably uncircumcised) penis on top. Bits that are normally covered by straggly fur.

She, also sans fur, has no vagina. The thing was drawn by Mrs Sagan. I wonder if it left her drawing board in that prudish state?

I also wonder why on earth they showed no bums. I can just imagine xxxtqtflq talking to zxzxzcvanksa out beyond the Orion Nebula trying to work out whether the tentacles on the back were erect when the fin was in use, or the other way round.

A drawing of a baby would have helped too. In fact, when you think about it, they should have incised every available surface of the craft with drawings of people doing stuff. After all, when it is finally captured by space beings eight hundred trillions years into the future, they are going to ask a lot of questions that won't be answered.. like "Didn't these beings have an arse?"

If there was a weight problem on the craft, they could just have drawn everything smaller. After all, the readers could be two microns high, or the size and shape of an iceberg floating in interstellar space.

What would they be thinking? "Glad they didn't draw the vagina. That's really rude."

The whole project is well described by Wikipedia; the inspiration for this rant comes from qwghlm.

by their works shall ye know them

"After more than 600 years, it was his handwriting that gave him away. A scribe - who until the weekend was known to history only as Adam the scrivener - so infuriated Geoffrey Chaucer with his carelessness that the poet threatened to curse him with an outbreak of scabs."

Now clever detective work reported by the Guardian has worked out who he was, and where he came from. After six hundred years.

in memory of bitzers past

The fifteenth stage of le Tour brought more mountains, not the nasty, sharp, leg draining, puffing out kind of the Pyrenees, but the nightmarish, long, uphill drags that challenge the soul with the most profound question of all: why am I doing this to myself? Particularly when that bastard Armstrong is so much faster?

After a small escape grew with some determined riding by a second breakaway from the peleton, both Gentle O'Grady and Scott Sunderland were in the lead group of fifteen. The sinister Hushvard, dreaming of snatching the green jersey in a berserker frenzy of Norse rage, was also lurking nearby.

O'Grady came over the summit of the third climb in the top ten. His mind maddened by memories of demented bitzer riding down Australian gullies, he took off like a whirly whirly summoned by a gadaicha man. By the bottom he was IN THE LEAD. Means nothing but the news would be putting little sweaty droplets into the armpits of Rabid Robby the Dingo Napoleon, still theoretically within range for green jersey hunters. Particularly if he falls off, which he has already done three times in this race.

O'Grady took top points in the intermediate sprint, followed by Hushovd. A handy six points for Gentle.

Two minutes later they were into a climb and ten minutes after that he was caught by the first breakaway group. Then the heavy mob arrived and Armstrong swept him into the peleton. By now Thomas Voeckler the baby faced heartthrob of France had finally lost touch with the back of the peleton and surrendered the yellow jersey.

The end got serious - Armstrong rolling uphill with the old lion Ulrich, a bit mangy now but still ugly with his claws, and Basso the young pretender. Armstrong outsprinted Basso mano a mano to take both the stage and the yellow jersey.

O'Grady coasted in well back in the pack, probably niggling Rabid Robbie about the green jersey. McEwen no doubt used the same chilling, cheerful smile he was practicing this morning in the BBC picture above.

um... vegetable

You have given your all. You are feeling spent. You deserve a moment to yourself.

You need this.

Twenty questions gone all clever and automated. Study those questions and you will beat any kid on a long journey.

rogue's language of behaviour

Every now and again I am sent a URL (yes please) that takes me to an alternate universe. A friend of mine who works in China wrote:

"A link to the rabid govt funded English language rag from Beijing. Follow the antics of foreign roguery. Could be me any day of the week, especially now that it's 37ish degrees everyday and as humid as Shane Warne's cricket box."

The People's Daily is a most peculiar thing, as exemplified by this street encounter with a wigged out American.

"The news that an American man behaved in a wild manner on a Beijing bus last Friday, April 19, has aroused strong indignation from the public.

When asked not to stomp on the engine cap, the Yankee chose to hit the woman driver of bus No. 359 and a passenger in the face. Both were wounded, with blood dripping down their faces.

The man became hysterical, insulting onlookers with foul language and obscene gestures before being taken away by police.

Given that no civilized society would allow such hooliganism to go unpunished, it is natural to expect that the evil-doer will be condemned by the public and punished by law. .."

This is not the first time a foreigner has acted indecently on Chinese soil.
What would the People's Daily be like under capitalism? Probably even more bent than Pravda.
 

how to survive in a hard world

Inspired by the People's Daily, I wondered what Pravda has to telll the world. Nothing new about the manned Russian expedition to Mars, but it did offer a few ghoulish titbits to make us realise that a Melbourne winter is not a true place of suffering.

In the Russian city of Tyumen, police have hauled two bodies out of a burning "heating main bunker." One was dead with mutilated ears and a butterfly cut out of his buttock. The other was so drunk it took two days before police could interrogate him.

Apparently the bunker was colonised in February by a gang of former prisoners led by a man on probation, who survived by collecting metal scrap and bottles. They shaved and sometimes washed, in much better condition than their neigbours, the clan of homeless people living around Karl Marx Street.

According to Pravda, "The newcomers found an entertainment soon. They went to their neighbors after every alcohol party. The 'program of the visit' usually included execution of weak-willed people. They brutally beat the ones, who dared to be rude to them."

Execution of weak-willed people for an entertainment. That is what they did to the people found in the burning bunker. So what actually happened?

"Having mutilated the victim, the criminals threw the burning newspaper on the floor of the bunker and left. The homeless man died of coal gas intoxication."

In the spirit of true capitalist entrepeneurialism, more organised crooks found more creative ways of solving their housing problem.

"The police arrested the members of the criminal gang killing people to sell their apartments in Kemerovo region.

The gang called itself "Antonova"s shelter" as its leader was a woman named Antonova. She was also the head of a real estate agency in Kemerovo.

There were policemen, real estate agents and notaries in the gang, said the head of Kemerovo police department on fighting organized crime Sergey Bezryadin.

The gang killed elderly people and those who lowered themselves. After this, the victims' apartments were sold on forged documents by the real estate agency."

There were a dozen people in the gang, which stole ten apartments. Sometimes I am glad of immigration controls. With that kind of determination, "Antonova"s shelter" would soon dominate the Melbourne real estate market.

the faith that lights the eyes of children

Due to the wave of savage morbidity which has overcome Barista, please resucitate your faith in humanity by going here.

Remember to come back, mind.. I've got more.

homonymnmsns

Companies often have droogy names. Stop and say them slowly. TOY -OH -TA. BILL - I - TON. DAT - SUN. AIR - LING -GUS....

Here's a list of how they were chosen.

Canon - from Kwanon the Buddhist god of mercy. The name was changed to Canon to avoid offending religious groups.

Lotus - Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Nokia - started as a wood-pulp mill, the company expanded into producing rubber products in the Finnish city of Nokia. The company later adopted the city's name.

Sony - from the Latin word 'sonus' meaning sound, and 'sonny' a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say `dry' (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer' means dry.

And so on, via The Presurfer.

crack, crack, yum, yum

We can't pick our neighbours, and sometimes they can be very very creepy and provide fodder for the ikkier parts of the internet. STOP NOW IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH. (Or adult, probably).

Case One: Someone in Waukesha, Wisconsin is fascinated by the properties of gladwrap (not TM). Maybe it's the way it sticks to itself and creates a flat, sedimentary surface. It becomes a very strange insubstantial, illusionistic substance, a cross between flakey pastry and plexiglass.

Either way, residents know that one of their neighbours is going much too far with it. Several times last year they found their cars wrapped in the stuff so they couldn't get in. YOK YOK YOK.

Now, s/he has taken to winding it round and round two telegraph poles on opposite sides of the road. We know it's going on because two motorcyclists, fortunately driving slowly, whacked into it. BOING OWCH! At least they didn't bring the poles down.

The second case is much worse:

"Sagawa lives in a cheap apartment block with students for neighbours in the city of Chiba, 30 miles east of Tokyo. The name on his post box is Shin Nakamoto, however, because his own name is still synonymous with a crime that is worse than shocking...

...Under five feet tall and with a head too big for his body, Issei Sagawa makes the most unlikely of cannibals. Stepping inside his apartment, where images of Snow White and Diana, Princess of Wales, are juxtaposed with his own explicit pastel drawings and an extensive collection of pornography, offers a better insight into his twisted mind...

...Studying literature at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1981, he invited 25-year-old Dutch student Renee Hartevelt to his apartment, shot her dead and began to carve her up with a knife, then later a hatchet.

French psychiatrists declared him insane and ordered that he be detained at a high-security asylum.

His rich and influential father reportedly pulled some strings and arranged for his transfer back to Japan in 1985. The following year, Japanese psychiatrists determined him to be perfectly sane, and extremely intelligent, and Sagawa was released.

He quickly became a celebrity, writing 18 books - including the bestseller In The Fog - newspaper columns and even appeared on television cooking programmes. Today, he says he was living a lie..."

Now he is back in the news, because he has recently claimed he can't remember the crime and probably made it up. Once French police used the word 'cannibal' the story got its own momentum but he didn't care because he was mentally ill. Since then he has used the story to meet foreign women for interesting roleplay.

Prisoners at Saint Maur Jail in central France have no such ambiguities about this next story. It happened in front of them and probably changed their attitude to a cafeteria queue forever.

"...the prisoner threw himself upon one of two fellow inmates responsible for handing out the meals and began hitting his head with an ashtray. Two prison guards ran to get reinforcements but by the time they returned it was too late.

"He was bashing away at one of the two prisoners. When the guards got back he was on all fours leaning over his victim and he was eating his brain," said Thierry Foucher, union representative for prison managers at the jail...

...The suspect, who has not been named, was serving a 30-year sentence for a "crime committed with barbaric acts", the union representative said."

Just to renew your faith in a more innocent kind of strangeness, let me offer a story in which all organs remain on the right side of the human skin.

79 year old "Hank Edwards had waited a long time to visit Germany. When he was finally able to make the trip, he dug out a copy of "Beautiful Bayreuth," a travel guide bought by his father 90 years ago [in the interesting year of 1914].

"He told us he had read it over and over as a boy and had always wanted to visit the places listed in it," said a police spokesman in Bad Berneck.

"But owing to the Great Depression, the war, and raising a family and working all his life, he said he never got around to actually travelling abroad until now."

After arriving in Germany, Edwards headed straight for Bayreuth, the Bavarian town most famous for its annual Wagner festival, with his old guide book in tow.

The alarm was raised when Edwards failed to return to his hotel for two days. Locals soon found him sitting in his rental car, which had gotten stuck on a muddy road in the middle of a forest.

Unfortunately for Edwards, two world wars and a massive reforestation program in the region meant the Bayreuth in the book no longer existed.

Despite the unplanned adventure, Edwards told local police that he was happy with his vacation.

"It's still very beautiful here even if it's not what he expected," the police spokesman said.

From The Tampa Tribune, The Scotsman, and Deutsche Welle, starting from Attu Sees All. But the total losss of restraint is all my responsibility.

UPDATE: Issei Sigawa has what is claimed to be the "official website" here. The google results are positively necrotic and best viewed in daylight hours. Vegetarians will need sedatives.

Every human possibility is somewhere on the internet.