This is my blogchalk:
United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

Subscribe to this blog in Radio:

Thursday, July 24, 2003

News digest BERLIN, Germany (Reuters) -- One-third of Germans under age 30 believe the U.S. government may have sponsored the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, according to a poll. The move comes as elephants in the Indian capital Delhi are being fitted with reflective badges in an attempt to prevent road accidents involving them. "The butt-reflector, roped to the howdah (seat), costs just 100 rupees ($2) and is the simplest way to protect them," explained Aniruddha Mookerjee, Wildlife Trust of India programme director. Leopard seal attacks and kills British scientist snorkelling off Antarctic coast (Repent now! And pay no attention to the 9/11 report) 7:16:33 PM    comment []

Hotspur Hotspur was buried at Whitchurch - but not for long. King Henry, who is reported to have wept over the corpse of his one time ally, ordered him dug up and the body displayed at Shrewsbury market square, in order to quash rumours he was still alive. Hotspur was later beheaded and quartered, and the various parts displayed in Newcastle, London, Chester, Bristol and the head in York. Barbaric, maybe, but standard behaviour for the times. In any case, Hotspur's widow eventually got her husband's remains back, and buried them in York Minster. Meanwhile, Hotspur's henchmen, the Earl of Worcester, the Scots Earl of Douglas and Sir Richard Vernon and Sir Richard Venables, two Cheshire knights who had sided with the rebels, had been captured. Douglas was lucky - he was ransomed - but the rest were tried for treason two days after the battle and were hung, drawn, beheaded and quartered. The spot where Hotspur's body was displayed, and Worcester, Venables and Vernon were tried and publicly executed is today marked by a plaque opposite the Butter Cross at the top of Pride Hill, Shrewsbury. Worcester's head was displayed on London Bridge until December, when it was buried with his body at Shrewsbury Abbey. 5:25:59 AM    comment []

From The Independent: US to release photos of Saddam's dead sons 'soon' …Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, had said the White House was "weighing the decision" to release gruesome pictures to prove the two men, the most powerful in Iraq after Saddam, were killed in a raid on a villa in Mosul on Tuesday. …Such a move would be highly controversial after the furore over the Iraqi regime's decision to broadcast television pictures of captured US soldiers and the storm of protest after the Arab television station al-Jazeera showed pictures of British dead, in contravention of the Geneva Convention. 5:14:37 AM    comment []

Thank you, Mr. UPS!   Electrical storms have causes brief power outages at least twice in the last 12 hours here. Both times, power was restored in mere seconds. Both times, I had a variety of web pages open and a Microsoft Word document in progress for a post to the blog.  It wouldn't have been a great loss to the universe if my paddlefish and "Blair quotes Castro" entries had been wiped out, but it would have caused me to explore the limits of 4-letter freedom of speech.   Instead, the monitor only blinked briefly and the “Bulldog” alert popped up warning me that I had 5 minutes before it got turned off. After 30 minutes, the system would hibernate, meaning that it would restart on the same desktop – nothing lost!   I originally bought the UPS so I could post to the blog by email while I was in Korea last January (Radio Userland must be active on the host computer to use this feature). The were no power interruptions then, but there have been a few occasions that the UPS has prevented coprolalia here. I got mine from Tiger Direct, for about $120. 5:00:22 AM    comment []

Today's History Lesson   Tony Blair was applauded for quoting Castro in US speech!   From The Guardian   Tony Blair last night used the rare opportunity of a historic address to the US Congress to declare that history would "forgive" him even if no weapons of mass destruction are uncovered in Iraq. In a significant softening of Downing Street's stance on Iraq's banned weapons, the prime minister stood before hundreds of members of Congress to admit that he may eventually be proved wrong. "Can we be sure that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together?" the prime minister asked his audience of Republicans and Democrats, who are beginning to voice doubts about whether Saddam Hussein still possessed banned weapons in his final months in power. Mr Blair then made a rare admission of fallibility: "Let us say one thing. If we are wrong we will have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. That is something I am confident history will forgive." From Chicken Bones: A Journal On July 26, 1953 a force of some 165 men led by Fidel conducted an attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba with the hope of fomenting a popular revolt in Oriente province. Both that attack and an accompanying raid against the Bayano garrison were fiascos. About half of the rebels were killed and most of the rest, including Fidel and his brother Rául, were imprisoned. After constructing his own defense with an impassioned speech ending with the words “la historia me absolverá.” (History will absolve me), Fidel was sent to the isle of Pines inder a fifteen-year sentence. Commenting on the Moncada attack, Herbert Matthews wrote in his book Fidel Castro (Simon & Schuster, 1969) that it had “a similar significance for the Cuban Revolution as the fall of the Bastille eventually had for the French Revolution.” 4:20:21 AM    comment []