TODAY TURKS AND CAICOS, TOMORROW THE WORLD!: I have heard that there is a possibility of Canada annexing the Turks and Caicos Islands, despite the best efforts of the Caicos to free themselves from the Turks. Military analysts expect trouble as the Caicos Liberation Front threaten to oppose any foreign intervention with force if need be. The situation is tense and negotiators from the United Nations are expected to try to defuse the crisis before any suntan oil is spilled in vain. Canadian imperialism, bane of the modern world.

TO HELL WITH THE FUTURE AND LET'S LIVE IN THE PAST: The Belfast Telegraph reported on March 19th (sorry; I don’t have a link to it) that the Evangelical Protestant Society of Belfast has condemned Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ as being “too Catholic.” You could laugh, but it reminded me of Winston Churchill’s description of this mindset in The World Crisis, his history of the First World War. The Cabinet was discussing the possibility of civil war in Ireland in June of 1914 when Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, came in and began to read the Austrian ultimatum to the Serbs. The Irish problem vanished into the background as the damn fool thing in the Balkans Bismarck predicted would cause the next great European war was finally upon them. Four years later, after millions of deaths, the collapse of monarchies, and the upending of entire societies, Churchill wrote,

"The whole map of Europe has been changed...The modes of thought of men, the whole outlook on affairs, the grouping of parties, all have encountered violent and tremendous changes in the deluge of the world. But as the deluge subsides and the waters fall short we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that has been unaltered in the cataclysm which has swept the world."

If Jesus died for these dummies then he wasted his time.

ALL THE NUDES THAT'S FIT TO PRINT:I passed the periodical rack at my friendly Barnes & Noble superstore last night when I saw something that made me stop and think for a moment. Well, actually, I didn’t stop and think; I was on my way to the bathroom, but I thought while I was in there. This explains why I missed the urinal all together and hit my crummy sneakers instead. The reason for this prolonged rumination was a publication entitled Playboy’s Nude Playmates.

Now I have not had much contact with Playboy since my subscription ran out in 1984. I refused to renew my subscription; I was protesting Roberta Vasquez’s not being named Playmate of the Year (she was robbed; Ms. Vasquez, who if I remember right was Miss November that year, blew the doors off the competition, but Hefner gave the crown to someone else, the cad). In any case, it appears that Playboy’s Nude Playmates is one of several Playboy special publications designed for the reading impaired, in that it provides a maximum of photographs of attractive nude young women and a minimum of the articles that three generations of American men have bought the magazine for.

But this is neither here nor there. I think my cognitive dissonance was a result of the title of the publication. Isn’t this title a statement of the obvious? Aren’t all Playboy Playmates, almost by definition, nudes, nudity being one, if not the most important one, of the major requirements of the job? After all, who would buy Playboy’s Dressed Playmates? Would someone buy Playboy’s Dressed Playmates for the articles or would they have to admit they were spending their money on soft-core pictures of clothed women? The world wonders...well, maybe not.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING VAGUELY DIFFERENT: Federal guidelines regarding the use of ethanol in gasoline have gone into effect here in the US; from now on 10% of any gasoline purchase is ethanol. Now I want to help the American family farmer as much as the next guy, maybe more so, in fact, since I am all for giving people who want to get up at five in the morning to do chores and scoop up cow flop the opportunity to do just that. But let's face a certain degree of reality here; ethanol in gasoline is and was a priority of American agribusiness. These multinationals lobbied the farm state Congressional delegations mercilessly to get this thing passed into law. Having created the demand, of course, the merchants of grain will have to feed the American people's insatiable desire for ethanol. How long can it be before the United States becomes permanently dependent on supplies of foreign grain to meet the public's need for ethanol? And how long will it be before antiwar activists flood our nation's capital demanding NO BLOOD FOR CORN! as the Pentagon and the neocon aggressors plot to seize the grainlands of Australia, Argentina, and Russia?

Indeed, one can imagine hordes of literature professors expounding on how William Faulkner's Sanctuary, where in a impotent bootlegger named Popeye rapes a woman with a corncob is a grimly prophetical allegory of America's insatiable need for ethanol and what Amerikkkan agribusinesses will do to secure fresh corn producing land. One may even safely envision the women's movement denouncing the nation's dependence on such an obvious phallic symbol with their customary vigor and demanding that ethanol producers stop using corn to make their product and instead use such nonphallocentric plants as wheat or loganberries. I fully expect that corn chowder, corndogs, and cream of corn soup will be dropped from faculty menus all over the academy in order to avoid offending the sensibilities of campus feminists. However, amongst all the questions that have been asked about ethanol the two that are the most important to my mind have been ignored. First, why does my car get such lousy mileage using ethanolized gasoline, and second, given that 10% of my gas is now alcohol, does this mean my car is driving under the influence?

SPANISH ELECTIONS: What can you say? Sometimes the people dont know best. They have to learn the hard way. If the Spanish think they are going to get off the hook by dumping the PP, then they are deluding themselves. Osama lives by an Islamic Brezhnev Doctrine that says that what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine and what used to be yours and became mine and became yours again is going to be mine again, inshallah. Zapatero will have to appease, even in situations where it goes against his better judgement, as he has gained the highest political office in Spain under conditions that will allow him to do nothing else. I wonder how many more people, in Spain and outside of Spain, are going to die because of this.

OBITER RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS: So, let me see if I have this straight: a judge in Alabama is slapped down by his fellow judges for violating the law, while in San Francisco judges refuse to slap down a mayor who is violating the law. And I believe I am right in assuming that the judges in the first case disagree with their offending colleague, whereas the judges in San Francisco think that the mayor is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Now, if I remember right, arent judges supposed to enforce the law whether or not they agree with it? When a judge inserts a personal comment into a decision this insertion is called an obiter dictum; it is there usually to illustrate a point, it is not part of the decision, and it carries no legal significance. I am wonder how long it will be before people begin regarding judicial decisions as just so much personal opinion. The Left in this country will not like that at all; they prefer having judges impose the Left's agenda. It's so much easier than using the democratic process and having to convince the unwashed of the wisdom of their betters.

THE CANADIAN INVASIONS: I was not going to bring up the Oscars again; after all, when everything’s been said 157 times in as many languages what's left to say? But Mark Steyn’s column in the Telegraph today compels me to do so. Mr. Steyn points out that the provincial government of Nova Scotia is now officially discouraging, through the use of fines and other measures, people in the local media from referring to the mentally ill as nuts, fruitcakes, loonies, or any of the other labels the allegedly sane pin on those whose connection to reality might be more than a little bit tenuous.

I bring this up because Canada’s entry for Best Foreign Film, The Barbarian Invasions, actually won the Oscar in this category. I must confess that this title causes some small degree of cognitive dissonance, since I do not understand why a government so squeamish about referring to crazy people as loonies would categorize an entire group of people as barbarians. It is not at all the multicultural thing to do and one cannot imagine a good Canadian doing this sort of thing without apologizing profusely to everyone involved beforehand. One imagines Canadian Vikings, Vandals, and Visigoths as being very nice people on the whole, the sort of people who would go to an old lady’s house, knock on the door, and politely ask the owner, “I’m sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but do you mind if me and my mates loot, rape, and pillage here for a little bit, eh? We’ll clean up once we’re done, and I promise we won’t make too much noise.”

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS REPORTS THE FOLLOWING: ...But prominent scientists outside the space agency are beginning to ask a harder question: Does Mars represent what is out of whack in American science and exploration?


"So what if there is water up there?" said George Washington University sociologist Amitai Etzioni, who served as a domestic affairs adviser in the Carter White House.


"What difference does it make to anyone's life?" he said. "Will it grow any more food? Cure a disease? This doesn't even broaden our horizons."

What was the point of going to America? What was the point of Pythias traveling to Britain? What was the point of going to the moon? It doesn't surprise me that someone from the Carter White House poses such a question; a more parochial unimaginative group of people could not be found if you spent years on the quest. So why go to Mars? Because it is a great idea and we are a great people, and great people dare great things.

HAIL TO THE CRAPPER: My brother came up from the city yesterday while I was at work. I knew he was there the second I walked in the door because he'd used my bathroom only a few minutes before and as they say, the song was over but the melody lingered on. After I opened all my windows and Lysoled the hell out of my bathroom to get rid of the melody, which was louder and more noxious than his usual output, he opined that there was nothing in the world better than a good dump; that it made you feel better about yourself and everyone else and that it was good for you as well. At the time I was not inclined to give much credence to his paeans of praise to the act of evacuation; when one's olfactory nerves are being violently assaulted one has other things on one's mind; but he went on and on about it to the point where I had to wonder if he was on to something. Laxatives: key to world peace?

CALIFORNIA DREAMIN': The answer to this question is self-evident to me, but let me ask it anyway: given the decision of the California Supreme Court in Catholic Charities v. Superior Court of Sacramento County, (the California Supreme Court ruled that Catholic Charities had to include contraceptives as part of their health plan despite the Catholic Church’s teaching that contraception is immoral) does anyone doubt for a minute that sooner rather than later the state of California will be after the Church to perform abortions in Catholic hospitals and to pay for the abortions of poor women at health clinics run by the Church? To those who scoff that this could never happen, allow me to ask this: who is going to stop them? The First Amendment? By the time the courts are through reinterpreting the establishment clause objections to public policy issues on grounds of faith will be illegal, subject to the same sort of penalties as hate speech, shouting fire in a crowded theater, or smoking in a restaurant.

EMERGENCY RESPONSE:The folks in charge of our happy little burg’s 911 emergency response system, or so I am told by those who know, do not own a current map of our city or a complete list of our city’s streets, this lack of what might otherwise be considered a necessity coming after the expenditure of millions of dollars on the system itself and a host of delays in actually implementing it. Given this literal lack of guidance, persons needing emergency services should therefore set their houses on fire immediately after calling 911; the column of smoke will help the paramedics find you.

PASSION NEWS: On Fox News a couple of days ago, an associate of the late Khalid Muhammed, well known honky hater and pourer of gasoline upon racial fires, opined that Mel Gibson was a racist because it was a well known fact that Jesus was a black man. The gentleman held up a magazine with pictures of a black Jesus to prove his point; he did not hold up any photos of second century artwork portraying Jesus as a smooth shaven Greek or the semiblondish Gentile Jesus meek and mild much beloved by the Victorians, but that would be giving aid and comfort to the racial enemy and was otherwise beside the point of the whole exercise, which was, I think, to get on television and get some free publicity. In that the gentleman succeeded admirably.

OSCAR POSTSCRIPT: I always find it amazing that the scientific and technical awards are held weeks before the main show. I can understand why the Academy does this; the show is already too long as it is; but these guys are the people who make the main show possible. Everything done on the main show is the direct result of the scientific and technical knowledge of these people; without them a lot of Hollywood's top stars would have to learn how to act for a living or go back to wherever it is they came from in the first place.

DEAD BLOGS: I have added two old blogs of mine so people can read the posts I use when I cant think of anything to say now.

OSCAR, OSCAR, WHO WILL WIN?: Well, Oscar night has come and gone for another year, and last night was about par for the course in Oscar night tedium. Where is Janet Jackson when you really need her? Let's face it, folks, the Oscars are like sex or tennis: intensely interesting if you're involved but something of a bore to watch. The Lord of the Rings won everything in California that wasn't actually nailed down, and, as Billy Crystal pointed out, everyone in New Zealand either won an award or was thanked by someone who did. In fact, the only Kiwi anywhere not awarded anything or thanked for helping those who did win was Keisha Castle-Hughes, the girl up for Best Actress in Whale Rider. She was eleven or twelve when the film was made, and is now thirteen and on the brink of puberty, and she flew 8,000 miles from her home in New Zealand to California to have her self-esteem shattered on world wide television. If this causes zits she should sue the Academy for every dime they've got.

The memoriam montage was handled nicely, I thought. I wondered who was going to get top billing; usually the biggest star is the last one on the reel, but this past year Hollywood heavyweights were dropping like punchy fighters taking a dive. So the question of who was going to get the end of the montage was a bit dicey. Hope, Hepburn, or Peck? They solved the problem pretty neatly, I thought; Hope and Hepburn got their own montages, and Gregory Peck's montage led into the main memoriam. So who got pride of place, the last man standing, as it were? Donald O'Connor, God bless him. And dont think for a minute I missed the significance of putting Elia Kazan and Leni Riefenstahl back to back, although the real significance was this: Kazan was right and Riefenstahl was wrong. The memorial managed to skip a few people; it always does; but I suppose that this year that was understandable.

My biggest peeves about the nominations? Simple. Over the years a good number of actors have been nominated and won for biographical pictures. Gary Cooper for Sergeant York, Anne Bancroft for The Miracle Worker, George C. Scott for Patton, and, most recently, Julia Roberts for Erin Brockovich and Russell Crowe for A Beautiful Mind come immediately to mind. So the tradition is there; no one can deny it, which makes the denial of a nomination to the lead actor in Seabiscuit doubly troubling. Charlize Theron was honored for changing herself over totally in order to play Aileen Wuornos, yet the lead actor in Seabiscuit, who did not even get his name above the title on marquees across the length and breadth of this country, has not been honored by anyone anywhere for his performance as the horse who brought hope and not Crosby to millions of people during the depths of the Great Depression. I do not wish to raise a controversy here, but as the National Enquirer pointed out recently, the lead actor in Seabiscuit is not a thoroughbred at all, but rather one of the Budweiser Clydesdales; he had to go on the Atkins diet to get himself down to racing weight; and more than one film critic has detected a certain subtle racism in the stereotyping of Clydesdales as good for hard backbreaking labor and cracking a keg of brew and little else. The Academy should put a stop this sort of thing now.