What???

The "well spoken" Sen. Joe Biden discusses his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination in a long interview with a reporter from the NY Observer at http://www.observer.com/printpage.asp?iid=14092&ic=News+Story+1

Are they going to turn to Hillary Clinton?” Biden asked, lowering his voice to a hush to explain why Mrs. Clinton won’t win the election.

“Everyone in the world knows her,” he said. “Her husband has used every single legitimate tool in his behalf to lock people in, shut people down. Legitimate. And she can’t break out of 30 percent for a choice for Democrats? Where do you want to be? Do you want to be in a place where 100 percent of the Democrats know you? They’ve looked at you for the last three years. And four out of 10 is the max you can get?”

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

But—and the “but” was clearly inevitable—he doubts whether American voters are going to elect “a one-term, a guy who has served for four years in the Senate,” and added: “I don’t recall hearing a word from Barack about a plan or a tactic.”

(After the interview with Mr. Biden and shortly before press time, Mr. Obama proposed legislation that would require all American combat brigades to be withdrawn from Iraq by the end of March 2008.)

Eagle Lugging Deer Head Causes Power Blackout

This story is reminiscent of the 1984 general election in Alaska, which had a hotly contested ballot initiative on whether to move the capital from Juneau to Willow, north of Anchorage. I voted first thing in the morning, but a huge after-work turnout was anticipated. Then, about 4:00 p.m., there was a regional power outage in Anchorage and the Mat-Su valley, which lasted for about 8 or 10 hours. Voting was much reduced in the area, which was a stronghold of the pro-move forces. Immediately there were mutterings about conspiracy, which were not quelled by reports that it was unlucky ravens who had shorted the main transmission lines from the Beluga power plant.

At least in Juneau, the eagle did not interfere with an election.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070129/ap_on_re_us/eagle_power_outage

JUNEAU, Alaska - About 10,000 Juneau residents briefly lost power after a bald eagle lugging a deer head crashed into transmission lines.


"You have to live in Alaska to have this kind of outage scenario," said Gayle Wood, an Alaska Electric Light & Power spokeswoman. "This is the story of the overly ambitious eagle who evidently found a deer head in the landfill."

The bird, weighed down by the deer head, apparently failed to clear the transmission lines, she said. A repair crew found the eagle dead, the deer head nearby.

The power was out for less than 45 minutes Sunday.

Vanderbilt and John Edwards

I found a great post by Dean Barnett at http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/. Barnett has some wry comments on John Edwards' new 28,000 square foot house in North Carolina, noting that this falls short of the 60,000 square feet of the Vanderbilt estate "The Breakers" at Asheville.

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) What about the house’s details? The Breakers, according to Wikipedia, had things “like a 50’ by 50’ great hall marked by six doors which are limestone figure groups celebrating humanity's progress in art, science, and industry: Galileo, representing science, Dante, representing literature, Apollo, representing the arts, Mercury, representing speed and commerce, Richard Morris Hunt, representing architecture and Karl Bitter, representing sculpture.” Surely Edwards can’t compete with that.

Well, he’s trying. According to John Carrington of Carolina Online, the humble Edwards abode will have an indoor recreation building that contains a basketball court, a squash court, two stages, a bedroom, kitchen, bathrooms, swimming pool, a four-story tower, and a room designated “John’s Lounge.” The latter is kind of appropriate when you think about it. While the Vanderbilts paid tribute to Dante, Apollo and Mercury, Edwards will pay tribute to himself.

5) What kind of things do you think will happen in “John’s Room?”

I imagine the Lord of the Manor sitting there drinking snifters of ancient Cognac or Brandy bemoaning the plight of America’s underclass to anyone who will listen,

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) This whole FAQ seems like a cheap shot. Big deal. We’re supposed to believe you’re suddenly against conspicuous consumption?

I’m not. Quite to the contrary, I conspicuously consume as much as my meager means allow me to. Furthermore, conspicuous consumption is good for the economy. The design and construction of the Edwards house is no doubt employing dozens of artisans, craftsmen and day laborers.

But I’ve always felt that Edwards is a phony. I don’t call him an empty suit – that’s too generous. I refer to him as a suit filled with anti-matter. It’s a bit hard to believe that someone who is actually obsessed with the plight of America’s downtrodden would devote so much energy and so many resources to building a home fit for a modern Medici. I just don’t buy it.

Procrastinators, let's wait up!

John Tierney, in his science blog at the New York Times site, discusses procrastination--
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/procrastinate-now/

Tierney quotes an interesting paper by Piers Steel, noting

as structure continues to decrease, the opportunity for workers to procrastinate will concomitantly increase. Furthermore, the prevalence and availability of temptation, for example, in the forms of computer gaming or internet messaging, should continue to exacerbate the problem of procrastination. There are simply more activities with desirable features competing for our attention.

There is even an online procrastinator quiz--

http://www.procrastinus.com/

I really need to get around to TAKING that quiz...

A Sad Day for Grad Students

Momufuku Ando, the inventor of instant ramen, has died in Japan at the age of 96. I could not possibly estimate the number of servings of instant ramen that I ingested in my college days. Of course, backpackers as well are forever in his debt.

Ando is a classic example of the entrepreneur who succeeds with a seemingly basic, mundane idea, which was only obvious after he came up with it. The Economist has an excellent obituary, at
http://www.economist.com/obituary/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8548461

The cult was global. In 2005, 86 billion servings of instant noodles were eaten around the world. And all this began with a vision, as such things do. One cold night in 1957, walking home from his salt-making factory in Osaka, in Japan, Mr Ando saw white clouds of steam in the street, and a crowd of people gathering. They were waiting for noodles to be cooked to order in vats of boiling water, and were prepared to wait a long time. Why not make it easier? thought Mr Ando. And why not try to do it himself?

His life until then had been a bit of a mess. He had sold dress fabrics, following in the footsteps of the grandparents who had brought him up. He had sold engine-parts, prefabricated houses, magic-lantern projectors, socks. He had presided over a credit association, which had gone bust, and tried to launch a scholarship scheme for poor students, which had landed him in jail for tax evasion. But now the “steadily rising” clouds (or possibly, as in the cartoon on the homepage of his Instant Noodle Museum in Osaka, one fluffy white cloud with a kettle dangling from it) had shown him the Way.

The road was long. It took a year, working night and day in a shed in his back garden, to find the secret of bringing noodles back to life. Mr Ando cooked quantities, but had trouble getting the moisture out and keeping any flavouring in. He sprayed them with chicken soup from a watering can, and festooned the shed with them. The secret, picked up from his wife as she cooked vegetable tempura, was to flash-fry the cooked noodles in palm oil. This made them “magic

”.

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n 1958 instant noodles went on the market, yellowish wormy bricks in cellophane bags, and were laughed at by fresh-noodle makers all over Japan. They were just a high-tech craze, costing six times as much as the fresh stuff; they would never catch on. By the end of the first year Mr Ando had sold 13m bags and had attracted a dozen competitors. He never looked back. In 1971 came noodles in heat-proof polystyrene cups, so that the hungry did not even need to get their bowls out of the cupboard. The Japanese voted instant noodles their most important 20th-century invention, Sony Walkmans notwithstanding. Mr Ando's firm, Nissin, became a $3 billion global enterprise.

But it was never just a company, and instant-noodlemaking never just an industry. The three sayings of Mr Ando became a philosophy of life:
Peace will come when people have food.
Eating wisely will enhance beauty and health.
The creation of food will serve society.

Mr Ando practised what he preached. He ate Chikin Ramen, his original flavour of noodles, almost every day until he died. Though sceptics pointed out that they were loaded with fat, salt and monosodium glutamate, he looked bonny and spry. Seabeds across Asia were littered with plastic noodle cups; but that was not his

fault.

His TV advertising, meanwhile, showed what instant noodles were really all about. When the world turned to eating them, barriers fell, children laughed and people loved each other. All liberating revolutions sprang from humanity's desire to gulp down steaming Cup Noodles whenever there was a chance. In 2006 a Japanese astronaut, on board the space shuttle Discovery, supped Mr Ando's noodles from a handy vacuum pack. He appeared on the TV ads weightless and smiling, his enlightenment complete.

Waltzing Matilda

Mark Steyn has a great post discussing some national anthems of former British colonies, and the vapidity of recent compositions, drained of any spirit by the dead hand of political correctness, at his site, steynonline.com
Best of all, Steyn has some good background on "Waltzing Matilda":

As the metropolitan reaction to Steve Irwin’s death reminded us, not all Australians want to be celebrated for the blokey camaraderie of the bush. No doubt it’s very frustrating when Sydney has so many fine Thai restaurants and firebreathing imams to be continually cheered in popular culture for boomerangs and kangaroos and mates and cobbers and larrikins. But, musically, you can’t beat something with nothing, and “Advance Australia Fair” is one big zero. We’ve been frolicking down the “W” end of the folk-song index – “Wallaby Stew”, “Wild Colonial Boy” – and we’ve only just reached the biggest “W” of all:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong
Under the shade of a coolibah tree
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

Waltzing Matilda
Waltzing Matilda
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?
And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boiled
Who’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?

The poet Banjo Paterson is traditionally credited with the song in the form we know it today, though some scholars continue to question this. Still, the song we know today began life in January 1895, when Paterson was visiting the Macpherson property at Dagworth Station in Queensland, north-west of Winton. Also visiting, from Victoria, was Christina Macpherson, who'd come home to spend Christmas with her father and brothers after the death of their mother. One day Christina played Paterson a tune she'd heard at the races in western Victoria, and the poet said he thought he could put words to it. The tune is said to have been "Thou Bonnie Wood of Craigielea", but there was also an 18th century English marching song called “The Bold Fusilier”. Paterson claimed never to have heard the earlier lyric but its pattern is so similar it’s impossible to believe that “Matilda” wasn’t laid out to the scheme of the earlier number:

A gay Fusilier was marching down through Rochester
Bound for the war in the Low Country
And he cried as he tramped through the dear streets of Rochester
Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?

Who’ll be a sojer?
Who’ll be a sojer?
Who’ll be a sojer for Marlb’ro with me?

Marlborough being the Duke thereof: Winston Churchill’s forebear. “Cried as he tramped”? “Sang as he watched”? Don’t tell me that’s not a conscious evocation. Nonetheless, “Waltzing Matilda” is a splendid improvement on the original. If you're a non-Australian who learned the song as a child, chances are you loved singing it long before you had a clue what the hell was going on. What’s a swagman? What’s a billabong? Why’s it under a coolibah tree? Who cares? It’s one of the most euphonious songs ever written, and the fact that the euphonies are all explicitly Australian and the words recur in no other well known song is all the more reason why “Matilda” should have been upgraded to official anthem status.

And yes, a “swagman” is a hobo, and this one steals a “jumbuck” (sheep), but he ends up drowning, which gives the song a surer moral resolution than most similar material. Yet in a sense that’s over-thinking it. It’s not about the literal meaning of the words, but rather the bigger picture that opens up when they’re set to the notes of that great rollicking melody: the big sky and empty horizon and blessed climate, all the possibilities of an island continent, a literally boundless liberation from the Victorian tenements and laborers’ cottages of cramped little England. Few of us would wish to be an actual swagman with a tucker bag, but the song is itself a kind of musical swagman with a psychological tucker bag, a rowdy vignette that captures the size of the land. One early version of it went “Rovin’ Australia, rovin’ Australia, who’ll come a-rovin’ Australia with me” – which is a lousy lyric, but accurately describes what the song does.

One sign of the song’s muscular quality is the number of variations. Of the rock’n’roll crowd’s monkeying around with it, I think I’ll stick with Bill Haley and the Comets’ goofy “Rockin’ Matilda”. The Pogues-Tom Waits approach – “And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, “Tom Traubert’s Blues” – seems to me to glum up the works unnecessarily. To use it for the story of a soldier who loses his legs at Gallipoli is unduly reductive: It’s too good a real marching song to be recast as an ironic marching song. I don’t know whether today’s diggers march to “Matilda” in Afghanistan and Iraq and East Timor but it’s one of the greatest marching songs ever, and today as a century ago it remains the great Australian contribution to the global songbook:

Waltzing Matilda
Waltzing Matilda
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me
And his ghost may be heard as you pass by that billabong
You’ll come a-waltzing Matilda with me.

Happy Australia Day!

Soviet Humor

Law Professor Eugene Volokh, at http://volokh.com relates a classic bit of Soviet humor:

Old Soviet Joke:

The Soviets talked a great deal about "Druzhba Narodov," which is to say "Friendship of the Peoples," though in fact the Peoples weren't really that Friendly to each other.

So the joke, of which I was very recently reminded: What is the Friendship of the Peoples? It's when the Georgian walks hand in hand with the Armenian, and with the Ukrainian, and with the Russian, and they all go to beat up the Jew.

More great Soviet-era humor is at http://www.johndclare.net/Russ12_Jokes.htm

and at

http://www.balticsworldwide.com/soviet_communist_humor_jokes.htm