Loralee Wright with Ambergris

The Australian Wright family, in the course of a fishing trip were walking on a beach near Streaky Bay on South Australia’s west coast, when they found a peculiar large object, which they eventually decided to take home. Research on the Internet, and a visit to a matine biologist, in the course of the next few weeks etablished that they had found a 14.75 kg (that’s 32.5 lbs to Americans) lump of Ambergris, a rare and valuable natural substance cast up by sperm whales, and used in the manufacture of perfumes worth $20-65 a gram. The beach souvenir is thought be worth as much as $295,000.

Indian Express—ABC West Coast

The best can be the enemy of the good. I’m sure that we all appreciate N.Z.’s contributions at the Truth Laid Bear, but efforts at making the system fiddle-proof, which began late last year have produced paralysis for about a month now. Most bloggers experienced dizzying evolutionary regresssion, followed by an inexplicable return to something which looked a like one’s old position in the Great Chain of Being, but the link count seems to have remained broken. My own precious small number of links from Glenn Reynolds and Power Line stayed missing, and what Technorati counts as around 200 comes out as 119.

N.Z. ought to figure that however you change the rules, you can never eliminate the game, as Larry the Liquidator (played by Danny DeVito) observed in the 1991 film Other People’s Money. There are a lot of bloggers out there, and whatever method of automated link measuring is used to keep score, some people will get obsessive about scoring, and someone’s ingenuity will find a way to game the system for extra links. C’est la guerre. Who cares? Most of us are content to inch our way up the ladder without unbecoming haste. On the whole, I bet most of us would be content to see TTLB operating normally. My advice is: just put it back the way it was.
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PJM may not yet have replaced the New York Times as the news source of record, but it’s time to get over the carping and hysteria. PJM is, at this, point, not bad. I read it. Over time it improves. Someday it may be hot stuff; and, who knows? maybe Frank J. will get his yacht in the end, but please let’s all the rest of us be good sports about the whole thing.

For God’s sake, kindly pull the plug on the pathetic PJM Death Pool, which is itself seriously moribund. Time to finish it off.
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Podcasting.

I understand the impulse. The thought of doing one myself, interviewing a celebrity, crossed my own vainglorious mind just the other day. But I concluded upon reflection that it’s a bad idea. There are some bloggers I like, Ann Althouse and Glenn Reynolds, for instance, who do podcasts. I’d love to hear what they have to say, but podcasts are just too slow, too time-consuming. Most of us read a lot faster than anyone can talk.

I wonder: Do you suppose it would be possible to use voice recognition software to capture and produce transcripts of podcasts by eminent blog personalities, which might then be posted as texts for the I’d-rather-be-reading crowd? A choice would be nice.

Linked by Professor Bainbridge. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

I’m a Ferrari 360 Modena!

You’ve got it all. Power, passion, precision, and style. You’re sensuous, exotic, and temperamental. Sure, you’re expensive and high-maintenance, but you’re worth it.————————————————————————-

I think most of my friends would say I’m really a Morgan three-wheeler of pre-war vintage.

I am sufficiently in a foul humor today about the left that I could be persuaded to gleefully anesthetize the lot of them, and drop them all out of airplanes into the Pacific. I’m planning to blog sparingly, and on non-political matters for a bit until my temper improves.

Just yesterday, I dropped in on YARGB, and found a posting by Seneca the Younger linking Tyler Cowen’s survey of recordings of Don Giovanni.

Having my own very decided opinions on the subject ï¼u02c6though our household has never really recovered from the trauma associated with the transition from LP recordings to CDs, and we abandoned any effort to stay courant years ago)ï¼u0152I was quite interested in reading what someone (inevitably) younger and more in touch with developments in recent years, would have to say. I was particularly interested in seeing which versions made the list.

I was very pleased to see that Mr. Cowen was well informed, and basically sound. I thought his opinions came close to being spot on, but I differ with him on a small number of points:

The Klemperer Magic Flute is a version of serious merit, and I think it deserves a high rank among versions of that opera, but it is the historic late 1930s Beecham recording, the first, which remains the best.

In the first place, Sir Thomas Beecham was one of the two greatest conducter interpreters of Mozart of the last century, the other being Bruno Walther. Beecham’s lucid and precise rationalism is equally appropriate to Mozart as Walther’s warm Romanticism. And Beecham’s conducting was accompanied in the historic first recording by an impossible-to-equal group of singers. Gerhard Hüsch is the best of all possible Papagenos. Helge Rosvaenge, Tiana Lemnitz, and Erna Berger were all also extraordinary performers of legendary stature. Klemperer is pretty much at his best in his version, but I’m afraid Thomas Beecham’s best day is a lot better than Otto Klemperer’s best day. Walter Berry is a fine singer, but Hüsch is a demigod.

Cowen correctly identifies the best Giovanni as the Fürtwangler 1953 Salzburg Festspiele recording, with Cesare Siepi, Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, Walter Berry, Otto Edelmann, Elizabeth Grümmer, and Raffaele Arie, but he is somewhat agnostic about the best choice among Fürtwangler Salzburg recordings of different years. I know two of them well. The 1953 was available long ago (via Discophile on St. Mark’s Place) on the luxury pirate BJR label. The 1954 could be gotten on the humble Everest label. Cowen’s friends are right: Fürtwangler was better in the 1953 recording, bringing a completely passionate identification to the music, resulting in an emphatically right momentum.

Best of all, Mr. Cowen’s Amazon link went to a page on which this magnificent recording was accompanied by a review written for Amazon by Jeff Lipscomb of Sacramento, California. Jeff Lipscomb is a find. He is a superb reviewer working on the basis of a serious listening background with excellent taste. I have not yet had time to read all 30 pages of Lipscomb reviews, but I know already that my music collection and Amazon’s bottom line will both soon be richer for these.

Yesterday, surfing around the Blogosphere, I found that Stop the ACLU (from a perspective on the political Right) is listing Best New Blogs of 2005.

Meanwhile, Wampum (from a perspective decidedly on the Left) is posting the first voting round for the 2005 Koufax Awards: (some (120+/-) Blogs Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.

Opinions differ. I do like many of the blogs on Stop the ACLU’s list myself, but there is one truly exceptional new blog, clearly deserving of wider recognition, which I have decided to name Never Yet Melted’s Best New Blog of 2005.

YARGB (Yet Another Really Great Blog) – Flares into Darkness, founded September 16, 2005, combines that great title with a superb selection of postings provided by an extremely talented group of twenty-four (!) contributors. Despite YARGB’s being hardly older than this blog, once I discovered its existence, I soon found it as reliable in quality as the members of the select group of blogs I bookmarked long ago under the label: “Essential Blogs.” I try to avoid parasitically linking material from exactly the same blogs day after day, but I have found I can count on finding at least one item I like well enough to link just about everyday on YARGB.

Honda commercial. Now that is a talented choir!

Clarice Feldman predicts that members of the MSM who helped the Pouting Spooks play Gotcha! on conservative policy adversaries in the Bush Administration in L’Affaire Plame will soon be hauled into court via subpoenas by Scooter Libby’s defense team, and find themselves on the hot seat, where they will be forced to divulge independent knowledge of Valerie Plame’s occupation (Take that Nicholas Kristoff) and expose other information sources, or—like Judith Miller—face penalties for contempt.

Right Wing News emailed more than 230 “right of center” bloggers and asked for a 1 to 5 list of candidates they would most like to see being the Republican nominee for President in 2008 and the list of candidates they’d least like to see nominated.

(Votes were weighted as follows:
1) Worth 2 points
2 or 3) Worth 1.5 points
4 or 5) Worth 1 point)

Results:

Top Most Desired:

1) Condoleeza Rice (65.5)
2) Rudy Giuliani (58.0)
3) George Allen (42.0)
4) Newt Gingrich (32.0)
5) Dick Cheney (26.0)

Top Least Desired:

1) John McCain (74.5)
2) Chuck Hagel (55.5)
3) Bill Frist (43.5)
4) George Pataki (33.0)
5) Jeb Bush (22.0)
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Frankly, I do not see how anybody who claims to be conservative could consider supporting Guiliani in the remotest of circumstances. My own list would look like:

Most Desired:

1) Dick Cheney
2) Newt Gingrich
3) Is there anybody else genuinely conservative, articulate, and reasonably intelligent?

Least Desired:

1) I wouldn’t have thought of Chuck Hagel as a potential Republican choice, but if he’s on the list, he gets my number 1 vote
2) John McCain
3) Rudy Giuliani
4) George Pataki

Iraqi Shiite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr visited Tehran over the weekend, and pledged his support and that of his so-called Mahdi Army to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s regime, if it is attacked.

There must have been some great minds along the Larry Wilkerson lines restraining the US military commanders from dealing with this noisy self-appointed holy man when his personal militia began acting up in the early days of the US occupation. al-Sadr actually led uprisings against US forces already in 2004 in Najaf, but was saved by taking shelter in a mosque while Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani negotiated to save him.

US policy in the War on Terror has been too often influenced by namby pamby-ism and too frequently has featured undue deference to the bigotry and superstitions of Mohammedanist fanatics. Can anyone imagine the US military command supplying copies of Mein Kampf to Waffen SS prisoners during WWII, and requiring POW camp guards to treat the Holy Bible of Nazism with respect? Would we have allowed some particularly belligerent Gauleiter in Bavaria to retain his own Werwolf resistance militia? Weakness in dealing with these kinds of troublemakers only leads to greater insolence, and further and worse trouble down the road.

Iran Deploys Human Shields to Protect Nuclear Bomb Facility

Isfahan – Iran on Sunday gave a fresh show of its determination to press on with its disputed nuclear programme, enrolling about 1 000 athletes to form a human shield in front of a key nuclear facility.

The demonstration, which took place in front of just a handful of journalists, was held under winter sunshine outside the main gate of a uranium conversion facility near the historic central city of Isfahan.

“Since we have reached this technology indigenously and with our own scientists, we will safeguard it at any cost,” the director of the facility, Behrouz Samani, said at the event.

Around him were about 1 000 sportsmen and women of all ages and from across Iran, who were wearing free T-shirts brandishing the slogan: “Nuclear Energy is our Legitimate Right.”

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IRNA, his official news agency reports that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Damascus yesterday told a radical Palestinian group that Middle East has become “the locus of the final war” between Muslims and the West .

Kathimerini reports:

Recent findings from a mass grave in the Ancient Cemetery of Kerameikos in central Athens show typhoid fever may have caused the plague of Athens, ending centuries of speculation about what kind of disease killed a third of the city’s population and contributed to the end of its Golden Age.

Examined by a group of Greek scientists coordinated by Dr Manolis Papagrigorakis of Athens University’s School of Dentistry, the findings provide clear evidence that Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi was present in the dental pulp of teeth recovered in remains from the mass grave.

The plague that decimated the population of Athens in 430-426 BC was a deciding factor in the outcome of the Peloponnesian Wars, ending the Golden Age of Pericles and Athens’s predominance in the Mediterranean.

Thucydides [2:47-54]:

In the first days of summer the Lacedaemonians and their allies, with two-thirds of their forces as before, invaded Attica.., and sat down and laid waste the country. Not many days after their arrival in Attica the plague first began to show itself among the Athenians. It was said that it had broken out in many places previously in the neighborhood of Lemnos and elsewhere; but a pestilence of such extent and mortality was nowhere remembered. Neither were the physicians at first of any service, ignorant as they were of the proper way to treat it, but they died themselves the most thickly, as they visited the sick most often; nor did any human art succeed any better. Supplications in the temples, divinations, and so forth were found equally futile, till the overwhelming nature of the disaster at last put a stop to them altogether.

It first began, it is said, in the parts of Ethiopia above Egypt, and thence descended into Egypt and Libya and into most of the king’s country. Suddenly falling upon Athens, it first attacked the population in Piraeus,—which was the occasion of their saying that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the reservoirs, there being as yet no wells there—and afterwards appeared in the upper city, when the deaths became much more frequent. All speculation as to its origin and its causes, if causes can be found adequate to produce so great a disturbance, I leave to other writers, whether lay or professional; for myself, I shall simply set down its nature, and explain the symptoms by which perhaps it may be recognized by the student, if it should ever break out again. This I can the better do, as I had the disease myself, and watched its operation in the case of others…

As a rule, however, there was no ostensible cause; but people in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath. These symptoms were followed by sneezing and hoarseness, after which the pain soon reached the chest, and produced a hard cough. When it fixed in the stomach, it upset it; and discharges of bile of every kind named by physicians ensued, accompanied by very great distress. In most cases also an ineffectual retching followed, producing violent spasms, which in some cases ceased soon after, in others much later. Externally the body was not very hot to the touch, nor pale in its appearance, but reddish, livid, and breaking out into small pustules and ulcers. But internally it burned so that the patient could not bear to have on him clothing or linen even of the very lightest description; or indeed to be otherwise than stark naked. What they would have liked best would have been to throw themselves into cold water; as indeed was done by some of the neglected sick, who plunged into the rain-tanks in their agonies of unquenchable thirst; though it made no difference whether they drank little or much. Besides this, the miserable feeling of not being able to rest or sleep never ceased to torment them. The body meanwhile did not waste away so long as the distemper was at its height, but held out to a marvel against its ravages; so that when they succumbed, as in most cases, on the seventh or eighth day to the internal inflammation, they had still some strength in them. But if they passed this stage, and the disease descended further into the bowels, inducing a violent ulceration there accompanied by severe diarrhea, this brought on a weakness which was generally fatal. For the disorder first settled in the head, ran its course from thence through the whole of the body, and even where it did not prove mortal, it still left its mark on the extremities; for it settled in the privy parts, the fingers and the toes, and many escaped with the loss of these, some too with that of their eyes. Others again were seized with an entire loss of memory on their first recovery, and did not know either themselves or their friends.

But while the nature of the distemper was such as to baffle all description, and its attacks almost too grievous for human nature to endure, it was still in the following circumstance that its difference from all ordinary disorders was most clearly shown. All the birds and beasts that prey upon human bodies, either abstained from touching them (though there were many lying unburied), or died after tasting them. In proof of this, it was noticed that birds of this kind actually disappeared; they were not about the bodies, or indeed to be seen at all. But of course the effects which I have mentioned could best be studied in a domestic animal like the dog.

Such then, if we pass over the varieties of particular cases, which were many and peculiar, were the general features of the distemper. Meanwhile the town enjoyed an immunity from all the ordinary disorders; or if any case occurred, it ended in this. Some died in neglect, others in the midst of every attention. No remedy was found that could be used as a specific; for what did good in one case, did harm in another. Strong and weak constitutions proved equally incapable of resistance, all alike being swept away, although dieted with the utmost precaution. By far the most terrible feature in the malady was the dejection which ensued when anyone felt himself sickening, for the despair into which they instantly fell took away their power of resistance, and left them a much easier prey to the disorder; besides which, there was the awful spectacle of men dying like sheep, through having caught the infection in nursing each other. This caused the greatest mortality. On the one hand, if they were afraid to visit each other, they perished from neglect; indeed many houses were emptied of their inmates for want of a nurse: on the other, if they ventured to do so, death was the consequence. This was especially the case with such as made any pretensions to goodness: honor made them unsparing of themselves in their attendance in their friends’ houses, where even the members of the family were at last worn out by the moans of the dying, and succumbed to the force of the disaster. Yet it was with those who had recovered from the disease that the sick and the dying found most compassion. These knew what it was from experience, and had now no fear for themselves; for the same man was never attacked twice—never at least fatally. And such persons not only received the congratulations of others, but themselves also, in the elation of the moment, half entertained the vain hope that they were for the future safe from any disease whatsoever.

An aggravation of the existing calamity was the influx from the country into the city, and this was especially felt by the new arrivals. As there were no houses to receive them, they had to be lodged at the hot season of the year in stifling cabins, where the mortality raged without restraint. The bodies of dying men lay one upon another, and half-dead creatures reeled about the streets and gathered round all the fountains in their longing for water. The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves were full of corpses of persons that had died there, just as they were; for as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became utterly careless of everything, whether sacred or profane. All the burial rites before in use were entirely upset, and they buried the bodies as best they could. Many from want of the proper appliances, through so many of their friends having died already, had recourse to the most shameless sepultures: sometimes getting the start of those who had raised a pile, they threw their own dead body upon the stranger’s pyre and ignited it; sometimes they tossed the corpse which they were carrying on the top of another that was burning, and so went off.

Nor was this the only form of lawless extravagance which owed its origin to the plague. Men now coolly ventured on what they had formerly done in a corner, and not just as they pleased, seeing the rapid transitions produced by persons in prosperity suddenly dying and those who before had nothing succeeding to their property. So they resolved to spend quickly and enjoy themselves, regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. Perseverance in what men called honor was popular with none, it was so uncertain whether they would be spared to attain the object; but it was settled that present enjoyment, and all that contributed to it, was both honorable and useful. Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them. As for the first, they judged it to be just the same whether they worshipped them or not, as they saw all alike perishing; and for the last, no one expected to live to be brought to trial for his offences, but each felt that a far severer sentence had been already passed upon them all and hung ever over their heads, and before this fell it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little.

Such was the nature of the calamity, and heavily did it weigh on the Athenians.

Justice David Souter voted with the Supreme Court majority in the infamous case of Kelo v. New London, which upheld the right of city government to use eminent domain to take away a individual’s property for private development.

On the principle of “what’s sauce for the goose,” Silicon Valley Objectivist Logan Darrow Clements took advantage of the law in Souter’s home state of New Hampshire to file a petition for Mr. Justice Souter’s hometown of Weare to take his property for a development project consisting of the erection of a “Lost Liberty Hotel.”

Voters in Weare will decide the fate of Souter’s colonial house on March 14th.

Dr. Rusty Shackleford at Jawa Report celebrates his blog’s anniversary by reporting its role in bringing about the arrest of Jordanian-born Mohammed Radwan Obeid who had fraudulently obtained US citizenship, and was engaged in attempting to organize a terrorist cell using a free computer in a Miami County, Ohio public library.

Hat tip to PJM.

Steve Janke of Angry in the Great White North reports from the Canadian election campaign front:

Liberal candidate to veteran: Get out of Canada!

At the Pembroke Outdoor Sportsman’s Club, Liberal candidate Don Lindsay revealed a portion of the Liberal platform related to compensation for gun owners should their legally owned weapons be confiscated. Essentially, if you think you are owed something, think again.

To be even more precise, if you think the Liberals owe you something, you should hit the road:

Don Lindsay’s self destruction continued when club member and Canadian Veteran George Tompkins stood to ask the candidates his question. “If the handgun ban goes forward. What plan would your party offer to compensate those of us who legally own the guns that would be confiscated?” To which Lindsay replied “Sir America is our neighbor not our nation, if you elect a society that talks about that kind of perspective I suggest that perhaps you go there!”

Maybe Lindsay thought grabbing [Conservative] Paul Martin’s line from the leader’s debate would work for him.

Of course, Linday’s comments don’t even make much sense. If the majority of voters do elect a government with that sort of policy, then wouldn’t it make sense that Lindsay be the one looking for somewhere else to live? I don’t think he needs to. He is welcome to stay, of course.

I don’t think people should leave for holding different opinions, and voting based on those opinions.

Too bad he couldn’t extend that courtesy to a man who fought for this country.

It’s moments like these that a Conservative candidate lives for.

Hat tip to PJM.