Anyone Can Be President

For years I have been trying to remember the name of the President of Israel who, in his memoir, describes being left alone in a room with President Reagan, who is obviously senile. I've come up with the name: Chiam Herzog--whose father was the Chief Rabbi of Ireland.

Mary in a Tree Stump

In today's paper I read that "thousands of Irish Catholics have flocked this week to a County Limerick church to pray at the stump of a recently cut willow that many observers say has the silhouette of the Virgin Mary." As someone of mostly Irish descent, I wish I could join them.

I know that some sceptics will be asking how Irish Catholics can identify the silhouette of the Virgin Mary when no photographs or genuine portraits of Mary exist. People say that we can't know what Mary looked like, but in fact we have obvious clues. We know Mary was dark and very short,* for example. Jews 2000 years ago had black hair, olive skin and dark eyes. We know that her son, Jesus, was charismatic, and it's likely he inherited his mother's attractive features--she, after all, drew the attentions of what might modestly be called the All-Time-Consort. It seems entirely likely that Mary had roughly the same astonishing silhouette as Selma Hayek, recently seen on TV in the show 30 ROCK.

* We learned from ancient writings that Moses was quite tall for a Jew of his era, standing approximately 5'4" in height. Jesus was, according to tradition, slightly shorter, and John the Baptist reportedly stood a full head shorter than Jesus. Mary's eyes came to the shoulder of John the Baptist, which would have made her (in contemporary terms) well over 44 inches in stature.

Blog Banned in China by Mistake

Chris O'Sullivan, traveling in the Far East, reports that my blog has been banned in China and partly translated in Japan. I have no idea why they bothered--it must be some automatic stuff performed by computers with a lot of time on their software.

Actually I have great respect for China and Japan, particularly for ancient rebels like Zhuangzi.

The Somali Pirates

When a country has a fragile economy and an unprotected coastline (and seamen out of work), the result can be piracy--with the pirates sponsored by powerful leaders in the port cities. Nearly everyone in port will profit from the unregulated black-market profits. The pirates deliver cheap goods and money to the power elite and spend money (like drunken sailors?) in the local hotels, cafes, bars and bordellos. This is, more of less, the story of the Somali pirates, Blackbeard and Captain Kidd.

During the heyday of the Caribbean pirates (1660 to 1725), nearly all of them had close ties to top government officials on land, who, for a fee, commissioned them to plunder. Following the earlier example of Francis Drake, some pirates/privateers achieved knighthoods. The murderous Blackbeard, Edward Teach, was sponsored by Governor Charles Eden of His Majesty's Colony of North Carolina, who kept the "privateer" informed of attempts to capture him. Captain Kidd was the protege (even the creation) of Lord Bellomont, governor of Massachusetts.

My favorite sponsor, though, was Sir John Killigrew, vice admiral of the English navy and holder of Pendennis Castle in Cornwall. "Given his position in local affairs it was only natural that the crown would confer upon him the singular honor of leading the commission to catalog and capture pirates along the English coast. Sir John didn't have to look far: his son earned a living from the pirate trade, his grandfather had been a notorious old pirate in Suffolk, and his own mother was alleged once to have led a boarding party" (see: THE PIRATES PACT by Douglas Burgress, Jr., McGraw Hill).

Captured pirates were usually found innocent by juries made up the tradesmen who serviced the pirate fleets.

I have nothing good to say about pirates, but I do marvel at the misfortune of the single Somali pirate captured by a country that has had no share in his profits.

thinking clearly on global warming

As Stephen Colbert put it, Michael Jackson has just died and no one is thinking clearly. Nevertheless . . . .

A friend recently directed me to a vegan web site that claimed that cattle are the main source of global warming. If that is the case, then our duty is clear. We must eat these dangerous cows as quickly as possible. Six billion people eating beef twice a day would, by my count, eliminate all cattle within 17 months, solving half the global warming problem.

The other half could be handled by not eating plant life. Vegetables, it is well established, pull destructive elements out of the air and store it safely in roots. Every time we pull up a carrot and chew on it, we begin a process that ends in releasing methane into the night sky.

I'm reminded of an environmental slogan from the 1960s: "Help Save the Planet--Kill Yourself."