How Make A Python Explode

Apparently, all you have to do is feed it an alligator.

An unusual clash between a 6-foot (1.8m) alligator and a 13-foot (3.9m) python has left two of the deadliest predators dead in Florida's swamps.

The Burmese python tried to swallow its fearsome rival whole but then exploded.

The remains of the two giant reptiles were found by astonished rangers in the Everglades National Park.

The rangers say the find suggests that non-native Burmese pythons might even challenge alligators' leading position in the food chain in the swamps.

The python's remains were found with the victim's tail protruding from its burst midsection. The head of the python was missing. 

Of course, you must realize what this means: alligators can detonate at will. There is also trouble between the factions of the reptile legions of the Animal Uprising™. 

The Naked Launch

A German author is set to launch his latest book – with a nude reading.

A book about naturism in East Germany is to spice up its publicity tour – with a naked book reading.

East Germans became famous for "Freikoerperkultur" (FKK) before the fall of the Berlin Wall, happily stripping off at summer nudist camps.

Now author Thomas Kupfermann has written a book about the subject, compiling snapshots and memories from leading lights in the naturist movement.

The sold-out reading today at a bookshop in north-eastern Germany will apparently be shrouded in heavy curtains to prevent over-curious onlookers ogling the audience. 

We here at Blue Crab Boulevard would never stoop to such naked opportunism. The upholstery on the office chair is much too scratchy. Not that we've checked. Honest.

The Smoke Pixel-Filled Room

The Politico reports that a virtual smoke-filled room is in operation, with Democratic party 'elites' busily deciding how to derail Hillary Clinton and confirm Barack Obama as the party's candidate.

Hoping to avoid a summer-long bloodbath for the Democratic presidential nomination, some party leaders such as Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen have urged a convention of superdelegates in June, after the caucuses and primaries are over.

The idea sounds exotic, but recent public declarations and Politico interviews with top Democratic officials have made clear that something like what Bredesen proposed is already underway — not with a big meeting but with an intensifying series of exchanges among party elites.

The early voting in this virtual convention is bad news for Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her hope that Democratic leaders will settle the nomination is starting to come true — with Barack Obama so far emerging as the beneficiary.

After a 10-day slog of self-inflicted wounds and fatalistic headlines for Clinton, these party elders are clearly tilting against her hopes for keeping the nomination contest open indefinitely.

The Democrats’ virtual convention is taking place publicly, with statements like the remarkable comment by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that Clinton should get out now, and semi-publicly, with background comments made by top operatives to the media.

It is taking place also in private entreaties by e-mail or phone — the modern equivalent of smoke-filed rooms — as advocates for Obama urge an early end to the race and Clinton backers plead for time and warn about his general election vulnerabilities.

Ah, the electronic age. The press certainly appears to have settled on who to back – the nonstop negative reporting on Hillary Clinton is telling. The quick shedding of negative reporting on Obama is also telling. Does anyone doubt that if someone like Jeremiah Wright was connected to John McCain that there would have been endless reporting on the sinister connections? The screeching would have been a serious risk to eardrums everywhere. Unless Obama makes a huge mistake in the next few weeks, Clinton is done. The writing is already on the wall for her. 

One Hand On The Whistle, One Hand On The Brake

Legend has it that when the body of Casey Jones was pulled from the wreckage of the train he was killed driving, one hand was clutching the whistle and the other the brake handle. The Democrats are desperately trying to avert the trainwreck that they can all see coming now and are rapidly shifting support to Obama in order to head things off. Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton's campaign juggernaut is stalled on the tracks ahead.

WASHINGTON — Slowly but steadily, a string of Democratic Party figures is taking Barack Obama's side in the presidential nominating race and raising the pressure on Hillary Clinton to give up.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota is expected to endorse Sen. Obama Monday, according to a Democrat familiar with her plans. Meanwhile, North Carolina's seven Democratic House members are poised to endorse Sen. Obama as a group — just one has so far — before that state's May 6 primary, several Democrats say.

Helping to drive the endorsements is a fear that the Obama-Clinton contest has grown toxic and threatens the Democratic Party's chances against Republican John McCain in the fall.

Sen. Clinton rejects that view. Over the weekend, she reiterated her intent to stay in the race beyond the last contest in early June — and all the way to the party's convention in Denver, if necessary.

"There are some folks saying we ought to stop these elections," she said Saturday in Indiana, which also has a May 6 primary. "I didn't think we believed that in America. I thought we of all people knew how important it was to give everyone a chance to have their voices heard and their votes counted."

It's a bit hard to envision Clinton getting the nod now, but it is also a bit hard to believe that the party will be able to stop the train in time. Funny thing about the legend of Casey Jones that kind of gets lost in the heroic tale of the engineer who died trying to stop the passenger train before it piled into the stopped freight. Jones was found to be at fault for the accident in the first place. 

The Vicious Left

Ed Morrisey links to this video, originating from the leftwing site MyDD using some of the most awful video from 9/11, bashing heck out of Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama and generally playing attack dog in the Democratic nomination process. The excuse for this vicious attack is that the Republicans will supposedly use this to get Obama. Now, of course, they don't have to. Oddly, the video makes John McCain look positively wonderful. I don't think that is quite what "Universal" at MyDD was aiming for, but he or she sure did.

As Ed puts it:

Of course, the fact that even George Bush didn’t use 9/11 footage in an attack ad against John Kerry doesn’t enter into Universal’s argument. Would John McCain be likely to do so? Not at all, and he’s not likely to use the Wright footage, either. He hasn’t even commented on the Wright Stuff, and his campaign suspended a member who Twittered one of the videos to his contacts.

The “GOP will use it” argument simply serves as a dodge for an attack on Obama over the Wright Stuff. Universal wants Obama out of the race, and has served up some fear mongering to suit that purpose.

I have a feeling this over-the-top video will be disappeared before very long. So I've saved it for future reference. The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy will eventually have to answer for what they are doing right now. It is interesting to see the left savage one another right now. In a gory, trainwreck, can't look away sort of way. 

Arms Race

My wife and I went out for a while today and decided to stop at a sporting goods store. I had wanted to take a look at a handgun but declined to buy it when the store did not carry extra magazines for the gun and also wanted to charge an exorbitant fee to transfer it to the state I reside in. Some bargains are simply not worth it. While browsing further, we looked at one of these:

But my wife told me we didn't need it, so I didn't buy it. I wandered off for a while looking around at other things when my cell phone started ringing. My youngest boy (who was with us) called and said that Mommy was buying the SU-16 for herself.

Now I know why she wouldn't let me buy it. 

Mookie Beats Feet

The Associated Press refrains from Calling Moqtada al Sadr – Mookie – by their usual descriptive term: "Fiery" in this report. Maybe because winners don't do what Mookie is doing: pulling his fighters off the streets nationwide in Iraq.

Al-Sadr's nine-point statement was issued by his headquarters in the holy city of Najaf and broadcast through loudspeakers on Shiite mosques. It said the first point was: "taking gunmen off the streets in Basra and elsewhere."

He also demanded that the Iraqi government stop "haphazard raids" and release security detainees who haven't been charged, two issues cited by his movement as reasons for fighting the government.

Followers handed out sweets in Baghdad's main Mahdi Army militia stronghold of Sadr City.

Government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh called the statement "positive and responsible." But he also warned in a telephone interview broadcast on Iraqi state TV. that security forces would continue to target those who don't follow the order.

"We expect a wide response to this call," he said. "After this announcement, anybody who targets the government and its institutions will be regarded … as outlaws."

It would appear that Mookie has, once again, been defeated. If he was actually winning, he would not have run for cover. One presumes that the new tactic of hitting Mahdi Army headquarters and strongholds got Mookie's attention. Since, presumably, he is smart enough to realize that his stronghold could be next. The media – and the left – have been trying to sell this latest wet firecracker from al Sadr as a sign that the Iraqi government has lost control. It looks rather more like al Sadr has lost decisively. 

You There! Step Away From The Root Beer!

I don't know which part is sillier. A police department raiding a root beer "kegger" and making more than 90 kids take Breathalyzer tests to prove they had been drinking the soft drink or the excuses by the police department when they had to admit that they had done so.

Dustin Zebro, 18, said he staged the party after friends at D.C. Everest High School got suspended from sports because of pictures showing them drinking from red cups.

The root-beer kegger was "to kind of make fun of the school," he said. "They assumed there was beer in the cups. We just wanted to have some root beer in red cups and just make it look like a party, but there actually wasn't any alcohol."…..

……"It was a tremendous waste of time and manpower, but we still had a job to do, and our officers did it," (police chief Daniel)Joling said. "If one kid had come there, even hadn't drank there, but had come there and had been drinking and had left and crashed and burned, then what would the sentiment be? Why didn't the police check everybody out?"

Admittedly, the police had cause to respond to a complaint about cars blocking the road, but it seems a bit of a reach to begin breath testing the people involved since, presumably, the police can tell the difference between root beer and beer. One look at the keg should have simply put the matter to rest. The police appear to have been more than a bit overzealous in this case. I'm also wondering what actual authority the police had to demand breath tests given the situation. Want to bet there is a lawsuit (or a number of them) coming over this? 

The Appeaser

Michael Goodwin sees a genuine disaster for Barack Obama in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright fiasco. He also sees the reason why it is such a disaster. Instead of Obama's claims to being a uniter, Goodwin sees Obama's stance on Wright's anti-America vitriol as nothing more than appeasement. Call Obama the Neville Chamberlain of our time.

Consider, for example, that Obama, alone among all major candidates this year, said he would meet our enemies without conditions, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. If his approach to Wright were applied, Obama would emerge from that meeting by condemning Ahmadinejad's threat to wipe Israel off the map while also condemning American and Israeli policies. This moral equivalency would be tacit support for Iran's warped grievances, and perhaps for its nuclear program.

After all, we have nuclear weapons and so does Israel, so who are we to deny Iran? Or, as Obama put it Friday when talking about race relations, "People all want the same thing."

They don't, but appeasement thinking often credits everybody with equally good and worthy intentions. That was the mistake of the most infamous appeaser of modern times, Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who, with France's help, gave in to Adolf Hitler in hopes of heading off war. In exchange for sacrificing innocent Czechs and others living on lands Hitler wanted, Chamberlain famously waved a treaty with Hitler's name on it that he insisted would secure "peace for our time."

Within days, Herr Hitler, as Chamberlain called him, attacked his neighbors and within a year Europe was engulfed in World War II.

Would Obama be so naive or craven? Because of his limited experience, we don't know. That's why the Wright episode, the most difficult issue of his idealistic campaign, takes on huge importance. The lessons are not pretty.  

There simply is no amount of context that can offset Wright's viciousness. Regardless of how much else Wright may have done, he crossed a line when he shouted out "God Damn America." Obama's lukewarm denunciations of that and other outrageous statements by Wright speak volumes about Obama. None of it good. A president must not indulge in moral equivalence, a president must lead. Obama simply appeased. That is what will come back to haunt him in the coming months.  

The Big Not-So-Easy

If one nickname for New Orleans is The Big Easy, one could reasonably apply the term The Big Not-So-Easy to the long-overdue cleanup of the filthy bayou of Louisiana politics. Yet the new governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, has managed to make some very impressive progress on draining that swamp. He has also managed to arrange for much-needed repairs to Louisiana's broken-down infrastructure.

Less than a month after taking office Mr. Jindal called a special legislative session to push an ambitious package of reforms aimed at transforming the state's image as an ethical cesspool. Though he encountered some minor resistance, Mr. Jindal managed to pass most of what he wanted, including broad financial disclosure requirements for state legislators and public officials, bans on awarding state contracts to politicians and their family members, and tight restrictions on meals, tickets and other legalized graft used by lobbyists to ply compliant lawmakers.

Some pills, however, proved too bitter for legislators to swallow. A bill that would have stripped those convicted of public corruption of their state pensions went down to defeat.

No sooner had the first special session wrapped up than Mr. Jindal announced plans for a second – this one focused on state finances. Contrary to common perception, the years after Hurricane Katrina have been pretty good ones for Louisiana's bank account. The flood of reconstruction money and soaring revenues from oil and gas production have left state coffers bulging. Outgoing Gov. Kathleen Blanco, widely reviled for her administration's bungling of the post-Katrina rebuilding effort – left Mr. Jindal a $1.1 billion budget surplus.

Though he ran as a fiscal conservative, Mr. Jindal saw the one-time surplus as a chance to pump cash into the state's dilapidated infrastructure. To that end, in a manic one-week spending spree, Mr. Jindal doled out $300 million to help fortify crumbling levees and rebuild eroding barrier islands. He allocated more than $500 million to repair the state's roads, bridges, ports and schools. He even found tens-of-millions to seed a biomedical research facility and pay down the state's looming pension obligations.

All this has been accomplished during special sessions of the legislature, where Jindal had broad control over the agenda. He will have much less say in the regular session, but he still has a mandate from the voters to clean things up. What he has accomplished to date is a very good start. Legislators would be wise to heed the popularity of what Jindal has done so far and not try to undo it. As the author of the Wall Street Journal op-ed, Douglas McCollam notes, Jindal appears to be in the right place at the right time to really make lasting, positive changes in Louisiana politics. 

Smoke-Filled Gore

The Telegraph reports that aides to Al Gore are busily floating a trial balloon of a potential smoke-filled room "compromise" that would give the Democratic presidential nomination to none other than Al Gore.

The opening has emerged because opinion polls show Mr McCain stretching his lead over both Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton, whose campaigns are engaged in a daily cycle of attacks, character assassination and mutual recriminations on religion, race and the economy.

Between a quarter and a third of Obama and Clinton supporters say that they would not now vote for the other in November.

The prospect of a new Gore candidacy was raised last week in Time magazine by Joe Klein, the doyen of American political writers, and discussed on the main cable news networks, CNN, Fox and MSNBC.

If neither Mr Obama nor Mrs Clinton has the 2,025 delegates needed to win the nomination, and if both appear unable to beat Mr McCain, under one scenario a group of about 100 party elders – the "super-delegates" – could sit out the first ballot in Denver, preventing either candidate winning outright, and then offer Mr Gore the nomination for the good of the party.

So, the two candidates would cheerfully surrender to a man who has not lifted a finger during the entire campaign for either of them or for the Democratic party itself. Did Gore withhold his endorsement hoping for the nomination? Quite possibly. If I were a backer of either of the two candidates, I would be furious if a bunch of party insiders threw my choice under the bus for such a cold, calculating and selfish man. Gore has enough baggage – and enough history of America-bashing remarks in the years since he lost the 2000 election to make his candidacy very iffy at best – especially with only a couple of months to do it in. 

I can't see either Obama or Clinton agreeing to be the second banana on the ticket, either. So a Gore candidacy would likely be seen as even more of a smoke-filled room deal. I think the Democrats have actually found a scenario that makes it even worse for them than it already is, bless them.

UPDATE: Others: The Corner, The Moderate Voice, PoliGazette, Gateway Pundit,

Oldest Recording?

I'll let readers judge for themselves here. A recently-formed group claims it has found a recording of a human voice that was made before Thomas Edison invented the phonograph by some 17 years. The recording was reportedly made by a Frenchman but could not be replayed until scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory  could scan the recording and make it work.

The recording was discovered in February at the archives of the French Academy of Sciences in Paris by First Sounds, an informal association of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists and others who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time.

The group was established in 2007 by David Giovannoni, who is a member of the ARSC.

"It's a very haunting song," Giovannoni said of "Au Clair de la Lune," the melody that Parisian inventor Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville recorded on a "phonautograph," a device that engraved sound waves onto a sheet of paper blackened by the smoke of an oil lamp.

The scientific breakthrough occurred on April 9, 1860, or 17 years before Thomas Edison invented his phonograph.

It is, however, necessary to give Edison his due. At the time, the French were unable to come up with a device that would allow reproduction of his musical recording.

As many as 148 years would pass before scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory converted these scans into sound using technology developed to preserve and create access to a wide variety of early recordings on mechanical carriers, such as phonograph discs and cylinders.

For Patrick Feaster, a historian with First Sounds, that was a significant discovery for many reasons.

"We already knew that Leon Scott had invented sound recording but he just had never got to the stage of playing back his recordings," Feaster told AFP.

"But we have made a number of discoveries here. First of all we have now heard one of his recordings, something he never dreamed of happening, but it does push the history of recording sound quite a step back. Up until this point you could listen back to something as early as 1888. That was about as far as you could go.

"Secondly," the historian continued, "People tended to present Scott's phonautograph as a dry scientific instrument but Leon Scott was really hoping to record interesting stuff: he wanted to preserve great music, great speeches."

You can listen to the decoded recording over at this website. For me, this is pretty thin. If the recording is actually the oldest recording, the inventor never figured out how to actually do anything with what he captured. Even if this is an actual recording, as opposed to creative decoding (and I am not saying the people involved did anything untoward here) one has to ask, who cares? The recording had no way of being recovered until massive technology was deployed to do so. 

At most, a historical oddity.  

The Pending Prospect Of A Positively Putrid P.C. Presidency

To my mind, there is much to dislike about the idea of an Obama presidency.  On the one hand there is the purely political objection to a lightly vetted candidate whose political track record suggests a strident left-wing agenda, which most Americans would reject outright if they had any idea what Obama stood for in the first place.

The objections on the other end of the spectrum concern social matters and the disturbing trend towards hypersensitivity and censorship among people who ought to know better, but who don't.  Case in point:  Skit featured student playing Obama in blackface 

 North Dakota State University is investigating complaints about a campus skit in which a white student in blackface portrayed Barack Obama receiving a lap dance.

The same skit, part of a charity fundraiser held at a campus theater, also featured a depiction of cowboys having sex with each other, witnesses told The Forum newspaper, which first reported the backlash Friday.

"We're trying to find out the right approaches for accountability, but at the same time try to heal wounds that have occurred and allow the campus to move ahead," Janna Stoskopf, NDSU's dean of students, told The Associated Press on Friday.

The March 18 skit involving the NDSU Saddle and Sirloin Club was performed at the Mr. NDSU Pageant, which raises money for diabetes research. People who attended it said a pageant contestant from Saddle and Sirloin dressed as a woman from the Internet video "I Got a Crush on Obama" and performed a strip tease for another student who was wearing dark makeup and an afro wig.

In the background, two male students dressed as cowboys simulated anal sex while holding an Obama sign that one student ripped at the conclusion of the 30-second performance, the Forum reported.

Get that?  Agents of the state (and be under no illusion here, the administrators of a public university are indeed agents of the state), are taking it upon themselves to "investigate" students very clearly engaged in artistic speech.  It simply doesn't matter if the speech could be found offensive or not, the state has no role to investigate whatever speech adults engage in during their own free time.  Period.

What is particularly galling is the caviler manner in which a fundamental right guaranteed to us in the Constitution is so lightly tossed aside:

"One of the issues here is how do we balance what our policies and expectations about behavior are with the issue of freedom of speech," Stoskopf said. "Where does all of that get us?"

Notice anything unusual?  Here I was laboring under the impression that freedom of speech was a right, enjoyed to the fullest of its meaning by every adult in the nation.  Little did I know it was merely an "issue"; an inconvenience the state needs to brush aside as they attempt to punish people for their political speech.  And even if the "investigation" doesn't lead to actual sanctions the chilling message will have already be sent: "Say something we don't like and we will be watching you."

And that will be the rub of an Obama presidency, as sensitivity police of various stripes scour the social and political landscape looking for "inappropriate" speech to demonize and intimidate, as if Obma himself were some sort of child being picked upon by "bullies" such as these South Dakota State students.  (Do Ivy League degrees really leave one in such an intellectually fragile state of mind?  If so the elite of this country might be better served heading for the Great Plains for their higher education.) 

As obnoxious and socially poisonous as such tactics are for the bulk of the country's citizens, the real danger occurs when such intimidation is used to quell genuine political opposition.  Given the glib manner the Obama campaign has charged their fellow Democrats with the crime of racism, I do not think any such fear can be discounted out of hand.  If the conduct of the Obama campaign is indicative of the way they would rule we can look forward not to a President who will infrequently use the "race card", but a fully fledged race President.

Where Has All The Magic Gone?

Mark Steyn reflects on Sir Edmund Hillary Danger Rodham Clinton and the loss of the old Clintonian magic. It is as if everything that used to work has suddenly stopped. Clinton gets caught telling a whopper about sniper fire and has to retreat hastily. Clinton supporters try a thuggish letter to Nancy Pelosi – standard operating procedure for the Clintons, and all heck breaks loose. What's left to do? Why, break the party that won't give her the office she feels she deserves, of course.

It may be that when the Democrats do settle on a candidate – which, on present form, seems likely to be about 48 hours before Election Day – the party will then do its usual thing and unite around the winner in order to slay the Republican dragon.

But it's not unreasonable to calculate that significant elements among both the Clintonites and the Obamaniacs will be disinclined to reward the other side for what they'll see as an act of usurpation. I have no time for Obama, and I think he'd be a disastrous president. But he's your ticket out if you're a Democrat who can't face the thought of giving your party to the Clinton mob for another decade. And, evidently, quite a lot of Dems feel like that.

Why? Where did the magic go? Well, the show got miscast. I wrote a decade ago that Hillary was like Margaret Dumont to Bill's Groucho Marx. He goes around leering at cocktail waitresses, waggling his eyebrows and his famously unlit cigar. And Hillary would stand there, seemingly oblivious to the subpoenaed dress and DNA analysis and all the rest: In double-acts, the best straight men (or women) are the ones who appear never to get the joke, and that was Hillary in the late Nineties, standing on stage alongside Bill night after night with her rictus grin and droning in the robotic cadences of that computerized voice in your car that tells you to fasten your seatbelt that "I. Am. So. Proud. Of. My. Husband. And. Our. President. Bill. Clinton."

Hillary will not step aside and she will never agree to be second banana on the ticket (and Obama would be completely daft to let the co-Clintons anywhere near his candidacy). She will simply continue that scorched earth policy the Clintons know how to do so well – which may, in fact, be the only policy the Clintons know at all. The Democratic leadership has got to be going crazy right now – they finally see the trainwreck and haven't a clue as to how to avert it.

Pass the popcorn. Maggie, get another vat or two!

Adding An Adjunct

Regular readers here at Blue Crab Boulevard will remember that I asked Rich Horton from The Iconic Midwest to guest post here when I accompanied my wife on a business trip she had to make. Recently, Rich took me at my word and posted a few things (I had told him he was welcome to and meant it). Now, Rich has signed on – if that is the correct term – as a full-fledged adjunct blogger here at the Crabitat. Adjunct blogger is the term Rich suggested, by the way – I like it. He'll post when he can and about whatever he wants. I look forward to his input here. I expect that we will not always agree, but I also expect that I will find his posts interesting and thought provoking.

Rich has the run of the place except for the back room where the monkeys are working on cracking the Shakespeare Code. That's off limits to everyone except me and Uncle Guido. Sorry, Rich. (Really, it's just as well. They are mean little suckers.)

Please join me in welcoming Rich to Blue Crab Boulevard.