Weekend Tids and Bits

 

RULE, MS. BRITANNIA! After 341 years of the job’s existence, beginning with John Dryden, Britain finally appointed a woman as Poet Laureate. Carol Ann Duffy, 53, told the BBC that she decided to accept the offered position “purely because they hadn’t had a woman.” The term of the job runs ten years, which should give Great Britain enough time to collect its wits after such a hasty plunge into modern practice.

 

EGYPT FOLLOWS RAHM’S ADVICE right out the window. Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, has been widely quoted as saying “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste; it’s an opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid.” So Egypt, an overwhelmingly pork-avoiding Muslin nation, is responding to the swine flu crisis by slaughtering all the 300,000 or so pigs owned and eaten by the nation’s minority Coptic Christians. See, that way it’s not state-sanctioned oppression of a minority, it’s just sound public health.

 

NOT TONIGHT, DEAR – THE COALITION GOVERNMENT WRANGLING GIVES ME A HEADACHE is the refrain from women in Kenya, says CNN. They’re withholding their favors for a week to protest political divisiveness. CNN did not report what the millions of married women elsewhere in the world were protesting.

 

AL-QAIDA USED HOTMAIL to communicate following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and plotted the location of other possible targets in an almanac, the AP reports, citing a guilty plea agreement. Seems the bad guys had a problem with a similar attempt on Yahoo. Although both Microsoft and Yahoo are locked in a struggle for e-mail El Supremo, neither marketing department seems to have recognized the presented opportunity.

 

THE MEASURED, CALM SWINE FLU REPORTING of the last week caused tremendous runs on dust masks around the globe, even though the number of confirmed deaths is ten – nine in Mexico and one in the United States. So far there have been no reports of an upsurge in personal lightning protection sales, even though the National Weather Service says lightning kills and average of 62 Americans every year. Clearly another case of press bias.

 

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL COMMITTEE chairman Michael Steele says of the coming David Souter Supreme Court vacancy that “the president should take his time and search for a nominee whose legal views are consistent with and reflective of mainstream America.” It’s the first known instance of a major U.S. political party taking its membership out of Supreme Court consideration.

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