Those Wacky Italians
Via Reuters, Funeral home gets a rise out of death:

Rome - Death is hardly something to look forward to, but one Italian funeral home is trying to make the afterlife a tad more tempting by using bikini-clad women to sell its coffins.

On its site http://www.cofanifunebri.it, the Rome-based funeral home and coffin factory Cisa features its hand-crafted caskets alongside models sipping champagne or reclining seductively on the lids.

"We wanted to make the whole idea of picking your coffin less serious, maybe even make people laugh a bit," Giuseppe Tenara, one of the partners, said.

Near-naked women are used to sell everything in Italy from computers to chocolate bars, but Cisa has taken the advertising ploy to new limits.

The page featuring the firm's "Madonna" coffin shows a pouting woman in zebra shorts and high-heel boots kneeling next to the casket, while in "Empire Style", a blonde donning a black G-string leans on a coffin and turns her backside to the camera.

"Unfortunately the site hasn't helped sales much, because we mostly get calls from far away places like Greece and Spain instead of Rome," Tenara told Reuters.

That hasn't stopped Cisa from creating an online "sexy calendar" with yet more temptresses frolicking among the coffins.

Still, not all clients have been charmed.

"Some people are scandalised, but we just explain that we're trying to make people laugh," Tenara said.

One of the tamer samples.

Ignoring the clue phone when it rings
Mark Steyn has some words for our pal, Canadian PM Jean Cretin, Chrétien caught in a web of confusion:

The Islamists have no rational demands, and no conceivable changes to U.S. policy will deflect them. M. Chrétien says he formulated his theory --American arrogance plus Osama's poverty equals global terrorism -- on the evening of September 11th. And what's heartening is that in the last 12 months nothing in the torrent of evidence has stirred our grand buffoon from his complacency. Indeed, we should give our Prime Minister credit for sticking to his hand-me-down clichés. For the more inventively you try to "explain" the Islamist psychosis as a rational phenomenon to be accommodated the more you risk sounding just as nutty as Mohammed Atta and the other genital depilators.

More by following the link.

Daschle Dawdle Watch!
Be there or be square.

The Problem Is Africa
Alan Wood in the Australian suggests we Pity poor McDonald-less Africa:

HOW many McDonald's are there in Africa? The Big Mac's US website lists 170, mostly in South Africa and Egypt, with a few in Morocco. Not many for a continent of nearly 800 million people. Australia, with a population of a little less than 20 million, has 712 McDonald's and counting.

There is a serious point to this comparison. McDonald's has become a potent symbol of what is wrong with globalisation for groups such as Greenpeace and the anti-globalisation non-government organisations. It represents US cultural and economic imperialism, an evil US multinational corporation.

On this logic, Africa is the lucky continent and Australia the unlucky one. Who believes that? The truth is the number of McDonald's outlets is a pretty good global index of economic prosperity and cultural diversity. Australia has hardly become a culinary monoculture because of the spread of the Golden Arches.

Although there are 712 McDonald's, there are more than 4000 Chinese restaurants, more than 2000 other Asian restaurants, more than 2500 Italian restaurants and 10,600 that style themselves as modern Australian.

...

The conference volume confirms that the story of the past three decades has been the Africanisation of world poverty. This is summed up in the introduction to the conference papers by David Gruen of the RBA and Terry O'Brien of Treasury. Although there are difficulties in getting reliable figures, it appears there has been a huge fall in the number of people outside Africa living in extreme poverty (an income of less than $US1 ? $1.82 _ per day). Conservatively, there has been a net fall of more than 200 million since 1970, despite an increase in the world's population of about 1.6 billion. But during the same time there has been a rise of about 175 million in those living in extreme poverty in Africa. In 1960 Africa was home to only about one in 10 of the world's extremely poor, but two in three of them by 1998.

This is not the outcome of globalisation. On the contrary, Africa's problems stem in large part from its inability to integrate into the world economy, unlike Asia and India, where the numbers living in extreme poverty have plunged and per capita incomes have soared.

Treasury put it bluntly in a paper last year: "It is one of the ironies of the [past] few years that globalisation's critics attribute to it economic problems that in fact arise from ethnic and religious fragmentation, civil wars, corruption and the absence of modern institutions and social trust." It was talking about Africa.

This isn't new news (1, 2), but the professional foreign aid pimps and professional "advocates" don't want it bandied about. They want more useless foreign aid to perpetuate their own petty rackets. Meanwhile the Mercedes dealers in Africa wax fatter off the corrupt dictators and their hangers-on while the people starve.

"Lust in his heart" Alert!
Via the NY Post's Page Six:

RED-blooded writer Hampton Stevens says he got fired from the New York Times after professing his lust for right-wing blondeshell Ann Coulter. Stevens, an independent contractor who hosted the op-ed forums on NYTimes.com, claims he was canned shortly after some salty statements he made about the coltish Coulter appeared in the New York Observer. "The New York Times has every right to hire and fire as they please," he told us. "But I think I should be free to express my opinion." A Times spokeswoman told us: "Hampton Stevens moderated an online forum for NYTimes.com on a free-lance basis. His free-lance project is now complete

Why do I think that the earthy part of his comment was less a problem for the Times than his laughing at "liberal folly"?

Apparently, Hampton failed to notice that the official Times poster girl is MoDo.

Those Wacky Florida Oldsters!
The AP enlightens with Poor Training, Glitches Factored in Miami-Dade Election Fiasco:

Eleven other Florida counties had the same kind of touchscreen voting machines used in Miami-Dade. They were being operated by similar crews of mainly elderly volunteers who had worked low-tech elections for years.

So why did Tuesday's primary go so well in those places and so miserably here?

For starters, those other counties trained their poll workers up to three times longer than Miami-Dade. Some made sure volunteers could read the English instructions. Most had their machines longer then Miami-Dade did, and they didn't experience the same cascade of last-minute technical glitches that faced the state's most populous county.

...

Retiree Jack Wile said he trained with some 40 others on the new iVotronic machines for about four hours. He has a computer and understood the instructions but says only about four people in the class who seemed to grasp the nuances of the system.

"The rest of the people who were in the class were in a fog," said Wile, an assistant precinct clerk. "Some of them couldn't even figure out where to sign the sheet to show that they took the class."

Precinct clerk Dorothy Walton, who has been working polls since 1973, said she came away from training without knowing exactly how to close out the machines at day's end. She said she didn't ask questions because she was supposed to have a helper who did know.

The helper didn't show up Tuesday.

Workers in Pasco and Sarasota counties got 12 hours of training, and Sarasota County required them to pass a written test. But in Miami-Dade, where the ballots were in English, Spanish and Creole, workers weren't even required to prove basic literacy.

Oh yeah, Janet Reno says this is all Jeb Bush's fault.

Thanks Grayout!
KXTV lets us know that Davis Signs Package of Anti-Terrorism Bills:

Gov. Gray Davis is working his way through two dozen bills having to do with state security. The bills were proposed after last September's terrorist attacks.

One bill keeps security guards from obtaining temporary registration cards before a background check is completed. Other measures boost penalties for using weapons of mass destruction and allow the state to increase its use of wiretaps to fight terrorism.

I wonder what the new penalty for using a weapon of mass destruction is? No tofu for 30 days? As for fighting terrorism, numerous California jurisidictions have made it clear they won't even interview known illegal aliens because it's "profiling". Whose wires are they planning on tapping? The Elks Club?

Grease Spot?
(Link via DailyPundit). The Mirror (UK) teases with BIN LADEN "DEAD":

OSAMA bin Laden's supporters yesterday issued a statement on the internet saying he was dead.

The claims, repeated in the Al Bayan newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, said that the al-Qaeda terror chief died when the Americans bombed the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan.

The details tally with dates of bombing missions in which US intelligence experts suspected that he may have been killed.

The newspaper's story, headlined, "Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead but the Jihad will continue until Judgement Day'', quotes witness Shahid Ayan saying he perished on December 10, 2001.

He said: "On the 24th night of Ramadan (Dec 10) and at a late hour, there were some scary explosions in the place where Osama bin Laden's cave was.

"The cave was completely erased from the ground and became nothing. This was the only cave of the 15 that was destroyed by an enormous 52ft missile and there is no doubt that bin Laden died.''

Since it's the Mirror, home of some of the worst Eurowhiners, one can't help but wonder about an ulterior motive for using one of those notoriously "creative" Middle Eastern sources as the basis for this newsflash. I also like the idea that the witness measured the missile.

On the other hand, the thought of an "enormous 52ft missile" paying a house call on Osama is rather pleasing.

No Fool Like an Old Fool
Old fool Walter Cronkite lets us know that he'd still like to be in on the news action:

Cronkite, who now works on documentaries with his son's company, Cronkite Productions, addressed the annual convention of retiree-advocacy group AARP on Thursday. The principal anchorman for "The CBS Evening News" retired in 1981 to spend more time with his grandchildren.

"I would have stayed quite a bit longer ... knowing what I know now, that I would still have plenty of years to grow up with the kids," he said in an interview.

"Not being on the air, that's not important. But I'd like to be in the newsroom helping set the agenda."

And you have quite an agenda, don't you Wally? An illustration from Wally's latest bloviation on Larry King:

KING: And foreign policy's effect on what might have caused 9/11?

CRONKITE: Yes, I think very definitely that foreign policy could have caused what has happened.
...

This is a revolution, in effect, around the world. A revolution is in place today. We are suffering from a revolution of the poor and have-nots against the rich and haves. And that's us.

Last time I looked, it was a bunch of middle class Islamist religious fanatics financed by a Saudi millionaire. But that wouldn't fit in with the "agenda", would it?

By the way Wally, thanks for Vietnam.

I am divine (but not in an elitist way)
Words fail me after a visit to the blog of Derek Sapphire, healer, activist and guru. (Link via Brain Graze).