Dowbrigade

Despite the season of peace and goodwill, the Dowbrigade household has for the past week been enveloped in an acute pre-Christmas crisis.

Nothing as mundane as a cash-flow shortage, or as dramatic as domestic abuse, it was mysterious and disturbing nonetheless. The baby Jesuses were missing.

A bit of background. Among her endearing qualities, which are legion, Norma Yvonne counts a charming attraction for all things miniature, from tiny books with postage-stamp pages, thru weird Barbie paraphernalia, to an impressive menagerie of teeny tiny animals cleverly crafted from a variety of substances by native craftspeople from around the world.

As it happens, one of her prized collections consists of dozens of fiendishly detailed creche scenes from around the world, carved or molded variously from wood, soapstone, ivory, tagua, onyx, brass, teak, marble, tin, glass, paper mache, plastic and rock candy. Every year about two weeks before the big day, when she digs out all the rest of the holiday decorations, the special bells and statures, and candles and wreaths,napkins and tablecloths, hangings and sheets and towels and mugs, the assorted manger scenes go on display, most of them in the living room, but others scattered strategically round the apartment.

For a final touch of realism, Norma refrains from placing in the center of each tiny diorama the figure of baby Jesus, on the theory that "He hasn’t been born yet." Then, early on Christmas morning, she tiptoes around the apartment in her pajamas and meticulously places each devilishly detailed edition of the Christ Child in his respective manger.

So it was with some concern that we noticed our dear wife, a couple of weeks ago, rummaging desperately through the entire flotsam and jetsam collected in our basement during a decade of acquisition and accumulation, like a feral hedgehog rooting for her last nuts and berries after a particularly brutal winter.

"What are you looking for?" we asked.

"My Baby Jesuses are missing!" There was an unsettling edge of panic in her voice. "All of them, except for the ones that are part of the scenes themselves."

"You mean somebody went down the basement, opened every creche you have, and took out all the baby Jesuses? That’s diabolical!"

"No, I did that. I thought that since they represented Jesus himself, they deserve to be stored separately, in a special place. Now I can’t remember where the special place is."

We offered to help her look, but she immediately declined our aid on the grounds that we would only mess things up and confuse her more. She was probably right. We retired to our electronic nest.

Eventually she found them, just in time for their dramatic collective virgin birth, safe and sound, in an old cookie tin wrapped inside a velvet bag in the back of a never used drawer in the antique end table we have converted to a TV stand.

Good thing, since we just found the following article in today’s Boston Globe, about a rash of these Baby Jesus thefts. The Dowbrigade was on the verge of calling the authorities to report a serial Christ Childnapper working the area.

Merry Christmas, everybody.

Rash of Baby Jesus Kidnappings Across Nation

In Chicago, 32 plastic baby Jesus dolls were stolen from Nativity displays set up in people’s front yards. The kidnappers lined up all the dolls along the fence outside a Chicago woman’s home. She turned them over to her parish priest.

Similar creche crimes occurred in at least 35 cities from Fayetteville, N.C., to Mission Viejo, Calif., this year, according to the Catholic League, which tracks Nativity vandalism.

from the Boston Globe

WRENTHAM — Jeffrey Cardin walked into a pub Thursday night near the modest cottage where he lived alone and told a stranger he was suffering through the worst day of his life.

He didn’t know the half of it.

Cardin, 48, said he had recently buried his sister, recalled Suzanne Bourque, who sat beside him at the bar.

To compound his heartache, the twice-divorced father of three continued, he had just heard that his best friend had been diagnosed with cervical cancer.

"He kept saying that his children were the only thing that made him feel good," Bourque said yesterday.

When Cardin left the Anvil Pub for the short walk home, the day he described as the worst day of his life also became his last. About 200 yards from the pub, Cardin was struck and killed about 9:40 p.m. on Shears Street by an automobile that left the scene.

Yesterday, the family of a 17-year-old girl contacted Wrentham police to say that their daughter, after seeing news reports, recalled that she might have struck something in the vicinity of the accident, according to Detective Sergeant William McGrath.

from the Boston Globe

Ah, she "might have struck something", eh? Or not. Whatever. Even a 17-year-old girl must have felt the impact of sending a 48-year-old divorced father of three shuffling off to the afterlife. Either she has such a flimsy grasp on reality she wasn’t sure if it had really happened, or she panicked. Either way, she’s in a world of trouble, and pain, and multiple lives will never be the same…..

BEIJING, Dec. 18 — A Hollywood stuntman who worked on one of the "Men in Black" films suffered serious injuries in Shanghai on Saturday when he fell off a moving car while trying to jump through a ring of fire.

Oldrich Svarousky, 48, a member of the Hollywood-based Filmka stunt group, was being treated last night at Shanghai No. 10 People’s Hospital for a concussion and a fractured rib. Though he was in the intensive care unit, doctors said his condition was no longer life threatening.

The mishap took place during a program featuring Hollywood-style stunt performances at Zhabei Stadium. The show consisted of 36 leaps, crashes, races and other death-defying feats.

Svarousky, who also had a role in Martin Scorsese’s "Taxi Driver" and several other films, was performing a stunt in which he stood on the top of a car and jumped through flaming hoops suspended just above roof-top level. His head bumped the second hoop and he missed the third, falling off the back of the car.

"We feel very sorry about what happened, but it’s a dangerous game," said Lu Pin, who works for the performance sponsors.

story and pictures from Xinhua News Agency

The $35-billion market value of U.S.-grown cannabis tops that of such heartland staples as corn and hay, a marijuana activist says.

SACRAMENTO — For years, activists in the marijuana legalization movement have claimed that cannabis is America’s biggest cash crop. Now they’re citing government statistics to prove it.

A report released today by a marijuana public policy analyst contends that the market value of pot produced in the U.S. exceeds $35 billion — far more than the crop value of such heartland staples as corn, soybeans and hay, which are the top three legal cash crops.

California is responsible for more than a third of the cannabis harvest, with an estimated production of $13.8 billion that exceeds the value of the state’s grapes, vegetables and hay combined — and marijuana is the top cash crop in a dozen states, the report states.

The report estimates that marijuana production has increased tenfold in the past quarter century despite an exhaustive anti-drug effort by law enforcement.

from the Los Angeles Times

The continued easy availability and increasing potency of domestically produced marijuana is both a testament to American ingenuity and the utter futility of attempting to prohibit a weed that can be grown just about anywhere, indoor or out.

According to our informants in the drug underground, back in the "heyday" of hippie-era pot consumption, most of the marijuana consumed in the United States was imported from Mexico, Jamaica, or Colombia. Hashish from Nepal, Afghanistan, Morocco, Turkey, Lebanon, and Pakistan was also widely available (according to our sources).

Today, in a complete turn-around running directly contrary to economic trends in almost every other field, production, processing, packaging and distribution are now over 90% domestic! Think of all of the jobs created by this $35 Billion industry. Imported jobs! Insourcing! A rare American success story, in terms of freeing the US from a dangerous foreign dependency. If only the energy industry could follow suit!

How long will venal politicians be able to ignore this colossal source of potential revenue? Of course, the current pot policies do generate some revenue from fines and seized property but this pales in comparison to the costs of enforcement and incarceration. For the past 50 years pot prohibition has been an invaluable tool of social control, a convenience handle to weed out troublemakers and put the screws to that creative underclass whenever they start whining about things like due process or pointing out inconsistencies in the official version of how things were going down.

But now that the majority of our potential presidential candidates have at least a passing acquaintance with the evil weed, and there are so many other tools available to the forces of law and order, and if the members of Congress were subjected to the same drug testing policies as baseball players they would have trouble reaching a quorum, perhaps the day is coming when the costs of this particular front in the war on drugs will so obviously and overwhelmingly outweigh the benefits that some kind of equitable truce can be declared.

FUSHUN, China — Bao Xishun, the world’s tallest man, reaches in to retrieve objects from the stomach of a sick dolphin at an aquarium in Fushun, in China’s northern Liaoning province. Bao, whose arms measure more than a meter in length, was called in by the aquarium after experts failed to surgically remove unidentified objects from the stomachs of two dolphins. Bao was able to reach in and retrieve the objects, which turned out to be pieces of plastic from their pool surround. Despite a few remaining small pieces of plastic in their stomachs, local experts expect the dolphins to recover soon. The 7-foot 9-inch tall Bao was confirmed as the world’s tallest man by the Guinness Book of Records in 2005. (12/14/06 AP photo/EyePress)

from wftv

Does he make house calls? There’s a small bag of something we stashed down the heating duct we can’t seem to reach anymore….

Dark clouds are gathering over the local blogosphere.

First there were "splog" attacks, pieces of spam left in the comments area of local blogs. That was kids’ stuff. Now it appears that at least two blogs in the western suburbs have become victims of a new, scarier menace: blogjacking.

As I went digging for more information, it became clear that this problem is just appearing on the outer edge of the blogosphere radar screen.

Stories of blogjackings are just now appearing on sites like Blogger Tips and Tricks (blogger-tricks.blogspot.com) and The Real Blogger Status (bloggerstatusforreal.blogspot.com), and they’re not pretty. Bloggers are saying that not only have their blogs been hijacked, but that they are having a tough time getting them restored. Blog gurus are issuing advice like strengthening passwords to 15 mixed characters, but are also saying that they’re not sure exactly how the blogjackers are doing it, although password hacking seems to be a strong possibility.

What’s more, the attacks seem to be focused on Blogger, the nation’s largest blog network, which was bought by search giant Google a while ago and which has been a focus of splog attacks as well.

from the Boston Globe

Any other reports out there about this ugly development? Anyone have any idea how they are doing it?

The Dowbrigade is a sucker for a bargain. On rare occasions this means we stumble onto a true, historic bargain. Even a blind pig comes up with a truffle now and again. However, much more often we wind up being taken for a sucker. Case in point.

Last week we were loitering in the Sports Authority store in the Assembly Square Mall in Somerville, a recently recycled tract of asphalt along the Mystic River currently in legal limbo while local residents resist another Viking Invasion in the form of a Big Box Ikea Superstore planned to anchor a megacomplex including a residential village with its own T stop. Meanwhile a rundown K-Mart, a Staples and a Christmas Tree Shop hold down the fort.

Norma Yvonne was in the K-Mart looking for something for someone else. Like out mother, Norma finished her own Christmas shopping months ago, and is currently acting as a shopping consultant for myriad friends and extended family members. So there we were, not looking for anything in particular, but somehow we gravitated to the tennis section.

Now as an avid if mediocre tennis buff (anything but), we are always on the lookout for a good deal on a new racquet. We usually head out as soon as the new, cutting edge, high tech models hit the stores. This is when the slash prices on last year’s Ultra Latest Cutting Edge models to make room for the new stuff. Simply setting back the old internal clock a year we can revel in he latest technology at about 60% off.

Sometimes more. On this particular occasion, we were just glancing through the racquets when we spied, buried under a stack of Hyper Hammers, a few Head Racquets with an attractive gun-metal gray body and an oversized head. Now, any serious tennis player will tell you never to choose a racquet for its color scheme, but we never said we were serious. Any way, the racquet had a list price of $229, but was part of a Big Two-Day Sale, at the ridiculously sick price of $79.00!

And it seemed particularly well-suited to our game. According to the little booklet hanging from the racquets handle, "A lively frame with excellent torsional stability, the Head Titanium Ti S6 will perform best in the hands of players with compact to medium stroke styles seeking an extra large sweetspot (115 head size) that blends a nice balance of power tempered with an open string pattern; ideal for spin artists with an all court game. "

We instantly recognized ourself in that description.

But the clincher was that we had in our possession, in our wallet, at that moment, a coupon we had clipped from the Boston Globe that morning, completely coincidentally, for an additional $10 off of any item priced more than $50 at none other than the Sports Authority! Fate. Karma. Kismet. I was helpless.

The word that best describes the experience though is serendipity – the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for. Inter-inguistic digression – we have been looking for the closest Spanish equivalent to serendipity for weeks, have looked in every Spanish-English dictionary in Norma’s library, on line or in the Harvard Coop – and nada. Anybody know how to say "Serendipity" in Spanish?

At any rate, we bought the dam racquet, and yesterday finally got a chance to try it out, down by the Riverside, with the Just Don’t Suck Tennis Club, a bunch of over-the-hill geezers who wack it around every weekend morning there isn’t snow on the public courts down by the River Charles. In this league a new racquet is a big deal, althogh none of us harbor illusions that a new ax is going to resuscitate what passes for our game.

And yesterday, our flashy, gun-metal gray racquet couldn’t hit squat! Every shot wen off at an extreme, seemingly random angle. We were making contact (hard not to with the cartoonist oversized head) but had absolutely no clue as to where the ball would wind up when we did. We couldn’t hit a serve, or a volley, or a lob, or a spin or a slice or a drop shot. Usually at least ONE of those is working.

As the morning wore on, we began to look more closely at our new weapon, and we began to notice some strange things. For one, it was "top-heavy", rather than symmetrically oval, as most modern tennis racquets are. That is, the head bulged out at the top, like a squash racquet; the aforementioned extra large sweet spot. And the arrangement of the strings was weird – they weren’t in a parallel grid; rather, they arced out from the center bottom like rays from a focus somewhere near the hea of the handle.

No wonder we couldn’t hit anything. No wonder it had been marked down to less than a third of list. No wonder we are know as a shopping fool.

We played two sets with out new racquet, and lost them both. Then, to salvage some self-respect and to test out the Prime Directive, we switched back to the old racquet for a final set – and won. We had not violated the Prime. We didn’t suck – the new racquet sucked!

When we swallowed our pride and told the sorry tale to Norma Yvonne she replied, as she is wont to do, with a Spanish proverb. In this case, "Lo barato sale caro". Rough translation – cheap stuff ends up being expensive.

Scientists have discovered an extinct animal the size of a small squirrel that lived in China at least 125 million years ago and soared among the trees. It is the earliest known example of gliding flight by mammals, and the scientists say it shows that mammals experimented with aerial life about the same time birds first took to the skies, perhaps even earlier.

Until now, the earliest identified gliding mammal was a 30-million-year-old extinct rodent. The first known modern bat, which is capable of powered flight, dates to 51 million years ago, but it is assumed that proto-bats were probably gliding much earlier.

from the New York Times