Sunday, 22 May 2011

The last days of Bill Haley

In the last desperate months of his life, he would come into the restaurant at all hours of the day and take a seat, sometimes at the counter and other times in one of the back booths. He was always alone. He wore a scruffy ball cap, and behind his large, square glasses there was something odd about his eyes. They didn’t always move together. Barbara Billnitzer, one of the waitresses, would bring him a menu and ask how he was doing. “Just fine,” he’d say, and they would chat about the traffic and the weather, which was always warm in South Texas, even in January. He’d order coffee—black—and sometimes a sandwich, maybe turkey with mayo. Then he’d light up a Pall Mall and look out the window or stare off into space. Soon he was lost in thought, looking like any other 55-year-old man passing the time in a Sambo’s on Tyler Street in downtown Harlingen. He had moved there with his family five years before, in 1976. It was a perfect place for a guy who wanted to get away from it all. And he had a lot to get away from. Twenty-five years before, just about everyone in the Western world had known his face. In fact, for a period of time in the mid-fifties, he had been the most popular entertainer on the planet. He had sold tens of millions of records. He had caused riots. He had headlined shows with a young opening act named Elvis Presley and had inspired John Lennon to pick up the guitar. He had changed the world...

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Michael Hall @'Texas Monthly'

Pakistan cuts off NATO supply route

Anti-Gay Legislators Hoist by Own Petards in MN

Obama’s Peace Tack Contrasts With Key Aide, Friend of Israel

Nang vs. Qalang in Eastern Afghanistan

Doug Ollivant knows more about counterinsurgency than almost anyone I know and also knows quite a bit about eastern Afghanistan. So when he says we've gotten ourselves into a mess by taking sides in a war we should have stayed out of, listen. If you've ever heard me lecture on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, you will hear me make the kind of point that a MacDonald of Glencoe whose family settled in the East Tennessee Mountains understands intuitively: people live in the mountains because they want to be left the bleep alone.
@'Abu Muqawama'

PANDA-drogy

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Al-Qaeda's new leader threatens retaliatory attack on London

Saif al-Adel, who apparently headed the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, has vowed to "crush" London in retaliation for the Osama bin Laden's death, Daily Mail said.
Al-Adel, 51, once Bin Laden's security chief, has been confirmed as the new Al Qaeda leader at a meeting of Taliban and Al-Qaeda leadership on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
"Our new leader has asked for a big plan for London," the paper quoted Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan as saying. "He believes the UK is the backbone of Europe and must be crushed."
Bin Laden was shot dead by U.S. Special Forces during a raid on his home in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad on May 2. His body was buried in the sea.
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Premature Perspiration

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Shit!

Gigg(le)s

Twitter and the mystery footballer

Twitter and WikiLeaks have made a mockery of the courts

Have I got this right? In his fight for people's right to anonymity, a certain footballer is going to court to discover somebodies identity?

Harold Camping's Family Radio Goes Quiet

Jay McInerney - The rich and powerful in handcuffs: one of the great sights of New York

The timing was weird. I'd just returned to New York from Paris, where I'd heard a fair amount of discussion in Montparnasse and elsewhere about the next elections, and about the likelihood that someone named Dominique Strauss-Kahn would be the Socialist candidate, and quite possibly the next president. And here he was in my town, being paraded in handcuffs in front of the cameras.

The image apparently inspired a fair amount of indignation, and even outrage, in certain quarters in Europe. New Yorkers, however, are fairly inured to seeing rich and powerful men in handcuffs. Certainly it's been a major source of entertainment since I arrived here back in 1980. There's something deeply satisfying in the apparent incongruity of a well-cut business suit and handcuffs.

Back in the 1980s, during one of Wall Street's earlier bursts of irrational exuberance and criminal excess, then prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani made a specialty of cuffing white-collar criminals and presenting them for the cameras. Giuliani was criticised by some people for this behaviour, especially after some of the accused were acquitted, but the general public enjoyed seeing stockbrokers and investment bankers treated in the same fashion as other putative thieves.

More recently we saw Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire head of the Galleon fund, being taken from FBI headquarters in New York after his conviction on insider-trading charges. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, responding to criticism of the so-called perp walk, defended the practice: "The public can see the alleged perpetrators," he said. "I think it is humiliating," he added. "But if you don't want to do the perp walk, don't do the crime." The mayor seems to have forgotten about the presumption of innocence, but his statement probably reflects the attitude of his constituents pretty accurately. New York's a tough place. Deal with it...