drat fink

eye spy

"VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (AP) - If you're a criminal, a runaway or a terrorist, a day at the beach here may soon be anything but that."

"The city will become the second in the nation — Tampa, Fla., is the other — to employ facial-recognition software to assist police in identifying and catching criminals and missing persons.

"The system is to be tested along the city's oceanfront resort strip this holiday weekend, and police hope to have it fully operational in two to three weeks."

seeing double

"Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II " by William Blum

take your medicine

"FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., July 3 — The unsolicited Prozac arrived in a hand-addressed manila envelope. It came from a Walgreens drugstore not far from here, and there was a "Dear Patient" form letter inside."

"Enclosed you will find a free one month trial of Prozac Weekly," it said. "Congratulations on being one step to full recovery."

swing kids

i was a terrible student
a miscreant learner
alone germane in youth
still mostly drang and a little sturmer

tensegrity

i fear the center will not hold
and it will all come crashing in

put a finger in the whole (and glisten)
as you hear the crackling skin

the dinner bell rang out
but there was nothing left to eat

the mynabird sangfroid
if it could only keep a beat

miss american piebald

it was a terrible blow
to my psychic connection

blue out a fuse
in my sleep
awoke to convection

arose with conviction
to make a correction

not a clue
what to do
sold short on conception

in a saccharine daze
yet i longed for confection

thought i was through
off ascent
and misdirected ascension

he was a civil warrior true
but a revolting insurrection

lugubrioche

bred and vicious
the staph of strife
fleche and blood pudding
on which side am i buttred
a half loafer
biting the hand
crusted liberty
give him not a stone
the breadth of idleness
beauty and sweetmeats
do i fret?

splendid splintered

"What a title ... Greatest Hitter of All Time. It is more of a distinction than World's Fastest Human or Heavyweight Champion of the World because those designations are temporary. This one covers 150 years; it covers Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and Rogers Hornsby. Hitting a baseball is indeed the hardest skill in sports, a skill that, unlike those in other major sports, is largely unchanged from the early 1900's. No one was ever better at hitting a baseball than Ted Williams. If he were playing today, he would be the best hitter today."

chic of araby

"The barrier to better Arab performance is not a lack of resources, concludes the report, but the lamentable shortage of three essentials: freedom, knowledge and womanpower. Not having enough of these amounts to what the authors call the region's three “deficits”. It is these deficits, they argue, that hold the frustrated Arabs back from reaching their potential—and allow the rest of the world both to despise and to fear a deadly combination of wealth and backwardness."

ciaegis

"Afridi is probably the only person capable of gathering the Pashtun commanders and tribal chiefs together to broker their interests to get them to agree on one leadership - which could be either former monarch Zahir Shah or any of his nominees - to initially form an interim set-up leading to the formation of a constitutional framework to establish an elected government in Afghanistan."

"Without fanfare, Afridi was freed from prison in Karachi last Thursday after serving just a few weeks of a seven-year sentence for the export of 6.5 tons of hashish, seized at Antwerp, Belgium, in the 1980s. (He had been in custody for over two years). He had also been fined 5 million rupees (US$82,000). No reasons were given for Afridi's release, or under which legislation he was allowed to return to his home town in Khyber Agency in North Western Frontier Province."