Category Archives: Completely Different

Source: BBC

Via Doc Searls, a link to this.

After a week or two of trying (and failing) to be fair and balanced by finding a flaw in Firefox to match the problems with IE, User Friendly explains why we don't have Lynx -friendly cartoons.

French 'lobster' alarms US troops: A seemingly innocuous codename chosen by French special forces in south-east Afghanistan caused alarm among US troops searching for Osama Bin Laden.

A newly arrived French commander picked “homard”, meaning lobster, as an alias, the newspaper Liberation reports.

He did not realise that it sounds like Omar, the first name of the Mullah who led the Taleban and is now on the run.

Concerned US intelligence services monitoring French communications raised the alarm and the codename was changed.

Of course, those of us in the know realized immediately that this fish story was just a cover to explain why the US spies on the perfidious French! And the great thing about the story is that Europeans immediately believe it!

What's even stranger is that the BBC buries the really interesting part of this story:

The incident, said to have happened in July 2003, marked the start of French special forces' involvement in operation Enduring Freedom, the US-led action to find the al-Qaeda leader.

The presence of more than 200 French troops in the area has only just been acknowledged by Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie.

So the French have been helping hunt Osama all the time the Republicans have been jumping up and down about them? Such great diplomacy on the part of the US!

NOTE: 'Homard' is no relation to the Medium Lobster

Thanks to special contacts who do not wish to be named, I have secured an exclusive copy of a key Presidential Daily Briefing, complete with GW Bush's own marginal notations. Click here to pop up a full size copy!. I think this document puts to rest any question of what Bush knew and when he knew it!

New roadside attraction's a cover-up. It seems someone complained about nude classical-style statuary at a garden center because the statutes were visible from the road:

… the statues weigh as much as 500 pounds each and are an ordeal to move. So owners Angie Langford and Pam Gregory came up with a different approach to customer service.

Nearly a dozen concrete statues are sporting crimson velvet two-piece sarongs.

I suppose this explains why people got so worked up about the Janet Jackson thing. No, actually, it doesn't explain it…it's just consistent with it.