Harvey Korman leaves the stage

Harvey Korman took his last bow:

Harvey Korman, the tall, versatile comedian who won four Emmys for his outrageously funny contributions to “The Carol Burnett Show” and played a conniving politician to hilarious effect in “Blazing Saddles,” died Thursday. He was 81.

I remember laughing until I cried in his skits with Tim Conway on “The Carol Burnett Show.” Then, years later, my wife got a chance to meet him on the set of “Based on an Untrue Story.” She described him as nice, warm, and genuinely funny.

Very sad to see him go.

UPDATE: DaveinTexas beat me to the punch and included some YouTube videos in his post at AoSHQ.

Dire prospects for Iran

Spengler of the Asia Times gives us his diagnosis and prognosis for Iran. First, the diagnosis:

Britain whines, Obama placates, nothing changes

On the one hand we have liberals in England celebrating Barack Obama’s recent speech:

Barack Obama has called for the “special relationship” between the US and Britain to be “recalibrated” to make it a fairer, more equal partnership, the Guardian has learned.
…
A foreign policy adviser to the Obama campaign said the remarks on the US-UK relationship reflected the senator’s general foreign policy approach.

“It’s no longer going to be that we are in the lead and everyone follows us. Full partners not only listen to each other, they also occasionally follow each other,” the adviser said.

The implication being that the Bush administration has slighted the UK, treating them as a junior partner. If only we would acknowledge their importance, they would be important!

But then take a look at this article from The Times:

…the response to Iran’s determination to put nuclear weapons within reach looks more like being the first difficult decision facing the next US president, rather than the last, dramatic one of President Bush.

So what, exactly, is the mighty UK government going to do in the face of this crisis? What sort of initiative, as a country deserving of a full partnership, are they pursuing?

They’re going to wait for the United States to decide what to do.

Hey Brits: if you want to be treated like an equal, act like an equal. Having Barack Obama say nice things isn’t going to change the reality of the situation, which is that you are not prepared to lead, or even take any sort of difficult stand in foreign policy.

And that’s a shame.

What could be worse than sitting through Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth?”

Maybe sitting through it as an opera?

First it was the film and the book. Now the next stop for Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” is opera. La Scala officials say the Italian composer Giorgio Battistelli has been commissioned to produce an opera on the international multiformat hit for the 2011 season at the Milan opera house.

Yikes. I just wish I had time to photoshop Al’s head onto somebody like Luciano Pavarotti.

More bad reporting from WaPo

I regard the Washington Post as the most balanced newspaper in publication, though it does lean a bit left. So I was disappointed in the very poor reporting job of this story from a week ago, in which their reporter exaggerates the results of the DoD Inspector General’s audit of expenditures in Iraq. Here’s her lede:

The inspector general for the Defense Department said yesterday that the Pentagon cannot account for almost $15 billion worth of goods and services ranging from trucks, bottled water and mattresses to rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns that were bought from contractors in the Iraq reconstruction effort.

A pair of pumps, the smell of the sea, and thou

Just when you think you’ve heard about every possible fetish:

Police say a man crawled under a table at a University of Cincinnati library and used a syringe to spray saltwater onto the woman’s shoes.
…
The woman told officers that after she heard something coming from under her table and felt the sensation on her feet, she looked down and saw a man on his knee holding a syringe.

If “syringe” and “saltwater” are euphemisms, then the story makes a sort of sick sense. If not, then I’m at a loss.