What you’re looking at there is apparently around $613 million.

(And yes, it is very odd when you think about the difference between owning digital copies of the images, which is free… and owning the originals, which are apparently somehow worth over $600 million. But that’s not the point.)

Those five paintings were stolen last night from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

When you hear about a museum robbery for that kind of money, you kind of hope that there’s an incredible caper story there.

This time… not so much.

A broken window and a smashed grille were the first clues that led to the discovery early today that five paintings worth $613 million, including a Picasso and a Matisse, were stolen sometime overnight from the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

A surveillance camera later showed a single, hooded and masked man climbing into the museum and stealing the artwork

Yeah, that’s not exactly my idea of a madcap caper–anything you can pull of without any planning that you’d need George Clooney to do in the movie, where the total set of gear you’d need is covered by “rock, knife, and stepladder”, is hardly a caper.

The part of the article I just quoted that made me laugh the most though:

The Museum of Modern Art in Paris, which opened in 1961, has the reputation of being one of the most secure in the world.

Yes, that’s some serious security, there. Who could have predicted an assault by a single man carrying a rock? Next thing someone might come at the museum with a board-with-a-nail-in-it.

Also, am I the only person who’s always a little disappointed when burglars cut art out of the frames? It just seems kind of disrespectful, right?

Speaking of Darwyn, his first adaptation of Richard Stark‘s¹ Parker stories is coming out soon. I was already pretty jazzed about it, just from the mental pictures I had of how it would look, but the fact that there’s a preview online that shows just how great it will look has upped the jazz level. (I wonder if Darwyn will be at the FCBD thing tomorrow…)

I’m also pretty happy with the reissues of the Parker books that the University of Chicago are doing. The first six already out, and three more on the books already. I wonder if they’ll do them all–it would be nice to have a uniform edition.

1. a.k.a. the recently deceased Donald E. Westlake

Anyway, on to the tabs–nothing too deep tonight:

• I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that Sarah Palin’s daughter and her hockey player fiancee have broken up. I was so sure that it was love, and not political theatre.
• The universe is constantly taunting us with the old “law of unexpected consequences” business–something we find more constantly with computers than almost anything. It’s amusing to have Karl Schroeder point out a pretty awesome unintended consequence of the space elevator idea.
• Someone who knows about my abiding John D. Macdonald fondness, recently pointed me to a very nice piece that the Washington Post did on him quite a while ago.
• When you think about smuggling, and illict cargo, and the bribing of inspectors and customs folk; when you think of massive fraud and the cheating of people around the world; when you think of the kinds of organized crime that particularly plague Italy… do you think of olive oil? While at my local high-end market for European imports–waiting for some stuff to be assembled at the deli–I had a chance to read a print-out of the lengthy, but strangely compelling New Yorker piece on corruption and crime in the olive oil business that the owner had tacked up to the wall. Read it, but plan to spend some time, because it will suck you in.
• You absolutely have to read the post at Pink Tentacles about the monster mummies of Japan. And check out the pictures. It’s crazy. I got this link from Jeff Ford, who is apparently starting the libretto for a Broadway show about the phenomenon.
• I find it more amusing than it probably deserves that Saskatchewan has apparently felt the need to ban boar farming. And to find out that there are more than 2000 feral boars running around out there.
• I have kind of accepted that when I read some SF from the 50s or 60s that some of the ideas that are meant to be shocking would no longer seem so to contemporary folks. Not the sexual mores business, but the social satire in things like The Space Merchants. However, I’m less ready to understand this has already happened in my lifetime. Walter Jon Williams though, on rereading his own book, notes that it really has.
• It’s never a good sign when a manuscript’s first sentence is “’Are luck’s run out,’ said the Princess, ‘there unicorns are to fast!’”
• Using the power of the Internet to understand things at a very local level is really cool. However, surely this is some kind of joke. Right? Right?!?!
• Is it just me, or is it actually anatomically impossible to throw the reverse satan?

Hersh replied, “After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet.”

Hersh then went on to describe a second area of extra-legal operations: the Joint Special Operations Command. “It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently,” he explained. “They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. … Congress has no oversight of it.”

So two things if your initial reaction is doubt:

1) This is Seymour Hersh. The guy that broke My Lai and Abu Ghraib, among many other stories. A man described as “the most feared investigative journalist in America”.

2) He’s talking about the Bush Administration. At this point can you really believe they wouldn’t do this? I’m sure John Yoo wrote up a justification for why it was legal. If you’ll start a war under false pretenses, engage in wholesale warrantless spying on your own citizens, tacitly allow the wholesale looting of a country, support torture and extraordinary rendition as government policy, etc, is it so hard to believe you might have a “hit squad”?

Me, I can’t wait for the book Hersh promises later in the article.

Man found in WI basement covered in BBQ sauce

APPLETON, Wisc. (NEWSCHANNEL 3) – A couple telephoned police in the middle of the night after finding a man in their basement covered head to toe in barbecue sauce.

The story gets better from there, although the information at that link is pretty slight. I should Google.

The guy told officers he covered himself in barbecue sauce because he wanted to hide from the government.

Does that work? Has anyone told DHS? They should totally get a billion dollar grant to invest in anti-sauce technologies to prevent people from slipping through secure checkpoints, or something.

OK, I Googled.

Two other choice quotes from another piece:

The 35-year-old man was wearing the woman’s jacket and the man’s hat and explained “he was in the military and that someone had tipped off the FBI that (he) was providing secrets to the terrorists.”

and then, for a level of deadpan that might even shock an RCMP sergeant:

The man’s attorney said there may be mental health issues involved in the case.

Ya think?

Actually, if I had access to an ocean-worthy boat, how cool (for some extremely geeky values of cool) would it be to head out to those coordinates and actually meet up with someone there?

So seriously, why has the DNC not taken out an injunction to prevent Lieberman from pretending to be a Democrat (even an “Independent Democrat”)? Did you see that OpEd? Yeah, OK, so it’s pretty much Joe announcing that he’s willing to run in the second spot on a McCain ticket. (Actually, I kind of hope McCain takes Joe, since polling shows Obama/Edwards would crush McCain/Lieberman in a landslide.)

While I’m talking US Elections, I would be remiss if I didn’t include this little video from The Real McCain:

You know, the more I read about Disney behind-the-scenes–like the piece today about life as a Jack Sparrow–the more it seems like a completely weird dysfunctional little world that is completely disjoint from reality. Which, I guess, makes sense.

“WARNING: This movie is set in a magical land with soaring dragons, powerful, reality-warping wizards and people who can wear hooded cloaks without looking like complete dorks. None of these things exist in real life.”

Surely there’s a variant of this that could be included in convention literature? (I wonder if there will be a run on Indy fedoras among the general public, though. Surely there’s a backlash effect where the fan-nerds destroy any cool. I probably still have five more years before I can get my black leather trench coat out of the closet–damn Matrix movies.)

Normally when I get to the end of a beard cycle and have to shave it all off, I like to experiment with different facial hair styles. Apparently there are more of these than I thought. I know now that, for example, Neil was sporting the Old Dutch last night, and that Eric has been rocking the Ducktail for a while. I am sorely tempted to try out the Franz Josef next week.

Speaking of my pal Neil, I should point out that “simulating sexual intercourse” with a parked car is apparently an offense in some jurisdictions. I would worry about Neil’s continued freedom given this, except that I see that he apparently robbed a bank last week, which probably constitutes a more pressing danger of imprisonment. (I guess that explains the Old Dutch–he’s trying to look less like the photo.)

• It’s lovely that the Internet can bring me an interactive beer and food matching guide. Sadly, it uses a different algorithm than I do–resulting in far more matches with “see through” beer than my scheme would generate.
• Speaking of beer, I love the idea of beer haiku. My favourite so far:
  

  You will never know
  If it is the glass too much
  If you don’t drink it!

• That same site brings a round up of lots of other beer-and-food pairing pieces.
• It’s nice to see someone take on the idea that only kids with no extra-work life can be valuable employees in the computer industry.
• The logical conclusion to Bush’s effect on US currency.
• Yes, I believe this may actually qualify as the geekiest band in the world. (As an aside, aren’t the people who have nostalgic memories of the C-64 now mostly outside of the vaunted 18-35 demographic?)
• Here’s your most-likely-to-break-my-brain YouTube of the day. And a context link.
• So absinthe doesn’t make you mad, it just makes you really drunk. Fine with me. Death in the Afternoon is still a recipe for… well for disastrously bad decisions that you don’t really remember making. And sometimes you need that.
• “Any leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is oligoclase.” Yeah, some of those definitions in the OED need some… well, apparently they need some translation into English. I guess I was wrong about what that E stood for. (And if you knew what word that definition was for without clicking through, slap yourself. No really. Slap yourself.)
• Is it wrong that I find the Australia apology song and video really rather touching? Well tough, because I do.
• I should design a computer language, so I would have an excuse to never shave again. I bet I would look cool with a ZZ Top beard.
• OK, the idea of residents of Lesbos suing to make lesbians stop calling themselves lesbians cracks me up. I bet there’s a good number of people on the island also enjoying the ludicrousness.
• And no link list would be complete without a link to a really dumb criminal.

Lynchings in Congo as penis theft panic hits capital

KINSHASA (Reuters) – Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.

(more in link)

World Wide Words: Blackmail
The mail in blackmail (at various times also spelled maill, male and in other ways) is an old Scots word for rent. This was usually paid in what was often called white money, silver coins. It comes from Old Norse mal, meaning an agreement, later a contract, and then the payment specified by the contract.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries chieftains in the highlands of Scotland and along the border between Scotland and England ran protection rackets in which they threatened farmers with pillage and worse if they didn’t pay up. This amounted to an informal tax or extra rent and the farmers, with twisted humour, thought of it as the opposite of the legitimate white money or white mail that they paid. Black has for many centuries been associated with the dark side of human activities, hence blackmail.

Adrian says: According to the Swedish daily newspaper Expressen.se, police suspect that a team of thieves operating in Sweden are using little people hidden in hockey bags and placed in the cargo holds of buses to loot passengers luggage while in transit.

They link to the original story in Swedish, which does me no good.

However, it does remind me that I wanted to either get this t-shirt for myself, or send one to Gwenda:

However, I think I’ve now found something that avoids embalming, but also doesn’t have the environmental costs associated with cremation, and as an added bonus is something that sounds completely insane.

Apparently Promessa will give you a very ecologically sound final disposition of your corpse.

How do they do this?

Well, first they freeze-dry your corpse, and then they shatter the corpsicle jerky into dust with sonic bursts. The dust, which doesn’t decay as long as you keep it dry gets put into a corn starch coffin, which will decompose quickly.

Come on, that’s awesome.

You know, I thought that story about the carnivorous fish spa was the freakiest thing I would read about the Japanese and fish. Not so, however. It comes a very, very distant second to the article about the sexual habits of Japanese fishermen. (The original link seems to have vanished, but there’s a copy of the story here.)

Look, I’m going to quote a little bit of it, but you go read it for yourself.

Should you happen to find yourself climbing on a seaside crag, you might come across a type of anemone known as “isoginchaku.” And this, says Makeburu, bodes well for some fishy frolic.

The creature gets its name from the old Japanese coin purse called a “kinchaku,” which puckers tightly in the center when you pull on the drawstrings.

“So if you stick in your you-know-what, it’ll snap shut around it,” he says. “You don’t need any foreplay at all. Just ram the old avenger home. It feels goooood,” he grins, rolling his eyes.

There’s a picture with that bit in the article that makes you wonder about those old size stereotypes for Asian men.

So, you want to be able to access your mail from anywhere, so you use GMail, or something like it. You want to be able to chat with your friends from anywhere, so you use the Google Talk web client, or something like it. You want to be able to read your RSS feeds from anywhere so you use Bloglines or Google Reader, or something like them. You want to be able to see your contacts from anywhere, so you use Plaxo, or something like it. You want to share documents with people over the web so you…

And so on.

The trend continues, and there are distributed applications to fill almost any niche at this point.

The obvious next step, of course, is a distributed operating system: access to your whole desktop from anywhere.

And there’s already a free, open source, implementation out there. Check it out.

Be sure to at least watch the video.

Scientology Faces Criminal Charges

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) — A Belgian prosecutor on Tuesday recommended that the U.S.-based Church of Scientology stand trial for fraud and extortion, following a 10-year investigation that concluded the group should be labeled a criminal organization.

I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!

Finally, I have this one problem at work that is plaguing me–things that work everywhere else behave dismally if the application server happens to be a specific version of Weblogic, running on Solaris (same version of WLS works fine on Windows). I can’t figure it out.

However, after reading about Nepalese airline mechanics today, I have an idea for something that might resolve the problem.