[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

From Belmont Club:

Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Notes from all over

***********************************AN EXCERPT *******************************

Whatever merits the article may have, the Rumsfeld vs the Generals debate has become political, a stage where noise really starts to exceed signal.

[Madame Dufarge]

Bump.

Excellent.

[Tribune7]

I thought this was pretty weird

The kung fu movie star Bruce Lee would have turned 65 in November, and a two-ring media circus descended on Mostar, Bosnia, for his birthday. It was then, in this mortar- and bullet-pocked city once famous for its Ottoman bridge, that the world’s first public monument to Lee was unveiled. Building civil society never seemed so weird: Here was a life-sized bronze statue of a topless American immigrant paid for by the German government and christened by a Chinese diplomat, erected at the behest of a dysfunctional community of Croats, Serbs, and Muslims.

But there are always unintended consequences.

Just hours after the monument was unveiled, a group of rowdy teenagers defaced the statue and stole the nunchucks, leaving the site littered with wine bottles. According to Sky News, one citizen responded with the cry, “Once again we’ve shown what Balkan savageness is!”