Place Your Bets


Several online casinos now offer you a chance to bet on when Castro will die, will appear in public, will retake control of the government, blah, blah, blah. Odds right now are 13.50 to 1 that he will appear in public within the next 10 days. They're 16.50 to 1 that he won't. Some casinos will let you bet on the date he will die. Ya takes ya chances.

With the CIA It's Not 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover


No, it's 638 ways to kill Castro. Over his 47 years in power, our spooks have devised 638 ways to do him in. The irony is that he's still hanging on, and looks like he's going to die a natural death. Unless this latest hemorrhaging is number 639 ;-)

Calling a Whore a Whore Is A Crime

At least it is in Italy. A man called his wife a whore because of the way she was dressed. To make it even worse, she in fact was a prostitute earlier in her life. He received a sentence of one year in jail due to "mistreatment and injury" of his wife. He appealed claiming that because she had been a prostitute previously, he should not have to serve his sentence. The court disagreed and said that what the man did injured wife's "moral integrity." The court said that regardless of her previous work what he said was an offense.

Dog Days

It's the dog days of summer. It wasn't until the last few years that I found out dog days refers to the constellation Canis Major that's high in the sky during the Northern Hemisphere summer. I always thought it was about how dogs in the summer don't do anything but lie around and almost never move.

Just to prove it's dog days, today the forecast high in Austin is 99F. The forecast high in NYC is 101F. Hah! It's actually hotter up there than here, but when it's hot in The City it's worse than here.

By the way, I've worked here so damned long that I have underground parking. No hot steering wheel for me!