Buckfast and BS detectors
A few things dug out of the preoccupied rubble of the past few weeks, and the far end of unread open windows in my browser. I should mention the snow I alluded to in the last post, that was the previous snow storm. There was another one right after that, rounding things out to about an even 26 inches. My workplace - the University of Maryland seemed to flash out of existence altogether - like that island in the show Lost. They were shut the entire week. Though they apparently blinked back to this time stream over the week-end. I didn't miss the place. If I wanted this much snow I would move back to Massachusetts. I'm not a skier or a skater. Snow, ice, piercing cold, and long interminable winters, these things were always reasons I was able to deal with the bittersweet separation from the marsh and peneplain of my youth.
First off back on Friday or Saturday the 22nd, 23rd of January the British government finally got around to arresting James McCormick on fraud charges
BBC News - 'Bomb detector' maker Jim McCormick arrested. I had written about this back at the end of November and wanted to note this outcome as it passed. This is the man who sold - not only to Iraq but apparently all over the world and for years - a bomb/explosives detection device, the ADE 651, for $60-80,000 apiece
British Man Held for Fraud in Iraq Bomb Detectors - NYTimes.com. Which consists of little more than a telescoping tv antenna attached to black plastic case shaped like a pistol grip and filled with a couple of wires and diodes to give the impression of an electronic device. Faced with criminal charges and the shuttering of his magical security factory McCormick admitted it was just a divining rod, that he wasn't really saying they weren't. Adding only that there was no reason a divining rod couldn't find a bomb as easily as water. Export of the devices is banned for the present. Iraqi officials are opening their own inquiry as how this came about
Iraq PM orders probe into 'bomb detector' - Yahoo! News. They pronounce themselves shocked, shocked at the perfidy of it all
BBC News - Iraqi Interior ministry still backing 'bomb detector.
The other thing in my Firefox back pages was a MetaFilter thread
Buckfast Tonic Wine | MetaFilter about Scotland's attempt to scapegoat and ban Buckfast Tonic Wine (from this
Coatbridge Journal - For Scots, a Scourge Unleashed by a Bottle - NYTimes.com ). This is a perennial event for the island Kingdom. Something that comes up every few years. I had never heard of Buckfast until Ted Leo wrote a song featuring it a few years ago. A net search at the time revealed much hand wringing on BTW's account. Apparently the Ted Leo song is not the only ode to Bucky, but I'm willing to bet its the best one. The Metafilter piece has links to the Ted Leo and the Pharmacists song and others, also the Wikipedia page for Buckfast so I need not repeat those here. 
The British press it seems has been full of concern for the binge drinking and hooliganism of youth culture for the past season. The press and that part of society that concern emanates osmosis like from that is. As some in the metafilter thread point out there are at least eight other countries that drink more heavily than Scotland.
Buckfast is; however, a Tonic Wine, a value added wine. It's fortified; with extra alcohol, extra sugar, and caffeine all in one handy bottle. A solid measure more convenient than having to drink both your vodka and your red bull. Sadly Bucky is not available on these shores.
Speaking of Vodka, I saw a Mini Cooper the other day down in DC, in a full body advertising paint-job. The vehicle spoke of British Vodka, Something about bubbles too I think. It just seemed unlikely. In a conspiratorial turn of mind it occurred to me that the Brits are really too parsimonious a people to have thrown away all those blighted potatoes that inaugurated the Irish potatoes famine. I see now that possibly they saved them all, in some hidden warehouse coordinated by a secret society all these years. Until the time was right. And now British Vodka is the result. As Terrence Simmion used to say Laissez les Bons Temps Rouler.
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