Eideard

Its crew has been threatened by pirates, lashed by storms and almost sunk by floating logs, but now there are blue skies for Earthrace, a biodiesel-powered trimaran, which sailed into the Spanish port of Sagunto and smashed the world record for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe by speedboat.

The £3m vessel, which looks more like the Batmobile than a boat and runs on recycled cooking fat, knocked 14 days off the record set a decade ago by Cable and Wireless Adventurer, a British craft…

It was New Zealand skipper Pete Bethune’s second attempt at the record. He abandoned his first last year after a series of disasters that included an attack from pirates off Nicaragua that left a bullet hole in the hull and his own brief imprisonment in Guatemala after a fatal collision with a local fishing boat.

This time Bethune was almost forced to abandon ship again when Earthrace crashed into logs in the surf off Borneo – wrecking the rudder, propeller and drive shaft – and progress was delayed by an expanse of floating rubbish 1,000 miles off California, a seven-day storm in the Indian Ocean and a six-week queue to pass through the Panama canal…

“We’re completely stoked to have achieved something so incredible,” says Bethune. “Earthrace’s success has proved that any form of transport can be non-damaging to the environment as well as being high performance.”

It’s only my personal opinion; but, this effort signals to the dim and desperate travelers between the American coasts that our focus on ethanol as the savior of affordable, renewable transport is better served by starting the trek to diesel power – and bio-diesel fuel. But, then, we’re only a few decades behind the decision-making of the rest of the industrial world.

Former South African President Nelson Mandela received a gift for his 90th birthday as U.S. Congress finally approved the removal of his name from the country’s terrorist list.

The Senate unanimously greenlighted the legislation on a voice vote removing the “terrorist” label and travel restrictions imposed on Mandela and other senior members of his African National Congress (ANC).

The same legislation was passed on May 8 at the House of Representatives…

The ANC was banned by the South African apartheid government in1960, its leaders jailed or forced into exile until the ban on the movement was lifted 30 years later.

Mandela was jailed for 27 years for his leadership in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He became the first post-apartheid-era president years after his release in 1990…

“It is shameful that the United States still treats the ANC this way based solely on its designation as a terrorist organization by the old apartheid South African regime,” said Howard Berman, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs who introduced the legislation.

Mandela, who is turning 90 on July 18, celebrated his 90th birthday with a concert in London’s Hyde Park on Friday in support of his global AIDS campaign.

I will try not to go off too hard on my fellow Americans; but, living in one of the most politically-ignorant, parochial and paranoid nations on the planet – I’m hard pressed to accept this overdue sop to reality as something truly positive.

The United States assumed the colonial mantle from England and France right after World War 2. Successive governments learned nothing from the failure of European imperialism. Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, our nation’s foreign policy has been decided by greedy, arrogant fools who worked hard only at diminishing the respect that followed our anti-fascist efforts during that war.

These idiots will probably spend the weekend patting themselves on the back for their “anti-racist” campaign. Hypocrites all!

The Church of Sweden will carry out drive-in weddings lasting about seven minutes at a car rally next month in a bid to make marriage more accessible.

Undaunted by soaring fuel prices, 36 couples have applied to get married at a gathering of auto enthusiasts in Vasteras in central Sweden, said priest Jerker Asterlund, the scheme’s initiator…

The wedding ceremonies will be carried by 10 priests alongside the focal point of the auto gathering, a motorcade of 1950s and 1960s cars.

A gospel choir and a priest singing Elvis tunes will provide the soundtrack to the festivities, Asterlund said.

Sounds like at least as much fun as most of my own marriages.

I’ve been blogging about this Salmonella outbreak for weeks. And it started a few weeks before the notoriety. The only thing new to report is that it may be something else!

“Produce investigations are very difficult, because a lot of times, vegetables are eaten all together,” said Dr. Patricia Griffin, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. That makes it hard to trace back any one item to a source of contamination, she added. “We continue to keep an open mind about the possible source of this outbreak, as does FDA.”

Dr. David Acheson, associate commissioner for foods at the Food and Drug Administration, agreed. “There is a strong epidemiological association with tomatoes,” but the agency is also “looking into other ingredients,” he said.

Acheson said FDA officials and tomato growers were involved in “a two-way dialogue.”

But, there’s obviously little useful record-keeping.

The CDC says the outbreak, which is linked to a rare form of bacteria called Salmonella Saintpaul, has spread to include 810 cases in 36 states and the District of Columbia. And there is no sign that it’s abating. “We are still getting reports of recent illnesses,” Griffin said.

The true incidence is probably much higher, because the agency has estimated that about 30 cases occur for every one that is reported.

We’ve learned that distributors often mix tomatoes from different farms, different states, even different countries in the same retail packaging. Wonderful.

How about electing a government that requires our civil service to spend some time working on behalf of the citizens instead of fronting for corporate sleaze and greed?

When the Great Depression left architect Alfred Butts out of work, he scrabbled around for something to do – and came up with a game whose ingenious mix of anagrams, crosswords, chance and skill is still a winner, 60 years on. And yet it nearly didn’t see the light of day…

The highest score that it is theoretically possible to achieve in a single turn in Scrabble is for the word “oxyphenbutazone”. Even at the top levels of tournament Scrabble, this has never actually happened: it would require the game to have unfolded in exactly the right way up to that point, leaving exactly the right open spaces, and the right combination of letters in the bag. But if it did, it would span three triple-word scores, creating seven other new words on the board, for a total of at least 1,778, depending on which official word list you used…

Hypothetically, there’s a chance that higher-scoring words have been played in amateur games, around tables strewn with the remains of lunch on slow Sunday afternoons, and never publicised. But it’s unlikely, and besides, we know what would happen: you’d play the word, then someone would dispute it, then you’d realise you’d never agreed which dictionary you were going to use, then you’d be able to find only a children’s dictionary with a couple of thousand words in it, then someone would knock over a glass of wine, and the cat would jump on the table, and if the game continued at all it would be with an undertone of resentment and edginess; the emotional temperature of the entire day would have changed. Scrabble does these things to people.

The official position is that Scrabble is 60 years old this year – though that’s slightly debatable and, believe me, Scrabble experts are the kind of people who like to debate it at length…

Read the whole article. A proper Scrabble fan would – even if it wasn’t about Scrabble.

These are from the L.A.Times coverage of Men’s Fashion Week in Milan and Paris.

Bulgaria’s Weightlifting Federation has withdrawn its team from this summer’s Beijing Olympics after 11 lifters failed drugs tests.

The federation said eight men and three women had tested positive for the banned substance methandienon.

The team was stripped of three gold medals and sent home following positive drugs tests at the Sydney Games in 2000.

“At the doorstep of the Beijing Games our hopes have been damaged,” the federation added.

NSS.