It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood...

SN1’s 2Q2007 post is up… “Advice for My Son.” Rumor has it there may be another post hard upon the heels of this one. SN2 told me he was going to update his blog as well, in an unrelated conversation we had yesterday evening (“I DO have the time, now.”). Mirabile dictu!

So. It’s now two-out-of-three. All even and headed back to Hockeytown. It would be easy to resurrect the Ghosts of Playoffs Past, wring my hands, rend my garments, and start collecting ashes and the odd sack or two. But I’m not gonna do that. The Wings simply need to get their special teams into the game and quit giving Calgary the gift of the power play, which is the SOLE reason the Flames have tied this series. The Flames would be competing for tee times right now if not for their power play goals. Detroit can change this, and they’ve proven they can score on Kiprusoff. Easier said than done, perhaps. But it can be done. As George Michael sang: Ya Gotta Have Faith.

But some things go the way you want them to: Dallas (finally) won in OT last evening to stay alive (Vancouver leads the series 3-2). It seems strange to actually be rooting for Dallas, but that’s the case. I’d rather the Wings play Dallas than San Jose…

All the other playoff series are pretty much going according to plan, with the exception of NY sweeping Atlanta. Pittsburg is out, and Anaheim eliminated Minnesota last night. And the game to watch tonight is Nashville vs. San Jose. I’m pretty danged sure the Sharks will celebrate in Nashville tonight, what with momentum on their side…not to mention a 3-1 series lead.

NHL history is not on the Predators' side either. Of the 214 teams that trailed 3-1 in a best-of-seven series, only 20 rallied to win the series (9.3 percent).

OK…so Dallas was down 3-1, you say. True enough, but Nashville ain’t Dallas, now, is it?

Interesting…and scary: ‘I found Saddam’s WMD bunkers’ by Melanie Phillips in The Spectator.

It’s a fair bet that you have never heard of a guy called Dave Gaubatz. It’s also a fair bet that you think the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has found absolutely nothing, nada, zilch; and that therefore there never were any WMD programmes in Saddam’s Iraq to justify the war ostensibly waged to protect the world from Saddam’s use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.

Dave Gaubatz, however, says that you could not be more wrong. Saddam’s WMD did exist. He should know, because he found the sites where he is certain they were stored. And the reason you don’t know about this is that the American administration failed to act on his information, ‘lost’ his classified reports and is now doing everything it can to prevent disclosure of the terrible fact that, through its own incompetence, it allowed Saddam’s WMD to end up in the hands of the very terrorist states against whom it is so controversially at war.

You may be tempted to dismiss this as yet another dodgy claim from a warmongering lackey of the world Zionist neocon conspiracy giving credence to yet another crank pushing US propaganda. If so, perhaps you might pause before throwing this article at the cat. Mr Gaubatz is not some marginal figure. He’s pretty well as near to the horse’s mouth as you can get.

[…]

‘The problem was that the ISG were concentrating their efforts in looking for WMD in northern Iraq and this was in the south,’ says Mr Gaubatz. ‘They were just swept up by reports of WMD in so many different locations. But we told them that if they didn’t excavate these sites, others would.’

That, he says, is precisely what happened. He subsequently learnt from Iraqi, CIA and British intelligence that the WMD buried in the four sites were excavated by Iraqis and Syrians, with help from the Russians, and moved to Syria. The location in Syria of this material, he says, is also known to these intelligence agencies. The worst-case scenario has now come about. Saddam’s nuclear, biological and chemical material is in the hands of a rogue terrorist state — and one with close links to Iran.

Scary on a couple of levels…first and foremost, WMDs in possession of the very same people we SO wanted to keep them away from. And scary because it’s another example of incompetence on the part of the bureaucracy running this war. And I’m getting pretty danged tired of the latter. Ms. Phillips only adds fuel to my smoldering fire. Oh, and lest we forget: Ms. Pelosi et al thinks we should talk to Assad and the other asshats. Good grief. (Play those last words as you will.)

Apropos of nothing, Mr. Gaubatz was a special agent in the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI). That’s what My Old Man did…but I can’t tell you any stories, other than the fact the Ol’ Man spent many a day away from home in various “exotic” places during the 50’s, when we lived in Paris. This sounds like a bad spy movie, but I remember many, many nights when there would be a knock on the door in the dead of night or in the wee small hours (we didn’t have a phone, virtually no one did in early post-war France), followed by the sounds and smells of Mom fixing breakfast and/or coffee while Dad packed and the “driver” cooled his heels in the kitchen, making small talk with Mom. And then he’d be off, sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for a couple of weeks. Those were trying times for my mother, and it showed.

In the end, Dad never said one single word about what he did. Not one… Kinda like Omertà, only stronger.