What a week for Oscar Pistorius, the fastest man on no legs. First, the good news that he gets to run in two international able-bodied events. He takes second place in the 400m B race in Rome last Friday, but gets disqualified in the rainy race in England two days later. The stress and emotion surface in an untimely outburst against the IAAF, which is still investigating whether his prosthetics give him an advantage. I fail to see why this should take so long, but calling them amateurs probably wasn’t going to help his cause. Today the news breaks that the IAAF believes his blades offer less wind-resistance. This shouldn’t be too hard to fix. But he also distributes his energy differently, and speeds up during the course of a sprint, which is the exact opposite of what other athletes do. I’m not convinced this is a fair point, but if it sticks he might not, ahem, have a leg to stand on.

Anyone remember Pik Botha? He’s the guy who was driven to drink as Apartheid’s long-serving foreign minister, because while he got a glimpse of reality while hobnobbing in foreign capitals with Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, the rest of white-ruled South Africa was growing ever more backwards and isolated. He was a good guy. PW Botha ordered him placed under surveillance and military intelligence didn’t trust him, so he must have been okay.

Like a ghost from the past, he recently resurfaced.

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War reporter Michael Yon recalls a remarkable combat story from January, about a Stryker named General Lee and its crew. Respect.

As the bomb detonated beneath it, the General Lee arced like a dolphin from the sea of Hell. … And that was it. Our guys’ lives seemed to be reduced to propaganda. The terrorists published reports that the soldiers were killed. … But that’s not exactly how it turned out.

If true, this story sheds some light on the reports that Strykers are too light to withstand combat conditions in Iraq.
The story has bombs and action, toughness and bravery, but suffers from a happy ending. No wonder it’s not good enough for the mainstream media. Go read it.

Amusing spoof of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Modern Major General posted by privacy advocate, Lauren Weinstein. Among the lyrics:

I’ve never met the ruling troika here inside the Googleplex,
But even so I know their motives are as pure as healthy sex.
We work real hard, our systems spin, we’re trying to make a better Earth,
It gets annoying sometimes when outsiders seem to doubt our worth.

That public situation needs to improve before it’s too late,
Perhaps what we have here is just a failure to communicate.
But companies worth billions are between a rock and a hard place,
Try do things really right and stockholders may just spit in your face.

Download MP3 here, check out YouTube audio here, or read the lyrics here.