The same apartment building that has the doubtful balcony of which I provided a picture on the 14th also has a questionable staircase: In fact. the staircase is collapsing rapidly. Here is a picture from the 18th: with a support having come free of the banister; and here is a picture from the 19th: with the support now lying on the ground.

Nor is this the only problematic staircase of the building. Here is another: This staircase has developed a discernible lean.

The balcony could be quickly repaired. In the short-run, all that is needed is to pull the base of the cocked support back into its original position. And this repair should be effected before the weight of the balcony and of the potted plants on it cause it to fall into the alley, potentially damaging persons or property.

The staircase shown in the first three pictures should be immediately torn-down. It cannot safely be used, nor is there a good way to block access from its base. The other staircase may have some life left to it; but, given that the one needs to be removed quickly, it would probably be most cost-effective to dismantle the other now as well.

The building seems to be crumbling about its tenants. Perhaps some of them simply don't care enough to move, but perhaps others cannot afford a better place. Generally speaking, even a home in such a poor state is better than no home. But eventually the bills will have to be paid, rents will be increased, and some of the tenants may have to leave.

The media is buzzing with the meme that Barack Obama has chosen or is on the cusp of choosing his Vice-Presidential running-mate.

I think that Obama has taken far longer than was in his interest to make this choice. Although it developed that there would be a second-choice advantage for the two major-party Presidential candidates in their selection of running-mates, each had to make a selection before or during their respective conventions, and the Democrats had already scheduled their convention before that of the Republicans. While there may have been some tiny hope that the McCain camp would toss-away the advantage, the principal effect of Obama's delay has been to allow Hillary Clinton to hold onto attention that would otherwise have gone to his choice of running mate (on the assumption that it were not her). And the Clintons plan to exploit the Convention as much as possible for their own aggrandizement, not-withstanding the costs to the Obama campaign in particular and to the Democratic Party more generally.

Hillary Clinton might be Obama's running-mate. Certainly, if he delays until the convention is under-way, the Clintons will do everything in their power to make it seem as if she has a sort of right to that spot. But Obama will look even more like Just Another Politician if he selects her. Perhaps the buzz about him nearing announcement of a running-mate comes from an awareness on the part of his camp that he needs to head-off the convention.

He has been encouraged to select a Yeehaw as a running-mate, the notion being that this would balance the ticket; I think that it would be a major mistake. A integral aspect of Obama's appeal is that he's not a Yeehaw.

Part of the reason that the Democrats have been comparing Obama to John F. Kennedy is that they want to look past the last three Democratic Presidents — Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Lyndon Johnson. There had been a sort of forced nostalgia for Bill Clinton, but once Obama came over the horizon, Democrats became more willing to look critically at Clinton and at his Presidency; Jimmy Carter was an even more incompetent than is the current President; and Johnson is largely remembered for the Viet-Nam War. Looking past those Presidents to Kennedy is looking past three Yeehaws (the most distant a Cowboy-Yeehaw) to a Yankee. It doesn't do much good to point-out that Kennedy chose a Yeehaw as his running-mate, 'cause that running-mate was Johnson, later one of the Democratic Presidents past whom these Democrats now want to look. And the highest profile Democrat Yeehaw under some consideration this time was John (Epic Fail) Edwards.

Meanwhile, for the last 14 or more years, the public faces of the Republicans have been largely Yeehaws — men such as Jesse Helms, Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and of course G.W. Bush. (Karl Rove is arguably a faux Yeehaw, but he manages to sound like one.) Democrats are alienated from these Yeehaws because they are Republicans, and Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are alienated from these figures because by a great many measures they have been very great failures. When Republicans look back, it is to Reagan, a man who liked to play the Cowboy, but who was raised in the Midwest and rose to importance in California.

As far as balancing the ticket goes, Obama isn't in a great spot. While many Yeehaws really themselves don't want a Yeehaw, they also don't want their nose rubbed in the political mess. Obama might do best to choose a Cowboy, as Yeehaws tend to blur the distinction (hence, for example, the conflation of American country music with that of the Old West), though the rest of the country doesn't place Montana or Arizona in the South.

McCain, who has long positioned himself as a Cowboy, can more easily balance his ticket. Regionally, he can choose a Yankee or a Yankee-Midwesterner. He probably shouldn't choose a plain-vanilla Midwesterner, as then his ticket will be mocked as white-bread.

In conversation last night or this morning, the Woman of Interest noted that cannibalistic killers are at elevated risk for brain disease, whence we got onto the subject of kuru.

Many people have heard or read of kuru, a form of prion disease noted amongst a people of Papua New Guinea, as a result of cannibalism, but I noted to her that there are a few twists to the story which which most people are not now unfamiliar.

The south Fore people, who were the people in question, seem to have picked-up the practice of eating the dead from a neighboring people who did so for religious reasons. But the Fore only adopted the practice, not the religion. The women were just having a little nosh as they prepared the bodies, and were sharing with the children.

An acknowledgment that kuru was caused by cannibalism — which acknowledgment later helped scientists and policy-makers to recognize how other prion diseases spread — was impeded because, in the 1970s and '80s, an anthropolgist, William Edward Arens, had with remarkable success made politically correct the denial of culturally based cannibalism. That is to say that the existence of cannibalism wasn't altogether denied, but it was claimed to be always an extraordinary act of deviance or of desperation. (On at least one occasion, Arens took a researcher to task for noting the physical evidence for cannibalism amongst a vanished people, instead of working to promote the virtues of their extinct culture.)

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on identifying the cause of kuru, was in Papua New Guinea largely for the boys. He was a child molestor.

I received an IKEA catalogue in the mails to-day. They shouldn't have bothered, as I will not buy from them.

In 1999, IKEA proposed to the City of New Rochelle, NY, that they use eminent domain to steal the City Park neighborhood, so that IKEA could have the land for a store.

On the cover of the catalogue, it says

Home is the most important place in the world.

I imagine that some of the people in the City Park neighborhood felt that way about their homes.

All right, now:

• If Edwards is not the father and ended the affair in 2006, then why did he surreptitiously visit Ms Hunter subsequently?
• If Edwards is not the father, then why did he feel the need to publicly admit to the affair, since his supporters and the mainstream media would have taken a negative paternity test for him (or a positive test for Mr Young) as pulling the rug from under the more general claim of an affair?

I think that Edwards is telling the truth slowly, which is to say that he has planned to admit to the affair and to paternity, but is now deliberately doing so in stages. I don't know how coherently he had previously thought about what he would do, but my guess is that at various times he has told himself that the affair and paternity could be indefinitely concealed, that they could be revealed after his wife dies, or that they could be revealed after he'd achieved greater acclaim in the office of President, of Vice President, or of Attorney General.

Meanwhile, spare a tear for Chet Edwards; his chances of being chosen as running-mate have been gravely injured simply because Obama will understand that there are a fair number of people who would confuse Chet Edwards with the guy who had that affair. (Obama would have been foolish to choose Chet Edwards in any case, but he might have been foolish.)

Okay, now I could write about the idiocy of the War on Drugs, but I want to instead talk about something else that makes me furious.

Far too many police, in far too many cases, have clearly demonstrated that they believe themselves to have the right to punish criminals by executing their dogs.

I'm not talking about cases where the dog has attacked, or has behaved in a way that indicates that it is an immediate threat.

It's not the right of a police officer to punish, period. And it's not the right of anyone to punish some person by killing an innocent companion animal. It doesn't fundamentally matter, when it comes to the killing of the Calvo dogs, that the Calvos were innocent. Even if they had been guilty of something truly criminal, it wouldn't be the right of police to kill their dogs because of who their owners were.

Police officials who needlessly kill dogs are never given worse than slaps on their wrists. Instead, they need to do hard prison time. More specifically:

• If it can been shown that police conducted a raid such as this, where they could have brought and deployed non-lethal measures but did not, then one or more of the officials needs to spend years in prison. It should even be a criminal offense (albeït perhaps just a misdemeanor) for any participating officer not to know who has been assigned responsibility for those non-lethal measures, so that treasonous bastards cannot merely pretend that there was a mix-up. Note that I am not claiming that non-lethal measures can always be employed; but, when it is practicable to prepare them, police should be required to prepare them.
• In any case where lethal methods have been used against a dog that is plainly not acting aggressively (as in the case of the dog who was attempting to flee), there should be years in prison.

These sorts of laws need to be effected on a state level. Governor O'Malley of Maryland should be recalled from office if he isn't the very first governor to produce a bill to such effect.

Year	Winner		Runner-Up
	Name	Affiliation	Name	Affiliation
1948	Truman	Yeehaw-Midwesterner	Dewey	Yankee
1952	Eisenhower	Midwesterner	Stevenson	Yankee-Midwesterner
1956	Eisenhower	Midwesterner	Stevenson	Yankee-Midwesterner
1960	Kennedy	Yankee	Nixon	Californian
1964	Johnson	Cowboy-Yeehaw	Goldwater	Cowboy
1968	Nixon	Californian	Humphrey	Yankee-Midwesterner
1972	Nixon	Californian	McGovern	Yankee-Midwesterner
1976	Carter	Yeehaw	Ford	Midwesterner
1980	Reagan	Faux-Cowboy Midwesterner-Californian	Carter	Yeehaw
1984	Reagan	Faux-Cowboy Midwesterner-Californian	Mondale	Yankee-Midwesterner
1988	Bush, GHW	Wannabe-Cowboy-Yeehaw Yankee	Dukakis	Yankee
1992	Clinton	Yeehaw	Bush, GHW	Wannabe-Cowboy-Yeehaw Yankee
1996	Clinton	Yeehaw	Dole	Midwesterner
2000	Bush, GW	Cowboy-Yeehaw	Gore	Faux-Yankee Yeehaw
2004	Bush, GW	Cowboy-Yeehaw	Kerry	Yankee

McCain has chosen to be a Cowboy, and Obama a Yankee-Midwesterner, though neither of them seems to have been raised thus. Nancy Pelosi is pressing Obama to accept a Cowboy-Yeehaw as running-mate.

Indicia of magazine for sale on eBay: Ace Annual, published semi-annually in 1973.

And the world is even faster-paced to-day.

Your mermaid, not unlike your cat, knows that you are made of meat.