The American Spectator

January brought gratifying news to Hindu skiers living in the economically vibrant Indian subcontinent and for that matter to the elusive Abominable Snowman (Yeti), wherever he might be hanging out. The predicted meltdown of the Himalayan glaciers contained in the United Nations’ 2007 report from its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been exposed as the work of mental defectives. Among the Nobel Prize-winning report’s colossal errors is its claim that the Himalayan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by 2035.” The nitwit UN scientists’ measurement of these delightful ice lumps is off by 467,000 square kilometers! The glaciers actually cover only 33,000 square kilometers. Yet Hindu skiers continue to have a hell of a good time, skiing up and down the slopes in their loincloths. Many continue to top off their après ski with a frosty seidel of human urine, à la former Indian prime minister Mr. Morarji Desai, now deceased. Actually a generation from now the Himalayan glaciers might be a very promising site for the Winter Olympics, if Indian sharpshooters can keep an eye on the stealthy Yeti. Contrary to the idiotic UN report, the Pindari Glacier was not shrinking by 135.2 meters annually between 1845 and 1965 but by a paltry 23.5 meters; and that Hindu glaciologist who reputedly predicted doom for the glaciers is actually indignant, claiming he was misquoted in 1999 by the journal New Scientist. So let the good times roll, and remember the IPCC shared its 2007 Nobel Prize for Peace with Mr. Al Gore, possibly to pave the way for former president Barack Obama’s 2009 Peace Prize.

On January 19, Massachusetts state senator Mr. Scott Brown, a Republican, won a special election for the Bay State’s Kennedy family seat, thus evaporating the Democrats’ supermajority in the Senate and causing Mr. Obama’s early retirement. Mr. Obama did remain in Washington to deliver his State of the Union address on January 27, and most members of Congress showed up, though many were photographed asleep and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton left the country. Youthful activists from both ends of the political spectrum were in the news. On the right, 25-year-old Mr. James O’Keefe, who posed as a pimp in last year’s sting at ACORN offices across the country, was arrested for presenting himself under false pretenses in the New Orleans offices of Louisiana’s callipygian Senator Mary L. Landrieu. On the left, a 23-year-old as yet unnamed young man was arrested in Cairns, Australia, for repeatedly breaking into a local sex shop and having sex with an inflatable doll (female). Back in the States, former Bush II speechwriter Mr. David Frum continues to be the center of speculation that he is an illegal alien. Apparently the rumors originated in London, where it is reported that Mr. Taki Theodoracopulos, the London Spectator’s “High Life” correspondent, is preparing another of his “world exclusives,” this time on Mr. Frum.

Mr. Frum was born in Canada and claims to have become an American citizen about the time he worked for President Bush. Yet there is much about the expat that does not ring true. In his 2003 book, The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush, Mr. Frum appraised the 43rd president as “nothing short of superb.” Then in another book four years later he claimed Bush “led his party to the brink of disaster.” Finally, there is his retreat from claiming authorship of the Bush-era term “Axis of Evil” to his more modest assertion that he assisted in creating the term. Even in a government bureaucracy, how many writers are needed to create a three-word phrase? Among literary sleuths, eyebrows spiked upward on January 27, when it was reported that the reclusive novelist Mr. J. D. Salinger, author of the masterpiece The Catcher in the Rye, had expired just hours after the death of the popular left-wing historian Mr. Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States. Mr. Salinger has not been seen in public for decades, and Holden Caulfield, the troubled 16-year-old protagonist of Catcher, did sound very much like the voice of Mr. Zinn whining in his puerile history of the Great Republic.

In Wellington, New Zealand, Mr. Hans Kurt Kubus, 58, a German national, was sentenced to 14 weeks incarceration and a $3,540 fine after being caught boarding an international flight with 44 small lizards secreted in his underpants. Authorities at Christ Church International Airport became suspicious when Mr. Kubus appeared at the boarding gate with a broad smile on his face. According to New Zealand Department of Conservation prosecutor Mr. Mike Bodie, Mr. Kubus could have been sentenced to a much longer stay in prison and a heftier fine, but he seemed like a nice person and frankly people in the courtroom liked him. Moreover, he had not damaged the 44 geckos and skinks that officials liberated from his nether regions, though their condition would have changed markedly when he got back to Germany, where the tiny reptiles fetch as much as $2,800 apiece and are often served in tossed salads. In an unrelated incident, Mr. Tiger Woods, the lapsed golfer, checked into a Hattiesburg, Mississippi, sex rehabilitation clinic, where he will be treated for what locals call Clinton Syndrome (CS). It is hoped he will be sufficiently well to return to the PGA circuit soon, possibly with endorsements from Victoria’s Secret and the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.

Following up on last month’s report that an English cleric, the Rev. Tim Jones, advised his parishioners during a Christmas sermon to shoplift, we can now report that in January the Rev. Jones was accosted by an enraged parishioner, who assaulted him with a bucket of ravioli. The parishioner, Mr. Martin Stot, explained that he considered his pastor’s sermon “appalling,” but British ethicists remain perplexed. Why ravioli? Why not linguini or tortellini? Perhaps there will be an update next month. Two thousand ten was shaping up as a particularly hectic year for the late Mr. Saddam Hussein’s cousin, Mr. Ali Hassan al-Majid, known in Iraq as “Chemical Ali” for his administrative role in the 1988 gassing of more than 5,000 Kurds. Last year he was handed down three death sentences by hanging for his misbehavior, and on January 18 a court gave him yet another death sentence, which could have proved to be a scheduling nightmare. Fortunately, on January 21 he died with a jerk.

More than a decade after the fall of Communism there appears to be a vigorous new proletarian movement. On January 10, hordes of intellectuals participated in what is billed as “No Pants Subway Ride” everywhere worldwide, though curiously not in Islamic nations, where sharia law appears to frown on the movement and subways are scarce. Streaming into subways in their underwear, the New Comrades seek to cause what the organization’s website calls “scenes of chaos and joy in public places.” “It’s a place to meet people that’s not your traditional bar scene,” attested Mr. Brady Kirchberg, 26, or maybe it is Miss Brady Kirchberg. It could be either. Many women are participants. Said Miss Ashley Kemp, 24, “I just wanted to do something fun and spontaneous.” Try it in the Holy City of Qom, you dinkelspiel.