| Water, Water Everywhere And in some places in drought-ravished California even where it proves an embarrassment. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco installed a sprinkler system in its doorways. The system runs every half hour for about 75 seconds and soaks homeless people sleeping in the doorways of St. Mary's cathedral. Homeless people sheltering in the doorways were duly soaked. Auxiliary bishop William Justice said the system had been installed to induce the homeless to find shelter elsewhere and avoid the feces and needles that were regularly found in the doorways, apologized, and removed the sprinklers. No comment on why the liberal politicians of San Francisco have not taken steps to prevent drug addicts and toiletless people from using the cathedral as a dropping ground. -- That's The Way The Ball Bounces If you owe a bank $10,000 and can't pay, you have a problem; if you owe a bank tens of millions and can't pay, the bank has a problem. And if you owe a ballplayer $60 million, and he can play, but you wish he couldn't so that you could collect insurance, you are the New York Yankees, and you have a problem. Alex Rodriguez is back from a season-long suspension and the Yankees are delighted, sort of. He has hit a few home runs in Spring training, which is good for the punchless Yankees. He has failed to collapse on his surgically reconstructed hips while trotting around the bases, which is not good for the Yankees, although good for the insurers who will have to fork over for his salary if he cannot play. The team thinks he might be useful at first base to substitute for a much-injured Mark Teixeira, but Alex, ever the team player, forgets to bring his new first-base mitt to practice. All is not a bed of roses for the steroided star: the Yankees don't want to pay him a $6 million bonus due when his next six home runs take him past Willie Mays' total. They feel defrauded by the fact that Rodriguez's home run total just might have been affected by the physical enhancement obtained from the cornucopia of drugs he relied upon early and late in his career, and which he once again swears he is not using. And speaking of roses, there is Pete Rose, former star of the Cincinnati Reds. No one has ever played in more games or gotten more hits than Rose, who played without any of infusions that so benefitted later-day players such as Rodriguez. But he is serving a life-time suspension for gambling: he bet on his own team. Rose has appealed for reinstatement and eligibility for induction into the Hall of Fame. Rodriguez had been reinstated and will technically be eligible for induction, although his election is unlikely. Meanwhile, he takes in $30 million per year while Rose -- Pete Hustle, as he was known -- hustles autographs in hotel lobbies. Ask yourself: which player, both flawed, would you prefer your children select as a role model? And surely this is a case of income inequality that offends even the most ardent defender of the fairness of our income distribution system. -- Old Saws Still Relevant Don't Shoot The Messenger: Greek authorities have renewed a criminal investigation of one Andreas Georgiou. No, he is not a ship-owner who has avoided taxes; so far, the new soak-the-rich government has left them to their yachts and Swiss bank accounts. Poor Mr. Georgiou is the country's chief statistician, responsible for calculating the country's deficit. Which he has done, the accuracy of his work approved by Greece's creditors, including the International Monetary Fund. His figures are wrong, charges the coalition government that has promised voters to remove the jackboot of German austerity from their necks, a wild overstatement of the amount of red ink blotting the country's ledgers, and the result of pressures from Greek's creditors. Such overstatement -- Georgiou put the deficit at 15% of GDP in 2009, his accusers, who some accuse of having lost their Marbles, say 4% was the right number -- is a felony, punishable by five-to-ten years in what must be an unpleasant, budget-constrained prison. Accusers of the chief statistician deny that corruption, wild spending, and failure to collect taxes have brought Greece to ruin, and see a plot to kick Greece out of the euro, never mind the repeated bailouts the country has received to keep it in. They also want the Germans to pay reparations for the death and destruction they wreaked on Greece during WWII, which the Germans have expressed a willingness to do -- after Greece has reimbursed all the countries pillaged by Alexander The Great. Good fun, but cannot divert attention from one hard fact: there is no way Greece can ever repay the mountain of debt it has incurred, so another name will have to be found for "bankruptcy". "Restructuring" is the leading contender. Seize The Moment: There are three people in this marriage, complained Princess Diana on her amazingly belated discovery that Prince Charles was still a regular at his mistress' digs, that he wore cufflinks with their initials inter-twined, and otherwise behaved as Princes of Wales, heirs to the throne of Great Britain & Co., have generally behaved while awaiting the death of the reigning monarch, which generally beats working one's way up the ladder unless the monarch is very long-lived. Marc Mezvinsky, has found there are four in his -- his wife Chelsea, and his in-laws, Bill and Hillary. Not a bad thing as it turns out since the New York Times reports, "Beyond the glamor, being part of the Clinton family has provided Mr. Mezvinsky with another perk: access to wealthy investors with ties to the Clintons," some of whom are investing in his hedge fund with money left over from contributing to Mrs. Clinton's campaign fund and the Clinton's charitable foundation. It is not known whether Mrs. Clinton, who has been gathering ideas from numerous advisers, has asked her son-in-law to help with speeches calling for measures to revive equal opportunity for all Americans -- or was it only for women? -- Eat Darling, Eat, You're All Skin And Bones: Shaimaa el-Sabbagh was killed by Egyptian riot police while on a march to Tahrir Square to commemorate the anniversary of what has come to be called the Arab Spring, when a despotic Islamist regime was deposed by a despotic military regime. Naturally, the government's Medical Forensics felt called upon to investigate, particularly since Ms. Sabbagh had been felled by birdshot. Conclusion: she was too thin. According to science, announced Hisham Abdel Hamid, a spokesman for the Medical Authority, "Shaminaa el-Sabbagh should not have died. Her body was like skin over bone, as they say. She was very thin. She did not have any percentage of fat." A chubbier person would have survived. Absurd, say rights groups. "Praise the Lord, it was her time," concludes the medical examiner. Bury Me Deep: So screamed the cover of a successful 2009 crime novel, published far too late to be of any use to the grave diggers charged with interring the corpse of King Richard III some 500 years ago. King Richard, felled in the final important battle of the Wars of the Roses, carried to his grave a reputation for unpleasant behavior, memorialized by Shakespeare's representation of him as the slaughterer of his nephew-princes. His body, originally buried without ceremony, was recently discovered by archeologists under a municipal parking lot in Leicester. All, well almost all of Britain celebrated the occasion by viewing the touring casket and re-interring Shakespeare's villain in Leicester Cathedral in a ceremony led by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the first step in the resurrection of Richard's reputation. How fleeting is infamy. -- France Wins The (New) Battle of Waterloo If it were up to the British, the French would never be allowed to forget their wipe-out at Waterloo. Margaret Thatcher had portraits of Nelson and Wellington hung in the dining room at No. 10, and the Royal Gallery of the House of Lords features a wall-scale painting of the meeting of Wellington and Prussian Field Marshall Blücher before they combined to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo. If memory serves, and it might not, Thatcher preferred to have large international meetings in that Gallery, and to seat the French representatives facing the enormous canvass. Now the French have called halt to such displays, at least to the extent that they control them. Protests by the French government have forced EU bureaucrats in Brussels to destroy 180,000 newly minted €2 coins ($2.20) marking the 200th anniversary of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, and showing a picture of the Lion Hill memorial near Brussels. "Prejudicial to ... unity and cooperation throughout the monetary union," whined the French over their wine. The coins were to be sold to collectors for €8 each, grossing almost €1.5 million, money EU taxpayers will have to make up, along with the cost of producing the scrapped coins. It is impossible to verify the rumor that if Lady Thatcher were alive she would have bought the entire output and used the coins as gifts to visitors and friends. But she would undoubtedly be pleased with the decision of her country's Royal Mint to offer a commemorative £5 coin ($1.50) showing Napoleon's conquerors, the Duke of Wellington and Field Marshall Blücher, shaking hands
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