Fine. We'll Just Sit Here in the Dark, Then.

Syria's ambassador to the U.S. -- who sounds like a real fun guy, by the way -- says the CIA's full of crap. Well, not really. He was... diplomatic about it. Imad Moustapha said the photographs the CIA had that were allegedly taken inside a Syrian nuclear facility were fabricated. "The photos presented to me yesterday were ludicrous, laughable." Okey Dokey. What was the building for, then? Hello? Israel bombed it last year, the Syrians promptly bulldozed the ruins and built a larger building on top of it. They won't say what it's for.

Other annoying countries like N. Korea and Iran like to pretend that they need reactors to generate nuclear power, but it's argued that the reactors are really for generating weapons-grade plutonium. Here's the quick-and-dirty on how inspectors might figure that out. I'm not a scientist. Real, actual scientists are invited to correct me. Preferably over cocktails.

From what I just read, the difference is in how short a time a fuel rod is used in a reactor. The objective in power generation is to turn the turbines. Nuclear power plants use steam, and the heat to boil the water to make the steam is generated through nuclear reaction. The fuel rods are made of Uranium 238. During the course of the reaction the uranium isotope picks up an extra neutron and decays into Plutonium 239. You have the option of removing the fuel rods at any point in the reaction process. If you were generating heat for steam you would allow the rods to remain in place until all reactivity tapered off. You would no longer have much uranium 238 and you would have the higher isotopes of plutonium (240,241, and so on). P239 is the one you want for weapons, and if you remove the fuel rods earlier in the process that's what you'll have. So I guess if you have more uranium being expended in a given period of time at a given reactor than 'should be' you have a reason to ask what they're using it for.

Meanwhile, back in Syria, Mr. Moustapha isn't saying what the reactor is for. I guess it doesn't have wires hooked up to it. Bit of an oversight, that. He says there's no military checkpoints, air defenses or even a fence, so it can't be a sensitive facility. It's in the middle of the desert where it's flat and there's a whole lot of nothing. Good luck sneaking up on it, and who needs a fence? Anti-aircraft defenses would be like asking to get bombed again. So what's it for, Moose?

Zelly Zelly Bo-belly

It is a ridiculously beautiful day, even by local standards, and I have the afternoon off work. There's about eight thousand more interesting things I could be writing about, but lucky you, you get to hear about my dog, Miss Zelda Clifton. She gets mail. From Hillary and Obama. She thinks it's delicious.

I've never had a dog before and I didn't know anything about them. Yes, I've seen dogs before; I've just never lived with one. I thought I'd get something tiny. Smaller puddles. Zelda was listed for free on Craigslist. There was nothing going on with her family, they just really wanted to get rid of her. I did manage to get this bit of information out of their five-year-old daughter: Lexy (her name then) had killed two of the neighbor's cats. Oh. Good to know. I suppose if I'd had a cat mom and dad wouldn't have told me that. Come along, doggie; these aren't your kind of people anyway.

I took Zel (named after Ms. Fitzgerald and not the video game, thanks) to the vet and discovered she'd been chipped. I had it read and discovered Zel was thirteen months old, a purebred show-quality rat terrier and had had four different addresses. I made home number five. I wondered why so many people had given her up until I took her home.

I think she's grand. She does all the doggie stuff you see in cartoons: chases cats, digs holes, turns around three times before she lays down, barks at imaginary crap, all of it. As a special treat sometimes we'll watch Animal Planet. She goes nuts barking at the TV. Whenever the GEICO ad with the squirrels comes on she just hurls herself at the set. It's a crackup. I hope she gets them someday.

So I was thinking about how people say dogs get to be like their owners, or maybe it's vice versa. Let's see. She's got terrible manners. OK. Likes beer, liverwurst and onion sandwiches and steak tartare. Sometimes at the same meal. Check. Hobbies include annoying people and risking her life teasing larger animals. Whoa. Freaky. She's incredibly butch, yet dainty. She was run over by a pickup truck -- complete with tread marks -- and only sustained a broken pelvis and dislocated hip. And she lost a tooth. In the back, though; you can't see it when she smiles. She's very good with nonverbal expression. For instance, she never has an "accident" on the rug. That's all on purpose, my friend. And she's punctual. Every morning at 0551 she stands on you, checking to see if you're awake yet, because someone needs to go for a walk or else the rug gets it, see.

My best guess is that Zel had too much personality to suit her other families. I can relate. All in all, she makes a good alter ego. Plus, the camera loves her. She's much more photogenic than me.

If you can't trust a bunch of coke-dealing terrorists, who can you trust?

"Colombian police charged Monday that they had found evidence on rebel computers that Venezuela has been funding Colombian leftist rebels and that the rebels were trading in drugs and uranium." -- Earth Times dot org, March 3, 2008

Drugs....and uranium? Please. Did they carry it around in the car trunk like in Repo Man, where they pop the lid and there's this bright light and the dude melts? Do you know how much uranium you'd need to build a nuke? About 11,000 pounds. And it takes around a year to refine. How much did they have for sale? 110 pounds. But that's not the funny part.

They were probably going to sell the uranium to Hugo Chavez, an enthusiastic consumer of FARC's other cash crop. The man cops to chewing coca leaves on a daily basis. Call me a cynic, but I think he's trying to establish plausible deniability for being nuttier than squirrel droppings. He's been FARC's most vocal booster (wonder why), even going so far as to tell the UN they should be taken off the terrorist watch list. That way they can proclaim themselves to be a real army with negotiating rights and whatnot. If the UN goes for that I think we can pinpoint the origin of most of the pharmaceuticals in NYC's water supply. But I digress.

FARC was asking $2.5 million per kilo for the uranium -- or 1000 times the cost of a kilo of cocaine. Columbian uranium sells for about $250 per kilo and in its natural state is too inert for even a dirty bomb. If Chavez was the mark -- er, customer, how funny is that, getting gouged by your so-called friends for low-strength product? After all he's done for them! They must know something about him the rest of us don't.