Wednesday, August 8, 2007

... and more numpties

1) Somehow CNN scooped cyclingnews.com, but Andrey Kashechkin just tested positive for the same homologous blood transfusion that got Vino and the rest of Team Astana excused from the Tour. It was a surprise test while he was training in Turkey!!

Buffoon.

2) In trying to be fair in my treatment of Meat, I found this article in Wired which nicely captures 'the Pound paradox': namely that Meat violates the rules to enforce the rules. Meat characterizes his tightrope act as follows:

"Pound insists that he chooses his words carefully and always includes a disclaimer. "If you're caught, then I'm enough of a lawyer to know that you're innocent until proven guilty," he says, "even in cases where there's a moral certitude that you're dealing with somebody who's doped. You sort of have to let the system deal with it."

Hmmm. Sounds a lot like a former White House aide who was a lawyer and had to rely on his former boss to get him out jail (even if he didn't get a pardon).

3) It seems that Vlast, the entity that suggested that Moldavia was part of an axis of weasel, sorry, circle of malevolence, or ring of unpleasantness, whatever... is the weekly magazine wing of Kommersant and taken sufficiently seriously that the US Ambassador to Russia, William Burns, agreed to an interview with them in July, 2006.

But -- "Stop using the sports term “finish" -- are you serious?

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