Lots of obituaries this week of the great Nazi-hunter, Simon Wiesenthal (for example here and here), but the most striking one was in the Economist. It included this story:

One of the stranger conversations in Simon Wiesenthal’s life occurred in September 1944. He was being taken by SS guards, in his faded striped uniform, away from the advancing Russians. Somewhere in the middle of Poland, he and an SS corporal scavenged together for potatoes. What, the corporal asked him mockingly, would he tell someone in America about the death camps? Mr Wiesenthal said he would tell the truth. “They wouldn’t believe you,” the corporal replied.

… that the average private health insurance policy for a family in the US now costs $10,000 a year (as reported in this week’s Economist)?

A telephone tethered to the wall, like a goat.

If you do a Google search using the terms “miserable failure” (without the quotes), guess what you get? Couldn’t have happened to a dumber guy.

Google comments:

We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.

Strange coincidences. Tom and I got lost in Cambridgeshire this morning looking for a place he needed to visit for a school project and came unexpectedly on this signpost.

And suddenly I remembered the four lines of Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ (from Four Quartets) which I quoted in my book…

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Later, when we got home, I looked up the text. The poem continues:

Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Strange how an unusual placename can fix something in one’s memory.

Clues start here.

Dubya’s nephew has been arrested after going on a drunken spree. Just like his uncle used to do, before he got religion and gave up the booze. Here’s the AP report:

AUSTIN, Texas — The youngest son of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was arrested early Friday and charged with public intoxication and resisting arrest, law enforcement officials said.John Ellis Bush, 21, was arrested by agents of the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission at 2:30 a.m. on a corner of Austin’s Sixth Street bar district, said commission spokesman Roger Wade.The nephew of President Bush was released on $2,500 bond for the resisting arrest charge, and on a personal recognizance bond for the public intoxication charge, officials said.

Don’t suppose this will stop the family running him for Governor of Texas, though.

According to a forthcoming conference paper by some Berkeley researchers, a ten-minute audio recording of a someone typing text on a standard computer keyboard can be analysed to recover up to 96% of the text typed. Works for passwords too, since you ask. For a plain-English explanation of how it’s done, see here.