Perhaps there is more to the story than can be found in this short nytimes.com article, Appellate Panel Bars Tests for Mad Cow Disease, but according to the story, “A federal appeals court has ruled that the government can prohibit meat packers from testing their animals for mad cow disease.”

If this makes the least bit of sense, I would like to hear why.

(Tip to Ezra Klein’s blog. Flickr photo from foxypar4’s photostream)

When I was a kid, after watching wrestling on Saturday afternoon, I would hang out with my friends, emulating what we “learned”. We practiced our body slams, our holds, and one of our favourites: The Claw. It sounds violent, but like professional wrestling, it was mostly great fun.

The Claw came from this man, Killer Kowalski, who just died at the age of 81. He was a favourite of mine, and no doubt alot of other middle aged men who came across this stopped and thought back fondly to those days, just like I did. Lots of great memories there. May he rest in peace.

Now get out of here before I apply the Claw to your head! 🙂

In a critical review of the the J. M. W. Turner retrospective at the Met (Heavy Weather: Critic’s Notebook: The New Yorker), in which Turner is said to convey “only irritable ambition. We must never forget to admire him. This tires.” is this last sentence: “Turner was the Damien Hirst of his day.”

Coupling this with the dig taken in the nytimes.com recently, it appears that Hirst is becoming an art symbol, and not a good one.