Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader, due to time contraints and family commitments, wasn’t able to blog as he would have liked yesterday. So here are some items off the news wire that he wanted to comment upon.

First off. Korean Bullfighting? What the hell? No matadors. Just angry bulls going at it? In a country with limited grazing space and thus small cattle herds this seems odd. Your Maximum Leader supposes it would be a way of disposing of excess bulls. But in another way it just seems like a glorified cock-fight. Perhaps some of our Korean readers (or Korea-based readers) could comment on this “pastime.”

It was first done in California. Now Oregon is up. Pretty soon it will be New York. About what is your Maximum Leader speaking… Outlawing traditional methods of making Foie Gras. Yes, yes. Your Maximum Leader knows that many people think that sticking a goose in a small box and force feeding it until it’s liver swells up, then killing the goose, extracting the liver, and curing it in wine/brandy/other tasty alcohol is cruel - but it makes for mighty good eatin’. Indeed, your Maximum Leader agrees to an extent that the treatment is unseemly. But in order for it to be cruel your Maximum Leader would have to ascribe some attributes of a moral agent to the goose. And he is, frankly, unwilling to do so. Perhaps the Smallholder should investigate becoming a premier supplier of foie gras to the finer restaurants of the mid-atlantic region. Since it is only a matter of time before the PETA people start working on the New York Legislature. (BTW, New York farms are the largest producers of US foie gras.) Your Maximum Leader doesn’t want to become dependent on French geese livers…

A recent poll showed that most Harvard students are unhappy. This saddens your Maximum Leader. Perhaps they would feel better if they went to Yale? Or maybe Dupont?

And finally, your Maximum Leader sees that some of the western counties of Ireland have decided to remove the English language from road signs and make their roadside navigational aids Gaelic only. In most cases your Maximum Leader is all for native languages. And he supposes he is in this case as well. It just seems as though it is something of a scam. A scam to increase the number of “native guides” for hapless English speakers from other parts of the anglophone world. And, as you might imagine, a scam by map makers to make old maps obsolete and require you to buy new ones in Gaelic AND English. (Or even worse, require that you have two maps - and compare them!)

Carry on.