The man who co-wrote the song “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” had the unsettling experience this week of reading his own obituary — the result of an impostor who went through life claiming to be the author of the 1960s smash hit.

[...]“Do you know what it’s like to have grandchildren calling you and say, ‘Grandpa, you’re still alive?’” he said in a telephone interview from Coral Springs. “This is not a game. I am who I am, and I’m proud of who I am. But these phones don’t stop with people calling thinking I’m dead.”

Bitsy Bikini’ Song Co-Author Is Alive (via Mediabistro)

To watch the rest of the documentary see Harry (via Oliver Kamm).

Spotted outside our apartment.

Broker talking into cell phone:

It’s in a lovely area between Windsor Terrace and Park Slope called Greenwood. There’s a cemetery there. It’s a tourist attraction.

Overheard half an hour ago in Park Slope by me.

Stressful morning. This completely chilled me out. I won’t even pretend to know anything about the music, the song or the performers. If you want to know that you’ll have to see Clive Davis.

If this anti-war protester in Manchester, England, wants to stop racism why does he support an anti-Semitic movement?

If he wants peace why does his t-shirt glorify violence?

And since when was Hezbollah in the t-shirt line anyway? Whatever next, Hezbollah mugs?

I shouldn’t have asked.

More irritating photographs of protesters at Sweetness and Light.

Clive Davis revels in the obituary of Fleet Street hack Brian Vine:

A rotund, Wodehousian figure with a booming voice and rubicund complexion, “Vino”, as Vine was known to his colleagues, wore Savile Row suits, sported a monocle (“for opthalmic reasons”, though the glass was obviously plain) and conveyed the general impression of being an escapee from the dustier benches of the Upper House…

Vine also enjoyed exotic cars, and returned from America with a Cadillac convertible. He liked to tell the story of how, on his way back home from Ascot races, he was stopped by a policeman who asked if he had been drinking. “Yes, officer,” he admitted, “I’m completely pissed.” The policeman asked him to get out of the car and produced a breathalyser, only to be stopped in his tracks when he noticed that the car was left-hand drive and Vine’s wife Beverley was in the driving seat.

What is the world coming to when a liberal democracy has to debate whether or not to torture people?

This op-ed in the New York Times yesterday by former soldier Paul Rieckhoff, the executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, says it all:

The question facing America is not whether to continue fighting our enemies in Iraq and beyond but how to do it best. My soldiers and I learned the hard way that policy at the point of a gun cannot, by itself, create democracy. The success of America’s fight against terrorism depends more on the strength of its moral integrity than on troop numbers in Iraq or the flexibility of interrogation options.

UPDATE: Clive Davis has been pondering the same today. Clive doesn’t agree that torture is always morally reprehensible:

I can’t say I’ve been following every twist and turn of the interrogation debate. The reason being that it seems obvious, to me anyway, that there are going to be extremely rare occasions when things such as waterboarding, repulsive though they are, will be morally justified. And, yes, on reflection, I’d say waterboarding – one of those laddish euphemisms we like to throw around – does qualify as a form of torture. (As does the use of intensely loud music. I know other people wouldn’t agree on that.) Do I feel confident that people can be trusted to use techniques like that in the right circumstances a hundred per cent of the time? No. Which is what troubles me most of all.

I’m still not convinced. I can’t escape the fact that there are some things people just should not do. There are lines that should never be crossed because once you cross them you can never go back. By torturing prisoners America is sending a message across the world that it is okay in the 21st century to torture your enemies (albeit in more humane ways than our forefathers). From that moment on how can America chastise any other country for doing the same? And how long before the US tortures someone who is innocent?