On a day in which Louisiana is deluged, France is beset with a winter hurricane, Chile is still shaking, rattling and rolling and leaky fishtanks in Dubai evacuate shopping malls, it’s not hard to come up with a number of very odd stories to relate. As such, we offer the following items to perplex and titillate our readers…

First, it appears that as details emerge about Bruce Ivins, the chief suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, the crazed scientist appears not to have differed much from the Democrats’ Congressional leadership:

For example, as seen below, when agents executed search warrants in late-2007, an FBI supervisor asked Ivins if he was worried about those raids. Ivins said he was, noting that he did things a “middle age man should not do,” adding that his actions would “not be acceptable to most people.” He then noted that agents searching his basement would find a “bag of material that he uses to ‘cross-dress,'” according to an interview report.

Three months before his suicide, surveillance agents sifted through trash Ivins left at his curb and discovered that the beleaguered scientist was disposing of pornographic magazines, fetish titles, and 15 pairs of stained women’s panties. When an FBI lab analysis of the underwear showed that semen was detected on 14 of the garments, a grand jury directive was issued to obtain DNA from Ivins. That sample was taken July 21, 2008, five days before the scientist’s Tylenol overdose (Ivins died on July 29 at age 62). The FBI records show that some Ivins acquaintances shared with the FBI e-mail and instant message communications exchanged with the scientist. In a July 2008 e-mail, Ivins wrote that “Dick Cheney scares me. The Patriot Act is so unconstitutional it’s not even funny.” He added, “I’m voting for Obama!”

Hey, if that IRS kamikaze crackpot guy can be tarred as a Tea Partier, certainly it’s fair game to paint Ivins as a Chuck Schumer clone, no?

Speaking of scientific nuts who vote Democrat, over the weekend noted fraudster and enviroscam profiteer Al Gore made an appearance in the friendly pages of the New York Times, which has heretofore largely refused to cover the various elements of the unraveling Climategate disclosures, and attempted to defend the hollow shell of his anthropogenic global warming crusade. It wasn’t exactly a convincing statement:

I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.

It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.

But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.

Gore’s ridiculous piece goes on and on, making more outlandish claims designed to up the ante in an effort to silence his critics. It’s a tactic he’s used for the duration of his stint as propagandist-in-chief for the AGW movement, but it’s played out. Don’t feel sad for him; he’s had a nice run and he’s made hundreds of millions of dollars pirating government subsidies and other swag using dubious vehicles as grappling hooks and grape shot.

Which reminds us of another story today. It seems that others in Gore’s line of work have come up with a slightly different method of enforcing climate policy…

Booming Asian demand for South African coal will put more ships at risk from Somali pirates operating in the Indian Ocean and raise insurance and freight costs already hiked due to seaborne attacks.

Emboldened by rising ransom payments, Somali pirates have stepped up attacks in recent months, making tens of millions of dollars by hijacking ships in the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden.

While pirates have hijacked oil tankers, passenger ships and yachts, they have started to target slow moving coal bulk carriers, which are easier to overcome than a large tanker.

A Somali pirate who gave his name only as Hassan told Reuters that armed gangs can operate far out to sea and were able to dodge naval warships deployed to combat their activities.

“If there are more coal ships coming, it is good news,” said Hassan, who was involved in a coal vessel hijacking last year. “A bulk ship means bulk ransom.”

Er, let’s not give Gore any ideas. But if he does venture out in his dinghy and attempts to commandeer a tanker or two, does that mean we can shoot holes in his hull?

We’ll now segue into a somewhat different subject; namely that excessive porn can apparently cause substandard skiing:

Running away with the gold medal for risque behaviour Norwegian cross-country skier Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset tops the list of gaffes for blaming a bad ski run that cost him the gold medal on watching too much porn.

‘My name is Odd-Bjoern Hjelmeset,’ he said. ‘I skied the second lap and I f***** up today. I think I have seen too much porn in the last 14 days.

‘I have the room next to Petter Northug and every day there is noise in there. So I think that is the reason I f***** up. By the way Tiger Woods is a really good man.’

Hjelmeset’s next-door neighbour was not the only one who made the most of his downtime in the Olympic Village.

Health officials well-versed in the needs of the world’s elite athletes had already provided 100,000 free condoms to 7,000 athletes and officials, which works out about 14 condoms per person.

But apparently this just wasn’t enough.

With just a couple of days to go officials were forced to ship in an emergency supply of condoms after supplies ran dangerously low during the last week of the Games.

Hey, whaddya expect? The guy’s name is Odd. He did manage to rebound and win another gold medal on Sunday before the Olympics were over.

Speaking of the Olympics, our smoker-in-chief lost a bet yesterday when Canada knocked off the U.S. hockey team in overtime – and as a result we’re going to be a case of beer short to the Canadians. Obama bet Canada’s president Stephen Harper a case of Yuengling, which is a local beer out of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, against a case of Molson. Consider that wager as a reflection of the odds on the bet…