Corpsegate

The mortuary in Kuwait City where they mix up corpses.

Finding Private Kovco
For wont of a better expression this fiasco can only be called corpse-gate. Just for the record, here's where we're up to right now:

The body of Private Jacob Kovco, the Australian soldier killed in Iraq, is expected to arrive in Sydney early tomorrow morning.

The body had been scheduled to arrive in Melbourne yesterday morning, but a mix-up in Kuwait caused the wrong coffin to arrive.

His family has flown to Sydney from the East Sale Air Force base in Victoria.

The father of two died last week from a single gun shot wound to the head.

The exact circumstances of his death are unclear but Defence Minister Brendan Nelson says there is no suggestion it was anything other than accidental.

The Opposition Leader Kim Beazley is demanding Dr Nelson put in place rules for the repatriation of bodies of Australian soldiers.

Dr Nelson has delayed an overseas trip so he can meet the body of Private Kovco when it arrives tomorrow.

Mr Beazley has demanded Dr Nelson explain to Parliament why the body was mistakenly left behind in Kuwait.

"A full statement from him as to how the Government is going to ensure this never happens again," he said.

Mr Beazley says the Government needs to ensure a protocol for the handling of Australian military deaths should be in place.

An argument has broken out over a draft document which was never finalised.

Former Defence Force chief Peter Cosgrove says it was delayed by the states and territories.

"It was an ADF (Australian Defence Force) proposal which the coroners collectively could not agree," he said.

Prime Minister John Howard says the Government is reviewing procedures for the return of bodies following the mix-up.

'Cover-up unlikely'
Martin Hamilton Smith is a former lieutenant colonel who is now a South Australian Liberal MP.

He says it is highly unlikely there has been a cover-up of Private Kovco's death.

"Accidents happen frankly, and then you have to ask yourself how do you prevent it from happening again," he said.

"This soldier's platoon commander, his company commander, his battalion commander, they would all be asking themselves now what went wrong, and possibly blaming themselves to some extent."

Coroner's investigation
The New South Wales Coroner says he expects to assume jurisdiction for the body of Private Kovco when it arrives in Sydney.

John Abernathy says he expects to look into the manner and cause of Private Kovco's death.

He says in order to ensure the matter is fully and properly investigated the NSW Police State Crime Command will take charge of the investigation.

That's not exactly enlightening. So who thinks the findings will go public? It wasn't a pretty sight to see both Brendan Nelson and PM John Howard having to apologise furiously on air for the corpse mix up; mixing up corpses is pure black comedy, but it shouldn't have been laid on the Head of State the way those two men who were hung out to dry by the Military. Even allowing for the fact that I don't much like those men, that was a terrible thing the military did to those politicians.
Here's another from the Adelaide Advertiser:

While it seems that the morgue was responsible for the mistake, the Australian Defence Force will today be pondering huge questions about the affair.

How could such a thing happen? What should be done to ensure that it never happens again?

There is also a disturbing question hanging over the official explanation of Pte Kovco's death.

First we were told that he died in a freak accident while cleaning his pistol.

Now, Defence Minister Brendan Nelson says Pte Kovco was actually fiddling with other equipment when the gun discharged.

The ADF has launched an inquiry into how he died.

Pte Kovco's family is reeling from this new twist. They demand the truth and accuse officials of a cover-up.

The inquiry must act swiftly to account for this tragedy so that Pte Kovco's family and indeed all Australians have a satisfactory explanation.

Hands up people who thought the explanation Private Kovco "shot himself accidentally while cleaning a gun" set alarm bells off in their heads? Some years ago it was reported that most men who are brought into hospitals with gunshot wounds in the USA claim they got their wounds while cleaning their guns when in reality, in majority of the cases they had been shot by their spouses.

My immediate response was "What? his wife shot him in Iraq?"
Of course, his wife is in Australia. My next guess was that he must've pulled a Wayne Carey - slept with one of his colleagues' wives, incurring the righteous wrath of a cuckold. Or more than one? Who knows?

So the next quetion that should come to mind is who shot Private Kovco?
The scenario as now accepted by the Media is now that he was at a table with some of his colleagues when a pistol nearby discharged and killed him. Well, you try and make that scenario stick in a movie script. I dare you, I double dare you. It makes no sense unless somebody pulled a gun pointed it at his head and pulled the trigger. Do you still think there's no cover-up?

The other question that springs to mind is who was that other corpse? And what about the people expecting that corpse? It turns out the other dead body was a Bosnian.

Radmila Bjelia, a counsellor at the Bosnian Embassy in Canberra, told smh.com.au that the body is that of a Bosnian citizen.

"We have information that there is a Bosnian private person, not a soldier, [sent to Australia]," she said.

[It is] a contractor with a foreign company. We don't know which company."

Ms Bjelia did not say where or how the contractor died and she did not have details about whether the dead person's family had been told about the casket being sent to the wrong country.

It wouldn't be so funny if it weren't corpses being mixed up. It's kind of a po-mo Memento Mori.

Air Drums
Check out this link. You won't be dissappointed...

Shawn Chacon

Last year Shawn Chacon did a reverse-type routine, turning into a carriage from a Colorado pumpkin as the Yankees rode him all thee way to the post-season. He doesn't have good enough peripherals to be a star accordings to FIPS/DIPS analysis, but some have done further analysis to suggest he's a rare pitcher who can get by by lowering his BABIP.

However, Marc Normandin of Beyond the Boxscore writes in Baseball Prospectus's latest Yankee Notebook that Chacon actually has a history of significantly low BABIPs relative to his home park. Thus, the improvement Chacon showed as a Yankee last year just might be a sustainable result of escaping Coors Field, a park that generally inflates BABIP, because Chacon just might be the rare non-knuckleballer who can consistantly supress his opponents success on balls in play.

The Normandin's credit, this is something he noticed before Chacon threw his first pitch for the Yankees. That is significant not only as a testament to Normandin's skills as an analyst, but because it proves his BABIP analysis isn't simply a case of retrofiting the stats to explain past performance, but the detection of a trend significant enough that he was able to anticipate and extremely surprising improvement in performance.

Here's what Normandin wrote around the time of the trade:

- Shawn Chacon of all people looks like he might have the ability to control hits on balls in play a little bit. Ignoring the .314 BABIP, where he was closing, Chacon's BABIP's for his major league career read .275, .261, .276, and .272. Consider again that Coors raises BABIP by simply existing [the average BABIP at Coors during Chacon's stay there was north of .330 --CJC], and we have ourselves someone lowering the batting average of balls in play against him at an extreme rate consistently.

Do I believe it? Not entirely, but it's a nice piece of analysis of events to date.
He certainly plays as an escape artist, though not quite on the same level of trickiness as Orlando 'El Duque' Hernandez. I don't know what it is about these types of pitchers that interest me; he's certainly fun.

He pitched 6-1/3 innings and won today, lowering his ERA from a transorbital 8.03 to 4.56.
If you don't count his bad relief innings, he's actually at a hair under 4.00. a pretty handy pitcher to have in your 4th starter slot. Amazingly the Yankees are *waiting* on the return of Aaron Small, the other fairy-tale pitcher from last year. Without Aaron Small, they are sending Jaret "Hit by A Bat And Two Balls" Wright to the mound against *gulp* Roy Halladay. I guess you get days like that.