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Owning a business that sells or rents inflatable bouncers is a lucrative way to make money. These have become popular throughout the years. Many people will rent or purchase them to use at birthday parties and carnivals. It is a great way to entertain children for hours at a time.

It is important to keep your investments intact and to keep from having to replace or buy a new one anytime one of yours have become punctured. Each one are made with durable material - but rocks, sticks, and other debris can puncture through it and cause either a slow or major leak. Learn how you can repair it so you don't have to spend hundreds in replacing it.

Inflate the bouncer so that you can determine where the leak is coming from. It is best to do this in sections if the bouncer will allow you to. There is a lot of ground to cover. Try to do this before you go rent it out to make sure that all parts of the tent are in good shape. That way if you find a leak you can fix it before you send it off to be used.

When it is fully inflated look and listen for the source of the puncture. If the leak is slow you might not be able to find it easily this way. The next best thing would be for you to place water inside of the tent. Pour in tap water and some soap. You will know immediately where the leak is.

Use a felt tip to mark the leak. Take out the puncture repair kit and apply solvent to the plastic patch. Apply the patch to the edge of the tent so that the hole is sealed completely. Apply more adhesive to the outside of the patch and allow it to dry.

When the patch is dried pour more soapy water inside of the tent. If there are any more bubbles being released than you did not seal it properly or you have found another leak. Try to keep it inflated overnight to make sure that it is sealed properly.

Owning a business that sells or rents inflatable bouncers is a lucrative way to make money. These have become popular throughout the years. Many people will rent or purchase them to use at birthday parties and carnivals. It is a great way to entertain children for hours at a time.

It is important to keep your investments intact and to keep from having to replace or buy a new one anytime one of yours have become punctured. Each one are made with durable material - but rocks, sticks, and other debris can puncture through it and cause either a slow or major leak. Learn how you can repair it so you don't have to spend hundreds in replacing it.

Inflate the bouncer so that you can determine where the leak is coming from. It is best to do this in sections if the bouncer will allow you to. There is a lot of ground to cover. Try to do this before you go rent it out to make sure that all parts of the tent are in good shape. That way if you find a leak you can fix it before you send it off to be used.

When it is fully inflated look and listen for the source of the puncture. If the leak is slow you might not be able to find it easily this way. The next best thing would be for you to place water inside of the tent. Pour in tap water and some soap. You will know immediately where the leak is.

Use a felt tip to mark the leak. Take out the puncture repair kit and apply solvent to the plastic patch. Apply the patch to the edge of the tent so that the hole is sealed completely. Apply more adhesive to the outside of the patch and allow it to dry.

When the patch is dried pour more soapy water inside of the tent. If there are any more bubbles being released than you did not seal it properly or you have found another leak. Try to keep it inflated overnight to make sure that it is sealed properly.

Kids like to bounce and use on the moon bounce! Is there anything the actual sensation of going up and down that simply gets a child, and also some older people chuckle! Subsequently, the moon bounce or rebound of the buildings are so well known in the party baby, birthday celebrations of youngsters, or even a party or event. We are while the company's operations.

Bounce house rental philadelphia can be obtained at party rental providers to keep and clean these devices accurately. Our moon bounces are wiped clean and disinfected upon each rental, and our supply of rebounds remains to be increasing. Were fully covered and a moon bounce rental provider qualified. Bounce to the CCM that can take care of your snacks and drinks requires. Our popcorn machine, snow cone apparat and cotton candy machine is an excellent accomplishment. Each piece of equipment incorporates enough provides for 30 men and women!

Bounce Party gives you service all over the miami. We're going to go the spot where you want Silly Games and rides are what we do and that we perform the best parties. felt staff will almost certainly transpire, the moon bounce installation instruction and properly deal with the equipment. We won't go away until you are content with the operation of our moon bounces! If the operator needs to shell out is $ 12/hr. schooled operator have to be all the time. We could do to suit your needs, that! Call us today to developed the next event or party.

Jump City is excited to announce that from early August 2009 we will distributing the Blast Zone range of inflatable bouncers, water slides and jumping castles. Although we have been selling the Happy Hop range since October 2005, we have regrettably decided to stop selling this range for a number of reasons. Jump City has always prided itself of supplying a quality product with excellent customer support and strongly believe we will be able to achieve this much better with the Blast Zone product.

The Blast Zone range of inflatables is a significant step up for us in supplying customers with domestic bouncy castles and is sure to take the Australian market by storm. The quality of manufacture is second to none in the non-commercial bouncer range, incorporating commercial quality materials and stitching in key impact areas of the inflatable. While we'll be looking at a 10-20% price increase on our previous range, we believe the product quality is at least 100% better. The Blast Zone range includes visually attractive inflatables with themed designs including pirates, rainforests, space, crocodiles and sharks! There will be different sizes and designs to suit a wide variety of tastes, backyards and budgets.

As long as pearl jewelry have been known to people, they have been a highly sought commodity for their beauty. It's only in recent times however that the industry has taken the hunt for the perfect pearl to a whole different level. Today, the shiny orbs that we see on in display in jewelry stores have actually almost always been grown in farms. That's a far cry from the dangerous extraction and collection methods used before the invention of modern technology. In the past, not more than 100 years ago, the only way to retrieve pearls was by diving in lakes, floods and the ocean to pick them up, one at the time. The unfortunate divers who'se job it was to do this, were often poor and lured by the relative large sums they could get. The diver would sometimes have to dive as deep as 100 feet on one single breath of air. In order to preserve air and to stay submerged the longest, the divers would hold on to heavy stones on the way down. Naturally, this dangerous activity was reserved for the desperate or the powerless - in many cases slaves or extremely poor peasents. Today, this method is all but obsolete in most places of the world. The cheaper cultured pearls have become popular and are many times the only pearls available to the consumer. There are however still a few isolated areas that practice this old art of pearl diving. Some of the finest natural pearl speciments come from the gulf of Bahrain. Here, divers still risk their health to retrieve what are considered the top of the crop in the world. In fact, Bahrain wants no part of the sale of cultured pearls, banned from trade. Bahrain is one of the few places on earth that does an active job in trying to preserve the natural habitat and waters from pollution. It's an interesting story and one that continues to fascinate buyers around the world. Somehow, the beauty of the pearl grows when it's been retrieved from the depth of the ocean.

Buying pearl jewelry can be fun, exciting and confusing. Whether you're considering a gift of pearl jewelry for someone special or as a treat for yourself, take some time to learn the terms used in the industry. Here's some information to help you get the best quality pearl jewelry for your money, whether you're shopping in a traditional brick and mortar store or online. Pearls Natural or real pearls are made by oysters and other mollusks. Cultured pearls also are grown by mollusks, but with human intervention; that is, an irritant introduced into the shells causes a pearl to grow. Imitation pearls are man-made with glass, plastic, or organic materials. Because natural pearls are very rare, most pearls used in jewelry are either cultured or imitation pearls. Cultured pearls, because they are made by oysters or mollusks, usually are more expensive than imitation pears. A cultured pearl's value is largely based on its size, usually stated in millimeters, and the quality of its nacre coating, which give it luster. Jewelers should tell your if the pearls are cultured or imitation. Some black, bronze, gold, purple, blue and orange pearls, whether natural or cultured, occur that way in nature; some, however, are dyed through various processes. Jewelers should tell you whether the colored pearls are naturally colored, dyed or irradiated. Clams, oysters, mussels and many other mollusks with limy shells are known to produce pearls. But very few kinds yield gem pearls of jeweler's quality. The pearl is an abnormal growth of mother-of-pearl, or nacre, imbedded in the soft bodies of these shellfish. It is built up, layer upon layer, in the same way as nacre is added to the lining of the growing shell and always has the same color and luster. For example, over the country, hundreds of good-sized pearls are found each year in the oysters we eat. Unfortunately these have no commercial value regardless of whether they have been cooked or not because they are dull opaque white or purple like the shell of the parent oyster. In recent times almost all pearls of gem quality come from the oriental pearl oyster which has a bright shimmering translucent nacre. A pearl starts growing when some irritating foreign substance such as a sand grain, bit of mud, parasite or other object becomes lodged in the shell-producing gland called the mantle. Pearls formed in the soft flesh where nacre can be added on all sides are most likely to be spherical and the most highly prized. By far the great majority are flattened or variously distorted and have little value. Size, color, luster and freedom from flaws are other essential qualities. Unlike other gems, such as diamonds, pearls have an average life of only about 50 years. In time the small amount of water in a pearl's make-up is lost and its surface cracks. Because they are mostly lime, necklaces which are worn often are injured by the acid secretions of the human skin.

Buying pearl jewelry can be fun, exciting and confusing. Whether you're considering a gift of pearl jewelry for someone special or as a treat for yourself, take some time to learn the terms used in the industry. Here's some information to help you get the best quality pearl jewelry for your money, whether you're shopping in a traditional brick and mortar store or online. Pearls Natural or real pearls are made by oysters and other mollusks. Cultured pearls also are grown by mollusks, but with human intervention; that is, an irritant introduced into the shells causes a pearl to grow. Imitation pearls are man-made with glass, plastic, or organic materials. Because natural pearls are very rare, most pearls used in jewelry are either cultured or imitation pearls. Cultured pearls, because they are made by oysters or mollusks, usually are more expensive than imitation pears. A cultured pearl's value is largely based on its size, usually stated in millimeters, and the quality of its nacre coating, which give it luster. Jewelers should tell your if the pearls are cultured or imitation. Some black, bronze, gold, purple, blue and orange pearls, whether natural or cultured, occur that way in nature; some, however, are dyed through various processes. Jewelers should tell you whether the colored pearls are naturally colored, dyed or irradiated. Clams, oysters, mussels and many other mollusks with limy shells are known to produce pearls. But very few kinds yield gem pearls of jeweler's quality. The pearl is an abnormal growth of mother-of-pearl, or nacre, imbedded in the soft bodies of these shellfish. It is built up, layer upon layer, in the same way as nacre is added to the lining of the growing shell and always has the same color and luster. For example, over the country, hundreds of good-sized pearls are found each year in the oysters we eat. Unfortunately these have no commercial value regardless of whether they have been cooked or not because they are dull opaque white or purple like the shell of the parent oyster. In recent times almost all pearls of gem quality come from the oriental pearl oyster which has a bright shimmering translucent nacre. A pearl starts growing when some irritating foreign substance such as a sand grain, bit of mud, parasite or other object becomes lodged in the shell-producing gland called the mantle. Pearls formed in the soft flesh where nacre can be added on all sides are most likely to be spherical and the most highly prized. By far the great majority are flattened or variously distorted and have little value. Size, color, luster and freedom from flaws are other essential qualities. Unlike other gems, such as diamonds, pearls have an average life of only about 50 years. In time the small amount of water in a pearl's make-up is lost and its surface cracks. Because they are mostly lime, necklaces which are worn often are injured by the acid secretions of the human skin.

Being a Butlins Redcoat in the 1950s was as all round a training in showbusiness as anyone could get. Aiming to entertain audiences that had a broad spectrum of likes and dislikes, keeping an ear open for the latest hits, and being able to turn one’s hand to jazz, skiffle and evergreen ballads were all part of the territory. For Clinton Ford, who worked the summer seasons at Butlins in pearl jewelry Pwllheli for three consecutive summers from 1957, it set in motion a career that was notable for his extraordinary versatility.

Initially, Ford became known as a skiffle singer, in the era of Lonnie Donegan, tea-chest basses and washboards. To jazz enthusiasts, Ford was famous as the vocalist with the Merseysippi Jazz Band in Liverpool, then with Kenny Ball’s Jazzmen, and subsequently as a frequent guest artist with a huge range of bands from Charlie Gall and the Clyde Valley Stompers to George Chisholm’s Gentlemen of Jazz. To fans of the BBC Light Programme, he was the host of Clinton’s Cakewalk, and the smooth-toned singer of such music-hall flavoured ditties as Fanlight Fanny. He was also a regular in pantomime and cabaret. His compositions included The Old Bazaar in Cairo, which he co-wrote with the comedian Charlie Chester and which became a firm favourite on pearl jewelry wholesale Radio 2. His country music song Old Shep, written by Red Foley about the death of a faithful sheepdog, was his biggest-selling record, but he donated the not insubstantial royalties from it to Battersea Dogs’ Home.

Ian George Stopford Harrison was born in Salford in 1931, and grew up in a musical family. During his National Service he began singing folk songs to his own guitar accompaniment, and after he was demobbed in 1957 led his own band, the Backwoods Skiffle Group. He did not think his real name sounded right for this brand of down-home American music so he adopted Clinton Ford as his stage persona. At this time he was making ends meet as a lab assistant, and playing with the group whenever possible, but later in 1957 he landed the Butlins job for the summer season and became a full-time musician. In the winters he wholesale pearl jewelry sang with the Merseysippi band at what was then a relatively unknown club, the Cavern in Liverpool. He made a considerable impression on the band by turning up for his first session in the dingy basement club wearing dark glasses. This was not, however, an attempt to be super-cool, but to disguise a black eye given to him by another Butlins employee in a contretemps over a lady friend. Lodging in cheap digs on Canning Street, where he wrote his first songs, Ford remembered the Cavern Club of the time as “squalid”. He recounted: “When it was packed the moisture would rise and settle on the ceiling. It would condense and drip down your neck. It was an awful place but we loved it.”

"I'm going to say to the Russian people, you shouldn't fear expansion of NATO to your border because these are peace-loving people and you ought to welcome them," Mr. Bush said (New York Times, Nov. 22).

Has it come to this? George Bush waving his antennae at the Russian people, holding up a set of splayed fingers and saying, "We mean you no harm!"

This was among the many absurdities accompanying the recent meeting between Bush and Vladimir Putin, not the least of which being the location – Tsarskoye Selo.

Given the increasingly hereditary nature of the American succession and the obviously tsarist leanings of the current First Face, this kind of imagery ought to be very striking to the casual or even the professional observer.

But the only registered blip on the media radar screen was an explanation in Izvestia that the meeting had to pearl jewelry be done there because of some strange issue involving an airstrip:

"About 10 days later, State Department officers set off for Russia's Northwest to find a place for the U.S. president's plane to land. Nothing was found close to St. Petersburg. But, ultimately, Tsarskoye Selo was a spot perfectly suitable for a ‘royal' agenda."

This was a small issue surrounding the summit. Some of the larger ones went completely unreported, at least in the American press.

Most of those, from where I sat, involved the final negotiations over Russia's asking price or support for the recent bogus U.N. resolution to disarm Iraq – clearly the central focus of these meetings. Aside even from the obvious idiocies in our Iraq war coverage – the sudden media concern with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction some 15 years after Hussein used such weapons, with our support, against Iran – there have been a number of extremely bizarre features of our wartime media mobilization. Not the least of these have been the surprisingly frank public discussions about the actual reasons for the war, held simultaneously with the utterly fraudulent "official" explanations for the attack.

It is not unusual in the States these days to see a major network run sober reports about Iraqi secret weapons sites and then, minutes later, run an in-depth feature about Iraqi oil and the eventual carving up of the petro-spoils among the postwar victors.

This schizophrenic approach was demonstrated most graphically recently by the Microsoft/NBC/Newsweek/ Washington Post conglomerate, which has created an entire full-length feature series, run on its MSNBC network, entitled: "Oil: The Other Iraq War." In it, the network – which in its day job runs the usual "Weapons Inspectors Arrive in Iraq" schlock as the meat of its "straight" coverage of the war – reports at length about the energy motives behind the attack.

A recent piece called "Oil After Saddam: All Bets Are In" put the matter succinctly:

"The American campaign to blister pearl overthrow Iraqi President Sad-dam Hussein, even as al-Qaida's terrorism thrives around the world and the national economy falters, has many people in America and abroad asking: What's really motivating Washing-ton to take on Saddam?"

The answer, the network concludes, is oil. And, for the rest of this "Other War" coverage, MSNBC reports on the upcoming conflict with more-or-less total candor, explaining the rewards the United States will reap when it takes control of the world's second-largest oil reserves, etc.

The whole thing leaves one with the odd impression that the media is actually covering two completely different wars: One, the fake one to fictionally disarm a fake dangerous sponsor of international terrorism, and the "other war," the actual one.

The coverage of the first war is suitably fake; the coverage of the second war, because it is real, is suitably real.

The phenomenon reminds me a lot of a book called "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst," about a sailor who once tried to fake a single-handed circumnavigation of the globe. Crowhurst went insane during the voyage and, after a short while, began to keep two separate captain's logs.

The first was the fake one, for posterity, which depicted the captain in all sorts of heroic poses, eating flying fish and composing lyrical descriptions of sunsets as he conquered the raging waters off Cape Horn.

The second log was the real one, intended for use by Crowhurst himself, where he described his actual location floating aimlessly a few hundred miles from the starting port in England, wondering aloud how to freshwater pearl work his compass and fretting over the likelihood that he will be found out when he returns home.

There are so many disturbing parallels to the Iraq coverage here that it boggles the mind, especially when you consider that in the Crowhurst story the two-log system only made sense to an insane person who eventually jumped overboard to his death following a complete mental short-out. We lay consumers of the wartime media may yet suffer the same fate.

That said, it is obvious that the American media is not yet completely comfortable with the two-war model. If it had been, some of the news from the recent Bush-Putin summit would have been reported differently. For instance: Just as Bush was meeting with Putin, the United States announced that it was going to expand its quota for imported slab steel from Russia.

Last year, to great fanfare and international outcry, the allegedly anti-protectionist Bush administration slapped 30-percent tariffs on imported slab steel, limiting Russia to 1 million metric tons of imports. Last week, it expanded that number to 1.3 million metric tons.

If, like most thinking people, you heard a distinct cash-register "kerching!" sound coming from the general direction of the Kremlin when Putin signed off on the U.N. Iraq resolution, you might naturally think that deals like this would be the form the payoff would come in.

After all, Russia's steel barons are major patrons of the Putin regime, and Putin's first order of business in gouging the United States would normally be the securing of a bone to throw in their direction.

But this obvious quid pro quo was not detected in the coverage either of the summit or the deal. Indeed, not a single news outlet has even suggested a connection.

Worse still, Izvestia reported that Bush and Putin came to wholesale pearl jewelry a "gentlemen's agreement" about Russia's share of the oil booty following the war. Aside from a write-up on the BBC's online service, this, too, went unreported.

Instead, acres of text went to describing the "genuine" relationship between the two men. What a crock. Putin and Bush love each other about as much as Henry VIII loved Catherine of Aragon. Royal marriages are always unions of convenience – then and now.

The real love stories are not for posterity.

"I'm going to say to the Russian people, you shouldn't fear expansion of NATO to your border because these are peace-loving people and you ought to welcome them," Mr. Bush said (New York Times, Nov. 22).

Has it come to this? George Bush waving his antennae at the Russian people, holding up a set of splayed fingers and saying, "We mean you no harm!"

This was among the many absurdities accompanying the recent meeting between Bush and Vladimir Putin, not the least of which being the location – Tsarskoye Selo.

Given the increasingly hereditary nature of the American succession and the obviously tsarist leanings of the current First Face, this kind of imagery ought to be very striking to the casual or even the professional observer.

But the only registered blip on the media radar screen was an explanation in Izvestia that the meeting had to pearl jewelry be done there because of some strange issue involving an airstrip:

"About 10 days later, State Department officers set off for Russia's Northwest to find a place for the U.S. president's plane to land. Nothing was found close to St. Petersburg. But, ultimately, Tsarskoye Selo was a spot perfectly suitable for a ‘royal' agenda."

This was a small issue surrounding the summit. Some of the larger ones went completely unreported, at least in the American press.

Most of those, from where I sat, involved the final negotiations over Russia's asking price or support for the recent bogus U.N. resolution to disarm Iraq – clearly the central focus of these meetings. Aside even from the obvious idiocies in our Iraq war coverage – the sudden media concern with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction some 15 years after Hussein used such weapons, with our support, against Iran – there have been a number of extremely bizarre features of our wartime media mobilization. Not the least of these have been the surprisingly frank public discussions about the actual reasons for the war, held simultaneously with the utterly fraudulent "official" explanations for the attack.

It is not unusual in the States these days to see a major network run sober reports about Iraqi secret weapons sites and then, minutes later, run an in-depth feature about Iraqi oil and the eventual carving up of the petro-spoils among the postwar victors.

This schizophrenic approach was demonstrated most graphically recently by the Microsoft/NBC/Newsweek/ Washington Post conglomerate, which has created an entire full-length feature series, run on its MSNBC network, entitled: "Oil: The Other Iraq War." In it, the network – which in its day job runs the usual "Weapons Inspectors Arrive in Iraq" schlock as the meat of its "straight" coverage of the war – reports at length about the energy motives behind the attack.

A recent piece called "Oil After Saddam: All Bets Are In" put the matter succinctly:

"The American campaign to blister pearl overthrow Iraqi President Sad-dam Hussein, even as al-Qaida's terrorism thrives around the world and the national economy falters, has many people in America and abroad asking: What's really motivating Washing-ton to take on Saddam?"

The answer, the network concludes, is oil. And, for the rest of this "Other War" coverage, MSNBC reports on the upcoming conflict with more-or-less total candor, explaining the rewards the United States will reap when it takes control of the world's second-largest oil reserves, etc.

The whole thing leaves one with the odd impression that the media is actually covering two completely different wars: One, the fake one to fictionally disarm a fake dangerous sponsor of international terrorism, and the "other war," the actual one.

The coverage of the first war is suitably fake; the coverage of the second war, because it is real, is suitably real.

The phenomenon reminds me a lot of a book called "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst," about a sailor who once tried to fake a single-handed circumnavigation of the globe. Crowhurst went insane during the voyage and, after a short while, began to keep two separate captain's logs.

The first was the fake one, for posterity, which depicted the captain in all sorts of heroic poses, eating flying fish and composing lyrical descriptions of sunsets as he conquered the raging waters off Cape Horn.

The second log was the real one, intended for use by Crowhurst himself, where he described his actual location floating aimlessly a few hundred miles from the starting port in England, wondering aloud how to freshwater pearl work his compass and fretting over the likelihood that he will be found out when he returns home.

There are so many disturbing parallels to the Iraq coverage here that it boggles the mind, especially when you consider that in the Crowhurst story the two-log system only made sense to an insane person who eventually jumped overboard to his death following a complete mental short-out. We lay consumers of the wartime media may yet suffer the same fate.

That said, it is obvious that the American media is not yet completely comfortable with the two-war model. If it had been, some of the news from the recent Bush-Putin summit would have been reported differently. For instance: Just as Bush was meeting with Putin, the United States announced that it was going to expand its quota for imported slab steel from Russia.

Last year, to great fanfare and international outcry, the allegedly anti-protectionist Bush administration slapped 30-percent tariffs on imported slab steel, limiting Russia to 1 million metric tons of imports. Last week, it expanded that number to 1.3 million metric tons.

If, like most thinking people, you heard a distinct cash-register "kerching!" sound coming from the general direction of the Kremlin when Putin signed off on the U.N. Iraq resolution, you might naturally think that deals like this would be the form the payoff would come in.

After all, Russia's steel barons are major patrons of the Putin regime, and Putin's first order of business in gouging the United States would normally be the securing of a bone to throw in their direction.

But this obvious quid pro quo was not detected in the coverage either of the summit or the deal. Indeed, not a single news outlet has even suggested a connection.

Worse still, Izvestia reported that Bush and Putin came to wholesale pearl jewelry a "gentlemen's agreement" about Russia's share of the oil booty following the war. Aside from a write-up on the BBC's online service, this, too, went unreported.

Instead, acres of text went to describing the "genuine" relationship between the two men. What a crock. Putin and Bush love each other about as much as Henry VIII loved Catherine of Aragon. Royal marriages are always unions of convenience – then and now.

The real love stories are not for posterity.

"I'm going to say to the Russian people, you shouldn't fear expansion of NATO to your border because these are peace-loving people and you ought to welcome them," Mr. Bush said (New York Times, Nov. 22).

Has it come to this? George Bush waving his antennae at the Russian people, holding up a set of splayed fingers and saying, "We mean you no harm!"

This was among the many absurdities accompanying the recent meeting between Bush and Vladimir Putin, not the least of which being the location – Tsarskoye Selo.

Given the increasingly hereditary nature of the American succession and the obviously tsarist leanings of the current First Face, this kind of imagery ought to be very striking to the casual or even the professional observer.

But the only registered blip on the media radar screen was an explanation in Izvestia that the meeting had to pearl jewelry be done there because of some strange issue involving an airstrip:

"About 10 days later, State Department officers set off for Russia's Northwest to find a place for the U.S. president's plane to land. Nothing was found close to St. Petersburg. But, ultimately, Tsarskoye Selo was a spot perfectly suitable for a ‘royal' agenda."

This was a small issue surrounding the summit. Some of the larger ones went completely unreported, at least in the American press.

Most of those, from where I sat, involved the final negotiations over Russia's asking price or support for the recent bogus U.N. resolution to disarm Iraq – clearly the central focus of these meetings. Aside even from the obvious idiocies in our Iraq war coverage – the sudden media concern with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction some 15 years after Hussein used such weapons, with our support, against Iran – there have been a number of extremely bizarre features of our wartime media mobilization. Not the least of these have been the surprisingly frank public discussions about the actual reasons for the war, held simultaneously with the utterly fraudulent "official" explanations for the attack.

It is not unusual in the States these days to see a major network run sober reports about Iraqi secret weapons sites and then, minutes later, run an in-depth feature about Iraqi oil and the eventual carving up of the petro-spoils among the postwar victors.

This schizophrenic approach was demonstrated most graphically recently by the Microsoft/NBC/Newsweek/ Washington Post conglomerate, which has created an entire full-length feature series, run on its MSNBC network, entitled: "Oil: The Other Iraq War." In it, the network – which in its day job runs the usual "Weapons Inspectors Arrive in Iraq" schlock as the meat of its "straight" coverage of the war – reports at length about the energy motives behind the attack.

A recent piece called "Oil After Saddam: All Bets Are In" put the matter succinctly:

"The American campaign to blister pearl overthrow Iraqi President Sad-dam Hussein, even as al-Qaida's terrorism thrives around the world and the national economy falters, has many people in America and abroad asking: What's really motivating Washing-ton to take on Saddam?"

The answer, the network concludes, is oil. And, for the rest of this "Other War" coverage, MSNBC reports on the upcoming conflict with more-or-less total candor, explaining the rewards the United States will reap when it takes control of the world's second-largest oil reserves, etc.

The whole thing leaves one with the odd impression that the media is actually covering two completely different wars: One, the fake one to fictionally disarm a fake dangerous sponsor of international terrorism, and the "other war," the actual one.

The coverage of the first war is suitably fake; the coverage of the second war, because it is real, is suitably real.

The phenomenon reminds me a lot of a book called "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst," about a sailor who once tried to fake a single-handed circumnavigation of the globe. Crowhurst went insane during the voyage and, after a short while, began to keep two separate captain's logs.

The first was the fake one, for posterity, which depicted the captain in all sorts of heroic poses, eating flying fish and composing lyrical descriptions of sunsets as he conquered the raging waters off Cape Horn.

The second log was the real one, intended for use by Crowhurst himself, where he described his actual location floating aimlessly a few hundred miles from the starting port in England, wondering aloud how to freshwater pearl work his compass and fretting over the likelihood that he will be found out when he returns home.

There are so many disturbing parallels to the Iraq coverage here that it boggles the mind, especially when you consider that in the Crowhurst story the two-log system only made sense to an insane person who eventually jumped overboard to his death following a complete mental short-out. We lay consumers of the wartime media may yet suffer the same fate.

That said, it is obvious that the American media is not yet completely comfortable with the two-war model. If it had been, some of the news from the recent Bush-Putin summit would have been reported differently. For instance: Just as Bush was meeting with Putin, the United States announced that it was going to expand its quota for imported slab steel from Russia.

Last year, to great fanfare and international outcry, the allegedly anti-protectionist Bush administration slapped 30-percent tariffs on imported slab steel, limiting Russia to 1 million metric tons of imports. Last week, it expanded that number to 1.3 million metric tons.

If, like most thinking people, you heard a distinct cash-register "kerching!" sound coming from the general direction of the Kremlin when Putin signed off on the U.N. Iraq resolution, you might naturally think that deals like this would be the form the payoff would come in.

After all, Russia's steel barons are major patrons of the Putin regime, and Putin's first order of business in gouging the United States would normally be the securing of a bone to throw in their direction.

But this obvious quid pro quo was not detected in the coverage either of the summit or the deal. Indeed, not a single news outlet has even suggested a connection.

Worse still, Izvestia reported that Bush and Putin came to wholesale pearl jewelry a "gentlemen's agreement" about Russia's share of the oil booty following the war. Aside from a write-up on the BBC's online service, this, too, went unreported.

Instead, acres of text went to describing the "genuine" relationship between the two men. What a crock. Putin and Bush love each other about as much as Henry VIII loved Catherine of Aragon. Royal marriages are always unions of convenience – then and now.

The real love stories are not for posterity.

There are two things about the U.S. plan to develop a National Missile Defense system (NMD) that have long been clear to Russian experts.

First, the United States will deploy this system. Second, these plans don't threaten Russia's nuclear deterrent potential, which is too great for any feasible missile defense system.

A clear understanding of these two circumstances gave Russian diplomats plenty of room for maneuver and opportunity to find and even push through a compromise that would have been in Russia's interests.

But over recent years, Russian diplomats have been repeating like a rote-learned mantra the formula that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is the cornerstone of strategic stability, never stopping to think what these words really mean.

Leaving aside Russian diplomats, let's come back to cultured pearl U.S. politicians. No matter who is in the White House, NMD is on the agenda in some way.

Former President Bill Clinton's Democratic administration took steps toward developing an NMD under pressure from the Republican majority in Congress. The Republican administration feels genuine ideological enthusiasm for NMD, while the Clinton administration spent several years sincerely and persistently trying to persuade the Russian side to accept modifications to the provisions of the ABM Treaty that place restrictions on NMD systems.

It's possible that Russia's monotonous repetition of its ABM mantra – which drove Clinton negotiators to desperation – was a demonstration of Moscow's diplomatic wisdom. Moscow understood the issue thoroughly, but wanted to wait until after the U.S. presidential election in order to conclude an advantageous agreement with the winner.

The problem is that the official Russian position hasn't become any more flexible since the Republicans came to power. What's more, and this is significant, since Jan. 20, 2001, no one has been trying to persuade us of anything. Formally, the official American position remains unchanged – Russia is invited to enter negotiations on modifying the ABM Treaty.

But a significant and influential part – if not the whole – of the Bush administration doesn't want the ABM Treaty modified. This concerns above all Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his supporters. They would rather see the United States withdraw completely from the treaty (which they can do as long as they give six-month notice). This would leave their hands free to silver pearl necklace pursue their plans. It's not even the military aspect of this scenario that interests them so much as the political outcome, which would put Russia outside any serious strategic agreements and deprive it of its last superpower trappings.

Rumsfeld left a security conference in Munich without even staying to hear Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov's reply and without bothering to debate with him. This was not just because he already knew what Ivanov would say but also because Ivanov's position suited him just fine.

For Russia, fighting to prevent modification of the ABM Treaty amounts to fighting to give the United States a free hand to deploy NMD. It also means fighting to push Russia out of its prestigious and genuinely significant seat in the club of nuclear superpowers, bound together by a system of agreements. And it means fighting to exclude the Russian military- industrial complex from the promising market in cutting-edge military technology.

What worries Rumsfeld more than anything is that Russia will pull out of this fight that has already driven our diplomacy into a dead end and will take up a reasonable position that actually meets our interests. But after so many years of rhetorical gymnastics and pumping up Russian public opinion, it's not so easy for the country's diplomats to retreat to dancing pearl a more constructive position without losing face.

Rumsfeld and Ivanov are confidently leading Russian-American relations toward a new Cold War, and it's no secret what the consequences will be for today's Russia.

Being a Butlins Redcoat in the 1950s was as all round a training in showbusiness as anyone could get. Aiming to entertain audiences that had a broad spectrum of likes and dislikes, keeping an ear open for the latest hits, and being able to turn one’s hand to jazz, skiffle and evergreen ballads were all part of the territory. For Clinton Ford, who worked the summer seasons at Butlins in pearl jewelry Pwllheli for three consecutive summers from 1957, it set in motion a career that was notable for his extraordinary versatility.

Initially, Ford became known as a skiffle singer, in the era of Lonnie Donegan, tea-chest basses and washboards. To jazz enthusiasts, Ford was famous as the vocalist with the Merseysippi Jazz Band in Liverpool, then with Kenny Ball’s Jazzmen, and subsequently as a frequent guest artist with a huge range of bands from Charlie Gall and the Clyde Valley Stompers to George Chisholm’s Gentlemen of Jazz. To fans of the BBC Light Programme, he was the host of Clinton’s Cakewalk, and the smooth-toned singer of such music-hall flavoured ditties as Fanlight Fanny. He was also a regular in pantomime and cabaret. His compositions included The Old Bazaar in Cairo, which he co-wrote with the comedian Charlie Chester and which became a firm favourite on pearl jewelry wholesale Radio 2. His country music song Old Shep, written by Red Foley about the death of a faithful sheepdog, was his biggest-selling record, but he donated the not insubstantial royalties from it to Battersea Dogs’ Home.

Ian George Stopford Harrison was born in Salford in 1931, and grew up in a musical family. During his National Service he began singing folk songs to his own guitar accompaniment, and after he was demobbed in 1957 led his own band, the Backwoods Skiffle Group. He did not think his real name sounded right for this brand of down-home American music so he adopted Clinton Ford as his stage persona. At this time he was making ends meet as a lab assistant, and playing with the group whenever possible, but later in 1957 he landed the Butlins job for the summer season and became a full-time musician. In the winters he wholesale pearl jewelry sang with the Merseysippi band at what was then a relatively unknown club, the Cavern in Liverpool. He made a considerable impression on the band by turning up for his first session in the dingy basement club wearing dark glasses. This was not, however, an attempt to be super-cool, but to disguise a black eye given to him by another Butlins employee in a contretemps over a lady friend. Lodging in cheap digs on Canning Street, where he wrote his first songs, Ford remembered the Cavern Club of the time as “squalid”. He recounted: “When it was packed the moisture would rise and settle on the ceiling. It would condense and drip down your neck. It was an awful place but we loved it.”