SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 6:09 P.M. ET: 

CULINARY REPORT – From Business Insider:  "On the first day of President Barack Obama's trip to Asia, he and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe dined at a legendary sushi restaurant made famous by a 2011 documentary.   The restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, earned a rare three-star Michelin rating, which means it has 'exceptional cuisine' and is 'worth a special journey.'  It is one of 13 three-star restaurants in Tokyo, and there are only 10 seats. That combination makes it especially hard to secure reservations. In early April the restaurant was already fully booked until the beginning of May.  Chef Jiro Ono, 87, is considered to be one of the top sushi chefs in the world. Ono prepares the sushi himself. His recommended special course — which features a rare, endangered species of bluefin tuna — starts at about $300. It includes more than a dozen courses served in about 20 minutes.  Obama and Abe's dinner lasted about an hour and a half."  I prefer hamburgers and fries.

RAF ON THE CASE – From Sky News:  "Two Russian bombers which flew close to UK airspace have been chased away by an RAF jet fighter.  The aircraft, believed to be Tupolev 95s, were spotted off the coast of northeast Scotland.  They were turned away from Britain when an RAF Typhoon was scrambled from Leuchars airbase, near Dundee.  Crews stationed there are on standby to intercept unidentified aircraft at a moment's notice.  The incident comes amid heightened international tensions over the situation in Ukraine, following the annexation of Crimea by Russia last month."  Nice to see the legendary RAF up there, but, if truth be told, it is today a shell of a force, constantly downsized by the British drift toward a nanny state.  The Royal Navy is in far worse shape.  The force sent by Maggie Thatcher to secure the Falklands in the 1980s was larger than today's entire Royal Navy.

AL GORE WILL BE THRILLED – From Reuters:  "LONDON (Reuters) - Sun seekers who leave northern Europe for warmer climes are marginally less happy than those left behind, a study found.  A sample of more than 300 migrants from Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Britain who resettled in Mediterranean countries found that they were slightly less satisfied with life than a much larger sample of 56,000 people living in northern countries.  The sun lovers scored 7.3 out of a possible 10 on average on a 'happiness' scale while the stay-at-homes came in at an average of 7.5 percent, according to the study released on Wednesday by Dr David Bartram, a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at England's University of Leicester."  Obviously true.  Al Gore always told us that the sun is evil.

WELL, I GUESS YOU NEVER KNOW – From the New York Post:  "The search for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane may return to the possibility that the jet landed somewhere, according to the latest media reports.  The New Strait Times quoted sources close to the investigation as saying that the failure to turn up any debris at the current southern Indian Ocean search site was causing a rethink among investigators.
The sources said they were considering revisiting the scenario that the plane had landed at an unknown location."  There has been so much overreporting, so many false leads, and such an avalanche of speculation, that almost anything becomes believable.  If the plane landed somewhere, how explain the pinging, consistent with an airliner's black box, that was heard only last week in the current search area?  This is one of the great aviation mysteries, and will result in fortunes earned from books and documentaries if it is not solved. 

April 23,  2014