New Bytes

There is so much nutso stuff in the news that all I can do is bullet-list the highlights:

• Everybody is talking about the PsychoKiller Astronaut. My dad is a fighter pilot and those guys (and obviously gals now) aren’t sane. My father is the obvious exception (Hi, Dad!). They all talk with their hands and swoop them around in formation to describe their dogfights. You risk your life walking through a cocktail party of pilots. I used to sneak looks at “log books” where they would brag about their exploits in and out of the cockpit. Top Gun and The Great Santini only scratches the surface of the machismo in a squadron lounge. And these guys form the pool of applicants that get to fly shuttles. While Lisa Nowak was a mission specialist and not a shuttle pilot, she has extensive test pilot experience as told on her official bio. I think the problem with the psychological screening process is that the sample population of potential astronauts is skewed to begin with. Normal is a very relative term.
  
  
• All the news reports discretely mention that Lisa and her erstwhile paramour were never on the same mission. The “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” implication is that they are not members of the Zero-G Club. At least not with each other. A Slate article debunks the urban rumors about sex in space and plays up the inconvenience and uncomfortableness of the space shuttle. That has never stopped all those frequent fliers from hogging the airplane lavatories just to have a story to tell. Even on firm ground, I don’t think comfort or lack thereof has ever stopped anybody from trying out a shower stall or a too small Jacuzzi. Just sayin’.
  
  
• I nearly got called for jury duty for a trial where a guy hid in the bushes and whacked his estranged wife with a machete, sending her to the hospital. That story got buried in the metro section because plenty of people do crazy violent stuff all the time. What part of Nowak’s story merits wall-to-wall OJ (Capricorn 1 allusion intentional, courtesy of bc) coverage? Astronaut? Woman astronaut? Diaper? Besides the high schadenfreude quotient, why should we really care about a transcontinental NASA catfight? It would be a different matter if there were video of the attack and it happened in a mud filled pond.
  
  
• The new federal budget is out and we are going to spend half a trillion dollars next year on defense. The share for my family of three is about five grand. Our share of the National Park Service budget is twenty-five dollars, and that doesn’t count the fifty dollars I spent on an annual pass this summer visiting the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Rocky Mountain National Parks. While I support our troops, I have to ask myself what was the better value.
  
  
• The Coalitional Provisional Authority (the incompetent Americans that ran Iraq before we turned it over to incompetent Iraqis) lost over five billion dollars in cash. We’re not talking accounting error here. We’re talking over 300 tons of small bills. For perspective, we could have tripled the Park Service budget with the money that literally fell off the truck in Iraq.
  
  
• I’ve said before that the celebrity I most resemble is Ron Howard. I think my sister bears more than a passing resemblance to Anna Nicole Smith. I hope she takes that as a compliment. You judge for yourself.

By celebutard standards, even Lisa Nowak is sane compared to Anna Nicole Smith. Anna Nicole won the All-Time Super Bowl MVP Award in Gold-Digging, and I don’t begrudge her that, but the karmic payoff has finally proven fatal. Let’s hope she finds peace where ever she is now.