This Gives "Extra-Vehicular Activity" A Whole New Meaning

You think you have a hard time getting a plumber when you need one? Pity the poor astronauts awaiting a spare part to fix the toilet on the international space station. "Okay, that'll be $37.50 for the pump, $150 labor and $2,000,000 for the service call." (I admit it. I don't know how much each flight of the the space shuttle Discovery actually costs and just pulled a figure from my... well, never mind that.)

But my favorite quote from the story is as follows:

The space station's Russian-built toilet has been acting up for the past week. The three male residents have temporarily bypassed the problem, which involves urine collection, not solid waste.

Top 10 Surprises in McClellan White House Book

From the home office at the Crawfish Ranch, the Top Ten surprises in Scott McClellan's new White House exposé, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception, are:

10. Cabinet meetings scheduled in president’s calendar as “keggers”

9. George Stephanopoulos’s secret stash of hair grooming products left behind podium includes "industrial strength mousse"

8. Flight jacket worn during “Mission Accomplished” speech borrowed from Indiana Jones

7. Karl Rove quit in disgust when polls showed public thought Cheney more evil

6. After hunting accident, Vice President Cheney’s wife Lynne heard to comment “His gun still fires? News to me.”

5. No one on White House staff has ever seen vice president between dawn and sundown

4. President overjoyed that The Hottie & The Nottie finally released on DVD

3. Staff panicked when president rehearsed Axis of Evil speech and kept saying “Iraq, Iran and North Dakota”

2. Secret Service code name for Vice President? “Mr. Burns”

And the number one surprise in Scott McClellan’s new White House “Tell All”:

1. President still pondering last minute third term run

Far From The Madding Crowd: A Libertarian Convention Non-Report

My preferred on-the-spot reporter would have been Triumph the Insult Comic or, failing that, Yakov Smirnoff (“In former Soviet Union, people actually give rat’s ass about Libertarian Party!”) Still, Reason’s David Weigel is doing a workmanlike job covering the 2008 Libertarian Convention, and you might want to check out Reason’s coverage if you, unlike me, care.

Picking the next Libertarian Party candidate is like being a battered wife fresh from the shelter walking into a pool room and flirting with the guy with the most prison tats and the fewest teeth. Forgive me if I don’t swoon at the prospect of Bob Barr, Mike Gravel or any of the other candidates carrying the tattered banner of libertarianism into the certain obscurity that yet again awaits it.

I will say, however, that if the ideological zealots who make up actual LP activists hand the nomination to a political careerist and opportunist like Barr because they think it will give the party added exposure, both sides to that bargain will have gotten exactly what they deserve. Barr will never again be taken as seriously as he once was (a good thing) and the LP will (correctly) be perceived as the political equivalent of a Star Trek convention. Not a good thing but not so bad, either. Hey, is that Penn Jillette over there? Oh, never mind, it's just Drew Carey again.

Constant Viewer: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the first movie of 2008 Constant Viewer intends to go back and see again. We are, just in case you haven’t noticed, in a period in the movies where the woolly mammoths of yesteryear are making one last charge before, well, you know about woolly mammoths, don’t you?. We saw it with Bruce Willis and (twice, no less) with Sylvester Stallone and we are seeing it now with Harrison Ford, reprising the role that really made him a major star (no, children, it wasn’t playing Han Solo that made Ford a star) for the first time in nearly two decades.

Stallone did a far better job than CV expected, mostly by not actually embarrassing himself in Rocky Balboa, while Willis delivered one of the best action pictures of his career in Live Free or Die Hard. With a George Lucas story and Steven Spielberg behind the camera, so, amazingly, does Ford. This is one of the few movies in quite a while CV just plain had fun watching, almost from beginning to end.

Almost. Rumored claims that Ford did much of his stunt work are clearly preposterous. Judging from the amount of footage in the first several reels where Indy is running in a medium shot with his face hidden in shadows, CV seriously doubts Ford did anything strenuous or dangerous, and the movie gets off to a slow start. By the time he takes refuge in the refrigerator in a suspiciously life-sized doll house on a military reservation, though, you know you’re in the hands of masters who carry you on a thrill ride for the next hour and a half with just enough comic relief and inside jokes along the way to let you catch your breath and enjoy the entire ride. The movie deserves its PG-13 rating (not that this will keep idiot parents from bringing their toddlers) but anyone old enough to ride an adult roller coaster should go see it.

There is an entire generation of moviegoers who have never seen an Indiana Jones movie on the big screen before. Nowadays, CGI makes any screen image possible and thereby makes none of them magical any longer, and it’s hard to describe how audiences felt when the first Star Wars movie was released in 1977 or when Raiders Of The Lost Ark was released in 1981. In fact, in terms of film history, Raiders really only updated the black and white Saturday afternoon “cliffhanger” serials of the 40s and 50s, but then that’s like saying modern medicine has only updated the practices of leeching and bleeding patients. What Lucas and Spielberg and Ford managed to create in the late 70s and early 80s truly was magical. Best of all, they haven’t forgotten how.

Constant Viewer: Prince Caspian

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian continues C.S. Lewis’s well known series of Christian apologetics thinly veiled as children’s literature and it does so neither better nor worse than The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which Constant Viewer also didn't like. Constant Viewer finds it difficult to be objective about the merits of these films because he frankly loathed the books when he (tried to) read (some of) them as a youth. Then again, sentimental drivel of a vaguely Christian nature abounded in Constant Viewer’s youth back when every television series trotted out some sort of saccharine Holiday Special in late December. (And the holiday in question wasn’t Hanukkah, either, Bubala.) These days, by contrast, religious ignorance in America is so rampant that one of CV’s friend's teenage children had never heard the story of Noah and the Ark. It’s gotten so bad that homophobes yelling “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” have to stop and explain who Adam and Eve were.

Sorry. CV ‘went away’ there for a moment, but he’s back now. Where were we? Oh yes, Prince Caspian. There’s certainly no reason not to take the kiddies to see Prince Caspian. The battle scenes aren’t gory -- they aren’t all that exciting, either, sadly enough -- and even the scene in the tomb when the White Witch (Tilda Swinton) tries to escape probably isn’t frightening enough to scare the little ones. Unlike the original books, the movie doesn’t flog the Christian mythos and symbolism incessantly. On the other hand, for all the supposedly magical mystery of Narnia, Prince Caspian is a surprisingly lifeless and nearly joyless affair, three parts medieval warfare to one part talking animals. Worse yet, what few interesting special effects there are seem almost gratuitously trotted out at the end, making the trailer a bit of a ‘bait and switch’ ploy in CV’s opinion. Aslan the Great Lion of Narnia (voice acted by Liam Neeson) has little more than a cameo at the finale, mostly just to summon the walking trees and water giant in the nick of time to vanquish the human army’s catapults. Frankly, there isn’t enough here to sustain nearly two and a half hours and CV wished he had a catapult to hop on, better to flee the theater, Iron Man like, as quickly as possible no matter how painful the landing.

Pssst! Hey, Can You Keep A Secret?

What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination:

1. George W. Bush is an idiot.

2. As controlled unclassified information goes, #1 isn't much of a secret. Still, try not to let it slip out beyond, oh, say, our solar system lest galactic embarrassment ensue.

3. "Controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination" sounds simultaneously pompous and stupid, like Dean Wormer's "double secret probation" except it's even more like how Otter would explain to Flounder where the emergency beer keg was hidden.

4. Reading any biography of the young George W. Bush makes points #1 through #3 not only obvious but unnecessary. That is all. Over and out.

Forget Money, Guns and Lawyers; Send Credit Cards, XBox and Hookers!

And speaking of promising political careers, I give you 13 year old Ralph Hardy who ordered a duplicate credit card on his father's account and used it for a $30,000 spree with friends that ended in a Texas hotel room with $1,000 hookers playing Halo on XBox.

What separates Ralph and his friends from your run-of-the-mill juvenile thieves, you ask? When the prostitutes balked because he and his friends seemed so young, they told the women they were "people of restricted growth" and that refusing them would be illegal discrimination against the disabled!

I am in awe.

"Come on, try it! Hey, the first grant's free!"

Bravo to Chardon Township, Ohio for turning down $10,000 in disaster aid from FEMA following a March snowstorm. Township Trustee Chuck Strazinsky explained it was a typical snowstorm unworthy of federal aid and that the money should be reserved for true emergencies, whereas Township Trustee Steve Borowski disagreed, saying help from the federal government shouldn't be turned down. Alas, Mr. Borowski probably has the far more promising political career.

Clinton Endorses Obama?

No, not really.
For now, just file under Stories That Wouldn't Surprise Us:

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Today in a surprise announcement just hours before the Democratic National Convention is scheduled to begin, former President William Jefferson Clinton declared his total and enthusiastic support for Barack Obama to become the Democratic Party nominee for president, effectively becoming the last significant member of the Democratic Party aside from Hillary herself to endorse Obama.

“You know I love Hillary,” Clinton explained, “and short of remaining faithful to her sexually I’d do just about anything for her; but politics is the art of the possible and, quite frankly, that bitch just won’t hunt, if you know what I mean.”

In a brief question and answer period following his announcement, Clinton said he thought poor white voters would vote for Obama over McCain in November. “After all, they voted for me twice, so this time all they have to do is vote for a black president who’s, you know, actually black.”

Clinton also said the chances of Hillary being offered or accepting the Vice Presidential nomination were “about as likely as me giving Kenneth Starr ‘a Monica,’” and he flatly denied rumors that his endorsement came at the price of Obama naming him for the first Supreme Court vacancy. When asked as he was leaving the stage why then there were numerous recent reports of him interviewing female law students “for possible clerkship openings,” Clinton simply smiled and declined comment.

Nothing But Net (Gain)?

I'm still waiting to hear a valid negative (against) a kid accepting a scholarship, free education, at an early point in his life. – Howard Avery, whose 8th grade son Michael committed to the University of Kentucky’s basketball program this month.

The obvious “valid negative” here, Mr. Avery, is that neither you nor your son knows what the fair market price of his talents really are. You might, after all, be selling (out) way too low.

Child athletes, be they gymnasts, tennis players or whatever, pose a special problem for our culture, especially given how much we pretend that much of our interference in each other’s lives is “for the children.” Nothing, of course, could be farther from the truth. There have probably been few cultures that have hated children more than ours does, going out of its way to regulate and micromanage their every activity, forcing them to spend over a decade in penal-like rehabilitation institutions, prematurely sexualizing them, encouraging them to engage in sexual intercourse and then branding thousands of them sex offenders when we catch them on the wrong side of the statutory rape laws.

But I digress. So what if professional athletes and prostitutes both ruin their bodies for the amusement of total strangers? We do still outlaw child prostitution, quaintly enough, but child athletics are not only encouraged, they are actively promoted. What better way to get your kid into Princeton or Stanford on a free ride than to find some niche sport you can start them in at around three or four in hopes of having them recruited for the varsity team? And if the kid shows enough talent for a possible pro career? Hey, who wants to waste years grooming a kid to go to Johns Hopkins Med School when the NBA draft is right around the corner? And nobody ever sued a starting point guard for malpractice, either. (Point shaving, on the other hand, well, you know.)

Children pose a special problem for libertarians. Put a bit more amusingly, a friend of mine says that libertarianism is an adults-only activity. On the one hand, children are not and cannot be regarded as their parents’ property. On the other hand, the only viable recourse against child neglect and abuse is the state. Obviously, reasonable people can disagree as to what exactly should count as actionable abuse or neglect. So, for that matter, can unreasonable people, people who contend a mere spanking or letting kids eat junk food are sufficiently egregious to warrant state intervention. But surely even the most adamantly purist libertarian would admit that, for example, children are entitled to the same level of police protection against assault that adults are and that it shouldn’t matter in such cases that the assailant is a parent. (Anarcho-capitalists, on the other hand, might have a problem with child free-riders, here, but I digress again.)

I have little concern whether Michael Avery goes on to play for Kentucky someday though I do hope the kid manages to get some good advice from a sports attorney between now and then, too. I hope he doesn’t get injured along the way or that he manages to get someone to pay for some heavy insurance against such an accident keeping him from a lucrative pro career. I don’t even know if such insurance is possible, but if it is I hope he gets it. And maybe, just maybe all this is not only what the kid really wants but, far more unlikely, he is sufficiently mature to be making these sorts of decisions. In any case, I wish him well.

As for the Kentuckys and the sports fathers of the world, it would be nice if I could wave a magic wand and forever prohibit any of them from contending that what they were doing was really “for the children.”