Friday, December 12, 2003

Satellite Fever

The National Air and Space Museum has opened a second home near Dulles International Airport. It houses the Enterprise, a test article shuttle orbiter, the Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb, and the Spacelab module. Everybody was there for the opening. Vice-President Cheney. John Glenn, first American to orbit the Earth. Neil Armstrong, first man on the moon. Scott Crossfield, (who knew Scott Crossfield was still alive? Damn) first person to fly at Mach 2 and then Mach 3. The current crew aboard the International Space Station was present by satellite feed.

So. Everybody and everything were there. The only way this could have been huger was if Amelia Earhart rolled in at the stick of the Kitty Hawk.

Here's how the AP reports it:
"JOHN TRAVOLTA ATTENDS NEW AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM."

God I wish I were making this up. Not only did John Travolta attend, he approved. Oh, Lord have mercy! John Travolta appeared in Look Who's Talking, Too! We shield our eyes before your luminousness and gigantic collars and general Travoltaness! We go together, Travolta! YOU and ME!!

The connection between Travolta and flight, apparently, exists in his pilot's license. I don't know what he's rated for, exactly. Possibly something constructed largely of balsa wood.

Glenn isn't quoted for something like 700 words of story. It's important, however, that we're all aware that "Travolta declared his love for the Concorde, waved fondly at the Boeing 707 (he owns one) and tried to imagine what it would have been like to pilot the sleek SR-71 Blackbird spy plane from coast to coast in an hour. " Also, he blew his nose twice and said he liked pie. But this has got to be good news and great comfort to the Concorde people. Travolta says it was A-OK! Its existence is hereby justified.

Neil Armstrong? Who the hell wants to hear from him? Get more Travolta! MORE TRAVOLTA, DAMMIT!!!!

"I started to cry," Travolta is said to have admitted when a replica of the Wright Brother's plane touched down at the opening ceremonies. Puss. Also: He's been permitted to share oxygen with Scott Crossfield, John Glenn, and Neil Armstrong at the same time, and what gets him? What gets him right here? A big ol' fake glider. Double puss.

Admission to the museum is free. Parking, however, is twelve dollars. Because JOHN TRAVOLTA'S LIMOSINE ALSO PARKED THERE.

MORE TRAVOLTA at blondechampagne@hotmail.com

That's An Outrage

Gary "No, Seriously, I'm Still A Jockey" Stevens does this to me all the time. He'll make spooky-spooky comments about setting off for the White Pants Only Retirement Home For Jockeys, vanish from the entry cards for a few weeks, then spring right back into the saddle just as I'm dumping his career into Rubbermaid to save it in the fridge. He'll be riding a colt named That's An Outrage on December 20th in the Hollywood Futurity, then Buddy Gil in the Malibu Stakes on the day after Christmas. (What's an outrage? Foals are usually named with a nod to their parents. His mommy's name is Cable News, which, granted, is a constant outrage, but seriously, my shoulders are just in the air on this one, because how do you pick just one cable news outrage? Is the owner referring to CNN as a whole, or just Larry King? Geraldo with or without MSNBC? What do his grooms call him for short? "Ragey"? Why all the ambiguity? Why not just name the damn thing "Fox and Friends Is An Insult to the Intelligence of My Coffee Table" and be done with it? I need to hire myself out as a professional thoroughbred namer.)

All this, and the DVD release date for Seabiscuit draws nigh (not "neigh", as the evil horrible punning elf on my shoulder keeps stabbing at me to type. I hate that guy.) Since I do all my partying at the Beverly Hills Hotel on Monday nights, I'll be sure to see Gary there at a DVD to-do.

The webmaster at the racing site I write for has been biting her fingernails over Gary's "maaaaaaaaaybe I'm retiring, maaaaaaaaaybe not," but I took these most recent rustlings with approximately 47,000 grains of salt. Here's a guy who tends to make decisions and statements based upon the emotion of the nanosecond, and is the type of person who is a jockey not only by trade, but by blood cells. It would be like me crying off writing just because I have no discernible writing career at the moment. Won't happen. Can't. (pause for crying jag in bathroom of large, decidedly unliterary engineering firm, returns to keyboard)

Email an outrage at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com

Thursday, December 11, 2003

Rollover Complete

The orbiter Atlantis rolled over this week. I'm sadly without security clearance at the Kennedy Space Center these days, but an extremely awesome person was present to bless the event-- my former co-worker, Nick the NASA Poobah.

Nick is the type of person you want leaning against your filing cabinet in the event a grenade-wielding psycho bursts into the office screeching that the nearest vending machine is charging $87.50 for bottled water. (Where the subcontractor I used to work for is concerned, this is not at all an out-of-hand possibility.) Nick won't throw a woman in front of him for cover or get out a unitard on the theory that relaxation yoga or a round of Kumbyas is going to solve the problem; he is going to fashion a deadly weapon out of a stapler and a yellow highlighter, take the bastard down, then very calmly get on the next bus to the launchpads. He will also, on his way out the door, take exactly enough time to assess the situation in action-figure fashion: "They're called drinking fountains, Jack," he'd say, and depart.

You get the feeling that he went to bed sometime in 1962, woke up in the middle of the Clinton administration, and has been trying to figure out at exactly what point the world went to hell ever since.

TRUE NICK STORY: He and I were briefing an auditorium full of people about an upcoming shuttle launch. A question and answer session went on and on, and finally one guy stood up, pointed at Nick, and said, "You've been answering questions about technology, history, physics, and politics. How do you know all this stuff?" Exquisitely timed pause. Then: "I make it all up."

He stood to feel the most personal hurt after we lost Columbia, and yet had the wherewithal to not only remain composed in front of the roomful of guests for whom he was narrating the landing, he huddled with everyone who was working that day, pulled the crew together, and issued exactly the right instructions. And yet he feels loss and joy, redemption and hope as deeply as the rest of us: At Columbia's memorial service on the landing strip where she was to touch down that day, it was his jacket that was draped around my shoulders just as I began to fall apart.

When I am Empress of the World, Nick will be in charge of PR for the entire Kennedy Space Center, and never again will the gift shop sell crap like this.

So you see why it is only fitting and good that Nick presided over the transport of Atlantis from OPF to VAB. "Slightly bittersweet, as you might expect," he emailed me, "but not without grandeur and majesty. Perhaps, in horse breeding parlance, she is 'by Columbia, out of Discovery'. In any event, she is every bit the thoroughbred." As is my Nick.

Email Nick's friend at: blondechampagne@hotmail.com. You should know, however, that Nick is single, but quite taken, so no you cannot have his phone number.

Tuesday, December 09, 2003

I miss my college friends.

They send me emails such as the following:

"Ted came to visit me in October from New York. He drove eight (8) hours. It was quite the enjoyable weekend. But as Ted was sitting in his car, about to drive back to New York, he asked me if he could use the bathroom before he left. Sure, why not? It is a long trip from Maine to New York. So Ted used the bathroom, for quite a long while, and ended up breaking my toilet. My toilet has not been the same since. Ted may be my best man when I get married, but I'll be damned if I ever let him use my toilet again. Ah Teddy, I can't wait to make sure your future wife knows what she's getting herself into. I'd bet a quarter that she'll at least make sure you have your own, separate toilet."

The above is from The One Known As Sykes, Army Ranger, who in days of dormdom brought love and light into the lives of many by occasionally leaping up, shouting "Wheel! Of! Fortune! I'll spin!" then exposing a horrifying amount of buttocks area and spinning in a rapid circle as everyone within eyeshot scattered. We became immediately confident about the fate of democracy when the Army sent Sykes to Afghanistan.

Sykes also briefly named his fantasy football team "Ted Broke My Toilet." I think that's pretty much all you need to know about Sykes in order to fully understand his place in the universe.

Monday, December 08, 2003

God Rest Ye Proportionate, Gentlemen

This is the first year I've had the opportunity to put up big-girl Christmas lights outside, and I wound two strands around the staircase leading to my apartment. It is exceedingly awesome. (Also, you really, really need to know that as I put them up I was wearing a t-shirt, jeans, and sunglasses-- and I was sweating. You're welcome. Viva Swamp Living!)

Home decor is fun, in extremely limited doses, but I fail to understand the people who plunk down and plug in any random Christmas-related lighted object. It reflects nothing but your own lack of discrimination and apparent desire for an electric bill outstripping that of several South American nations.

I drove by one house last night that featured two separate and complete sets of chicken-playing Santas and reindeer, aiming at one another from opposite ends of the house; an entire herd of those exceedingly creepy light-up reindeer that move (I hate those things, by the way, and the stupid white wooden ones too. One year, though, which shall henceforth be known as The Best Christmas Ever, my family was driving to Midnight Mass and passed a wooden reindeer pair that some presumably drunken person-- who, it must be noted, still had better taste than the homeowner-- had placed in what I shall delicately refer to as the Paris Hilton position. Look, boys and girls! It's the Screwing of the Deer!) and, very disturbingly, an inflatable, eight-foot Frosty, which is bad enough on its own but completely horrifying when placed next to a four-foot light-up Nativity scene. Frosty was positively towering over the defenseless baby Jesus and a totally expressionless Virgin Mary. It was a Godzilla movie for suburban Catholics. To paraphrase a friend of mine, "The Tacky Christmas Decoration Fairy had arrived and threw up all over the lawn."

You'd think St. Joseph would have done something about it, but he had his back to the world-ending snowman. Dude. Back to the wall, always. Back to the wall. Can't forever be counting on those angel-dreams to protect you, man.

Sunday, December 07, 2003

Oh, Boomer.

I've mentioned how dear to this blonde heart Boomer Esiason is, but he just vaulted himself right into BFF status when he spoke of how honored he was to call the Army-Navy game earlier this week. He mentioned Pearl Harbor and awesome the cadets are.

He's currently involved in a spat with Lawrence Taylor over-- okay, I'm not exactly sure why Taylor is pissed, but Deion The Perpetually Annoying is on his side, which automatically means that Boomer has got to be right. (Surrealality Sidenote: Sean Hannity had Taylor on his radio show last week. Given the recent dust-up between Sean and Marc Summers, all these colliding world moments between The Men In My Life are seriously starting to scare me.)

Boomer, it seems, is nearly constantly unpiling himself from an avalanche of cosmic crap. He has long been involved with cystic fibrosis research due to his son's illness, he lost his research foundation's offices in the World Trade Center on 9/11, Al Michaels ousted him from Monday Night Football, he refused to reveal that his struggles with the Bengals began when he discovered his son was sick and he had to drive the kid around and around I-275 for hours at night just to get him to sleep, and now he has to share oxygen with Idiot Deion on a weekly basis. From his comments on the CBS preview show, I can pretty much tell he has a tangible dedication to family, decency, and country. That goes yards and yards with me.

Also, he just picked the Bengals over the Ravens today. Sniff. I love you, man!

Pearl Harbor

I've been there, left flowers at the memorial bobbing over the grave of the stricken. I've seen how the oil still rises from the punctured drums of the broken ship, light and stealthy.

The same hatred and evil remain in the same way, skimming over the surface of all of us. God bless our veterans and those still keeping us safe.

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