Some observations whilst reviewing today’s online papers, while the rest of the house is still asleep, and I’m dealing with the remants of a headache.
- From the “He has curtained off the statue / But you’ll still see one big boob” Department: Today’s CNN is reporting how the White House is interested in supporting Anna Nicole Smith’s argument before the Supreme Court regarding her inheritance. Somehow, comments about two boobs keep coming to mind, but I’ll let you fill in the rest.
Yet the article is funny in its own way, drawing a comparison between Bush and the late J. Howard Marshall II, the oil tycoon Smith married in 1994 when he was 89 and she was a 26-year-old topless dancer in Houston. Like Marshall, President Bush was a Texas oil man. Both attended Yale. Both held government positions in Washington. However, Marshall had a penchant for strippers, and the court record before the justices is one of poverty, greed, sex and family rivalry. Bush, on the other hand…
- From the “But Captain, We Invented That First In Russia” Department: According to Spaceflight Now, Russia has just launched another GLONASS (Global Navigation System) satellite. This is Russia’s equivalent of the US Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite. Europe has their own, Galileo. More specifically, yesterday a Proton rocket launched three GLONASS satellites yesterday, after lifting off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome at 0507 GMT (12:07 a.m. EST). Two of these were upgraded GLONASS satellites, which feature longer service lives of seven years, while also substantially increasing the precision of positioning data produced using the constellation. The third spacecraft was an older model with an anticipated lifetime of three years. Once operational, each 3,000-pound satellite will enter service to provide exact positioning, velocity, and timing information to millions of users around the world, including the Russian armed forces.
I’m still trying to figure out why we need multiple constellations of these things. I wonder if anyone has built receivers that can receive signals from all the various positioning systems out there, irrespective of launch owners. Would that permit increasing the accuracy, even in the face of intentional fuzzing of data by the owners?
- From the “I remember them when Department: According to the Miami Herald, Don Johnson and his wife, Kelley, are expecting their third child. The baby is due around May, Johnson’s publicist, Elliot Mintz, said Friday. Now, I’m bringing this to your attention not because of Don Johnson (whom I still remember from his days with Melanie Griffith), but because of his publicist, Elliot Mintz. Mr. Mintz has been the publicist for loads of folks, most prominantly Yoko Ono and Bob Dylan. Some think he worked for the FBI.
I remember him when. More specifically, I remember when Elliot Mintz had a program on Talk Radio 790, KABC, in the early 1970s. This was well before the “conservative” shift in talk radio, when you had humorists (such as Lloyd Thaxton), deep thinkers (such as Michael Jackson (the one from South Africa)), and all sorts of reasonable folks on the radio. Mintz had a show that started at 10:00 PM weekdays, and I always listened to him as I went to sleep. Amazing what sticks in your head.
- Also from the “I remember them when Department: Lastly, let us have a moment of silence for those we have lost, or will be losing, this year. No, I don’t mean people; newspapers are filled with stories about them. I mean corporate monikers. For example, this is the last year for SBC, which is becoming, uhh, AT&T (or should that be at&t). This is also the last holiday season for MayCo’s monikers, such as RobinsonsMay, Filenes, Famous Barr, Hechts, Lord & Taylor, and numerous others. This was the year that K-Mart bought Sears, and that Whirlpool bought Maytag. What other monikers have disappeared this year that you miss (or would you rather talk about boobs [see the first item])?
