Winter Terror

The three stranded climbers have been found and rescued from Oregon’s Mt. Hood yesterday.

Thank Christ!

Now, finally, perhaps we can get back to the real important news such as crazy astronauts in diapers and dead celebrity paternity suits. The stories that really matter.

This particular story has had Anderson Cooper licking his chops since Friday as 6 people have been killed over the weekend in 3 different avalanches. Forget about tsunami’s, hurricanes, leaky levees, or any insignificant on-going ‘War on Terror’, evil has a new face of terror – a white, fluffy face of terror, but a face of terror nonetheless - Avalanches! And lately, the state of Oregon has been the new Ground Zero as 3 climbers and a black lab named Velvet had recently been behind some rocks after falling into a snowy canyon.

Was I the only one who thought we should have just let these dumbfucks freeze?

After all, who goes climbing in avalanche-warning areas, in near blizzard-like conditions? Only 35 climbers have died on this mountain in the last 25 years! That's better than one person killed per year. Not exactly the kind of odds that I'd feel too comfortable with in choosing my leisure activities. I’d say this was the very essence of Darwinism in action.

What kind of dipshit actually enjoys winter climbing anyway? Why not just take up something less dangerous, like, swimming with hungry tiger sharks. Winter climbing; there's a fun activity for the whole family. Pack up the kids, grab the dog, lets all trek up the side of a mountain in 70mph winds and sub zero temperatures! Yaaaaaaay!

The three who fell were part of an eight-person party that set out on Saturday, camped on the mountain that night, and then began to come back down on Sunday when they ran into bad weather, officials said. As they were descending, the three slipped off a ledge and fell about 100 feet. Someone in the party placed an emergency call to authorities.

The three had gotten into their sleeping bags to stay warm and cuddled up with their dog for warmth. Unfortunately, Velvet will now have to undergo severe psychological counseling.

Wow. That’s totally Cliffhanger for sure! I can almost see 'ol Sly's muscles rippling now.

I just hope that when the search party members from the Portland Mountain Rescue Patrol reached the trapped climbers, they greeted them with a warm, open-handed judo chop to the Adam’s Apple for wasting valuable public resources and time. As well as endangering the lives of the many rescuers who attempted repeatedly to reach them in the dangerous zero visibility conditions.

These climbers should have their status as card-carrying members of the 'Upright Citizens Brigade' revoked permanently! Time to take up a newer, lesser "rad", or "gnarly" hobby, like, say, lawn bowling fellas.

As could be expected, the media ‘Terror Machine’ kicked into overdrive and milked this tragedy like a Guernsey cow. For days, while the search continued for the climbers, we were treated to such compelling informational segments as “How Avalanches Work” *, and the late-breaking “Winter Terror” updates. CNN won’t be happy until we’re all screaming in the streets and clawing at each other in line at the airport for one-way tickets to Acapulco whenever it next begins to flurry.

I have even been encouraged to check out www.avalanche.org daily to find all the updated information on pending avalanche conditions in my own neighborhood. And if I’m not mistaken, the snowdrift that’s been accumulating on the awing above my kitchen window has been upgraded to an ‘Orange Level’ alert.

I won’t be able to leave the house now - for days!

When did we become so paranoid of snow anyway? Winter is supposed to be fun, dammit! We're supposed to be dashing through mounds of the white shit joyfully on thins sticks strapped to our feet, not risking being buried on remote mountain passes! That's just fucking stupid.

But, oh no! Blame the snow. The evil, evil snow.

I remember tobogganing off highway overpasses and skating alone on remote frozen ponds without the slightest concern. Those were the carefree days of my youth. Now, thanks to CNN’s whole ‘Culture of Fear’ doom and gloom prophesies; I wouldn’t be surprised if kids nowadays were terrified to build a snowman. They’d probably have to have their snowmen legally registered with City Hall as potential sex offenders in their neighborhood…because you just never know.

Suddenly, winter doesn’t seem so, so, crisp and pure. Does it?

Hell, who has time to enjoy their Winter Wonderland when there’s the risk of an avalanche barreling down the street on top of you as you make your way to your car? Before you know it, parents won’t even let their children build snow forts in their backyards without a mountain locator unit.

* Yeah. Snow gets heavy at the top and rolls down the mountain. I get it now. Thanks, Einstein!

The Week In Weirdness

Well, it became very clear this week that Florida is the very vortex from which all things fucked up emanate throughout the rest of the universe. All you had to do was turn on CNN for a brief second to verify this fact.

Let’s see. Where should we start?

Oh, I know! How about, with one crazy, love-scorned astronaut and a box of adult diapers. That’s as good a place to start as any I figure.

This whole bizarre astronaut love triangle began strangely enough in Houston, TX, where Lisa Nowak, a married, mother of three and successful NASA astronaut slipped on a pair of “maximum absorbency garments” and drove non-stop 14 hours to Orlando, FL, to confront the romantic rival of fellow astronaut, Bill Oefelein. Nowak then confronted, pepper-sprayed and scared the literal bejesus * out of fellow astronaut Colleen Shipman at Orlando International Airport.

Imagine Shipman’s reaction when she first saw Nowak in her soiled diapers coming at her in the parking lot with the pepper-spray? Is that some scary shit or what? You probably could have smelled her coming long before she actually arrived. I don’t know about you, Bill, but I think this chick demonstrates a little too much of ‘The Wrong Stuff’, if you know what I mean.

So I must have heard the word ‘diaper’ on the news only about a zillion times these past few days. I bet stocks in Huggies just about quadrupled thanks to all the added free publicity. ‘Diaper’ has now officially joined ‘WMD’, ‘Shock & Awe’, ‘tsunami’, ‘levees’, and ‘feeding tube’ on the list of popular culture’s new millennium lexicon.

The bail, originally set at $15,500 was later denied as Orlando police added a last minute charge of attempted first degree murder to the already existing charges of battery, attempted kidnapping, and attempted vehicle burglary with battery.

Man! Lesson learned: NEVER get involved with an astronaut because them astronaut chicks are fucking crazy!

But then again, I can see where this could be considered as pretty kinda sexy too. I have no idea what astronauts get up to in those airlock chambers, but I’d sure like to be a fly on the wall. But whatever it is that goes on behind closed shuttle doors, it must be worth 14 hours of sitting in your own shit and piss. You just know it’s love when a girl is willing to put on a pair of man Pampers and drive cross country to try and kidnap someone you smiled at the other day.

You can bet your ass she’s probably into your stash of German schizer videos too.

When Shipman landed in Orlando, she immediately noticed a woman in a tan trench coat following her. Well, duh! Who in their right mind who wants to appear inconspicuous would wear a tan trench coat in 90-degree weather? If you didn’t want to be noticed why the fuck would you wear a trench coat? You know who wears tan trench coats? Cold War spies, perverts, and suicide bombers, that’s who! She may as well have held up a banner that read: “Don't notice me!”

Shipman quickly jumped into her car and heard “running footsteps” behind her, she told police. Nowak then proceeded to gain entry into the car with Shipman, but resorted to pepper-spraying the car through a 2-inch space in the window. Her eyes burning, Shipman drove to a tollbooth and reported the incident.

When officers found Nowak at a bus stop still wearing her trench coat (see where wearing a trench coat gets you?), officers observed her putting items into a trash can. Officers later retrieved a wig and BB gun from the trash can. Nowak allowed officers to search her car where they also found the diapers, 6 pairs of latex gloves **, a steel mallet, a retractable folding knife with 4-inch blade, 3-4 ft of rubber tubing, large garbage bags, directions to Orlando from Houston, personal emails from Shipman to Oefelin, a love letter from Nowak to Oefelin, handwritten directions to Shipman’s Orange County home, and $600 in cash.

It sure sounds like one hell of a chick fight was a-brewin’.

Needless to say, that the media has attacked this story like a pack of starving silverbacks fighting over a banana. Each trying to outdo the other news networks in identifying the probably cause for such a bizarre turn of events. It is the first time a NASA astronaut has ever been convicted of felony charges.

No one is defending the fact that she’s a total nut bar, but what actually triggered Nowak’s launch code? The media critics are therefore speculating that astronauts may be particularly subject to suffering from the extreme stresses that are regularly made on them, both physically and emotionally. So Nowak only reached her breaking point and snapped as a result of her “pressure cooker” training regiment with NASA.

Huh? Isn’t that really grasping at straws?

Nobody is disputing Nowak’s intelligence. She’s one smart cookie for sure. She has been an astronaut since 1999, and has flown as a mission specialist aboard the space shuttle Discovery back in July. If she was “cracking under pressure”, wouldn’t it have happened back then? Why now almost a year later?

I’m stressed at work too and haven’t been laid yet this millennium, but I don’t feel the urge to drive cross-country in a pair of adult diapers.

I think it’s safe to say that she was just bonkers all along. Why does “crazy” also have to imply “stupid”? Hasn’t anybody ever seen ‘Rainman’, or ‘My Left Foot’ for that matter? They won Academy Awards for fuck sakes! Hasn’t anybody ever heard the old adage “crazy like a fox”? Foxes are not known to be stupid animals.

I say she was a brilliant ticking timebomb from the very beginning and it was only a matter of time before this astronut went into orbit. Somewhere between complex electrical logarithms and slapping on a diaper, Nowak’s fate was sealed.

“Houston. We have liftoff.”

But the weirdness doesn’t stop there. Oh no!

Only mere hours later, Reality TV star, Playboy Playmate, and former Guess jeans model, Anna Nicole Smith turned tits up in a South Florida hotel room.

Reality star? Pu-lease! She did for the world of entertainment what the ‘Etch-a-Sketch’ did for art.

The media reports her sudden departure from this crazy merry-go-round we call life, as a “tragedy”. Even stranger is that they are also making parallels to other infamous Hollywood goldbricker Marilyn Monroe.

That’s just going too far. I can understand the whole dim-witted blonde connection, but at least Marilyn had something resembling talent. Well, that, and she was banging cool guys like Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, and John F. Kennedy…not old men on respirators. You know what Anna Nicole is good at? Seducing old men and inheriting their estates.

Let’s face it, if it wasn’t for Howard Marshall II, Anna Nicole would still be performing in donkey shows for pocket change somewhere in Buzzardfuck, Texas. She’d probably suck dick for a Diet Coke.

Like the Nowak case, the media is trying to find all these new angles to intrigue the American public with. They have already made the allegation that Anna Nicole’s collapse was the result of an addiction to diet pills as a means to deal with her growing depression after the death of her son almost a year ago.

Umm, has anybody ever considered that she was just taking diet pills because she was fat? Honestly, she had an ass that looked like she was trying to smuggle throw pillows.

All the recent shots of her public sluggishness and glazed stares as a means of proving her deteriorating mental health are just ridiculous. Anna Nicole has been sluggish and glazed since birth. Who are they kidding? You’d get a better interview out a guinea pig!

The girl was about as clever as a retarded chimp. She was certainly no rocket scientist, or crazy astronaut for that matter – albeit, she probably wasn’t far from the whole wearing diapers thing. In fact, the only reason she became a topless dancer in the first place was because it was the only job where she wouldn’t be required to make change for a dollar.

And this story isn’t going to end soon either. We still have an autopsy and weeks of speculation for her sudden collapse to look forward to. On top of that, there is still the pending paternity dispute of her daughter Danielynn Hope. The late celebrity's half-sister now tells the New York Daily News that Smith may have used the frozen sperm of her late husband to get pregnant and not recent lawyer-slash-boyfriend Howard K. Stern.

At least five (and counting) other men have also said they may be the father, including the husband of actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, Prince Frederic von Anhalt.

Now there’s a job I wouldn’t want. Even Maury Povich wouldn’t slap on the latex gloves to get to the bottom of this quagmire of deceit. It sounds like there's just gallons of spuzz just sloshing around inside that dead celebrity poonach.

So, now with the untimely and unfortunate death of Anna Nicole Smith, there are now a number of legal questions that are entwined in this sorry saga:

How did Smith die and does the cause of that death impact the ultimate lawsuit over the millions?

Who is the real father of Danielynn?

Should the Estate of Smith now win the lawsuit, who will receive the almost five hundred million dollars?

Who will ultimately have legal custody of Danielynn?

It might be years before the truth becomes unraveled and we might discover others claiming paternity of Danielynn. Still, for a story line of a girl who married a man decades her elder and a now Prince (married to a former actress married eight times and who is almost 30 years her minor) claiming paternity, with almost one-half billion hanging in the balance, I for one can’t wait until the Hollywood version of this whole clusterfuck comes out.

But, still, a “tragedy”?

I don’t know. When push came to shove regarding this story, the announcement of Anna Nicole Smith death impacted me about as much as the plight of the three-toed sloth.

And I realize I’m being just a tad bit bitter here, it’s just that I’m annoyed that I’m not doing so well in this year’s office Dead Pool.

But at least I know now to avoid the state of Florida for a little while until the bad juju goes away.

* Because everybody knows that the best way to convince someone to “talk with them” is to show up reeking of shit and piss and pepper-spray them while they get into their car. Good plan there, Ziggy Stardust.

** For which I don’t even want to contemplate what they may have been used for.