back when i first started working for my company, i had had a chance to meet this guy, who was just a total normal engineer. he left about a year after i started and went to nasa and tomorrow he has his first mission to space. i haven’t personally talked to him since way back in 1998, but i definitely wish him luck. it’s kinda cool to personally know someone who’s actually going into space.

http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/reisman

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/03/10/space.shuttle.ap

it’s pretty tragic that he died so young, and his sudden passing makes life/death seem so much more real since he was only a few months older than me. what irks the fuck out of me though is how a million different stories start flying around about what it was that killed him. i know that in today’s information age we expect to know everything minutes after it happens, and csi vegas/miami/ny if nothing else has taught us that a full autopsy and toxicology report is only a sexy technician’s wink and ass-shake away. but seriously, why not just grieve however you need to and get the whole story after it unfolds. i personally couldn’t care less, but it’s gotta be really hard for his family to hear. apparently the family was first notified via media reports, which is weird, ’cause info like that isn’t supposed to be released until after the family is notified — that crazy jew harvey levin is hooked up.

i’ve heard and read everything from complications of pneumonia, to sleeping pill overdose, to snorting coke off the ass of an olsen twin through a rolled $20 bill. the poor guy’s dead, let him rest in peace and let his family grieve. i’m sure we’ll know everything soon enough.

since brad renfro and heath make 2… britney, please be the number 3 in this Ménage à trois of death. please!

the wife had to work tonite, so i found myself drinking martinis, eating popcorn and watching rush hour 3 off of a cinemanow.com download. other than being one of don cheadle’s whores in after the sunset, she hasn’t been in any other american movies, but damn, she’s beautiful. even with her head shaved she looks fantastic and other than the very honorable mention of zizi zhang in rush hour 2, noemie is the hottest girl in the rush hour trilogy.

i used to love watching the price is right when i was a kid playing hookie from school. i’d been waiting to see it hosted by drew carey for a while now and since i have this week off of work, i finally got a chance to see him. verdict = he sucks.

i know he’s new, so it might take some time for him to get settled in his role, but he’s super unenthusiastic, can’t remember his lines or what he’s supposed to do, and he’s fatter than his drew carey show days. the best part is that all the contestants keep accidentally calling him “bob.”

^ (you see what i did there?) i remember having the biggest crush on jennifer love hewitt back in the day. looks like now she’d have the biggest crush on me. how the hell do you gain that much wait weight (thanks mike+lisa =p)? especially when you used to be so thin and so hot? and isn’t black supposed to be thinning?! at least she looks happy and that’s all that matters, right guys? right?!?

high definition hasn’t been kind to many newscasters, but the one that bothers me the most is 50 year-old dorothy lucey on fox’s morning show good day la. she has freckles all over her body, which is fine. the problem is she wears super white tv makeup on her face (which doesn’t work right in HD), contrasted by dark eye makeup and always wears these low cut shirts to show her large freckled boobs.

this picture doesn’t do her (on the left) the scary justice i’m talking about, but i figured if i did a screen cap of the show i’m watching right now i might get into some copyright issue if someone sees this post. 42 year-old jillian reynolds (on the right) also acts and dresses like she’s 20, but she’s still pretty good, so i’m not complaining.

i’m sure hd is cutting lots of news women’s jobs short. thank god for technology.

i get to watch all kindsa good 80’s, 90’s and current music videos on the DTV channel “the tube” 5-5. it’s an over-the-air digital channel that just plays music videos 24/7, which you can’t even find on cable these days. if you have an HDtv, you should try hooking up a regular tv antenna to it. the local hd channels look better (compared to long beach charter hd), and there’s a few sub-channels (like 5-5) that are good, and all for free.

anyway, in the video for “it’s my life”, the singer mark hollis is totally just doing an impression of cameron from ferris bueller’s day off, doing an impression of principal rooney (when he’s pretending to be sloane’s father) it’s fantastic if you are familiar with both references, smirk-worth if you know of one, and pointless if you’ve never seen either. =p

on friday, i rolled up to the magic castle in hollywood with ben, christine and a couple of her friends. james, jen and one of her friends were also supposed to be there, but got caught up in fucked up friday la traffic and didn’t end up making it :/

it was a pretty badass experience. dinner was pricey and kinda mediocre, but the the club itself was amazing. i guess you can’t get in unless you are invited by a member (christine got an invitation from a magician she met online or something?), and formal attire is required so that added to the atmosphere. after dinner you walk around to different theatres and small private rooms to watch magic. the first show we saw was the most impressive, with people disapearing and switching places and amazing stuff that’s hard to describe. some of the other rooms had more comedy/magic, but all of it was some of the best i’ve ever seen. the castle has about 6 different levels, and a bar on almost every level and even waitresses that serve drinks in the different theatres (of which i’m sure is to just make the magic more believable =p).

One of the funny highlights of the night was that we kept running into crispin glover of back to the future fame, and his model girlfriend mara lafontaine (who’s only 20, so that’s kinda scandalous). at one point, we were sitting together in a private room of “close magic” where it was just us 5, and them 2 sitting around a small table. christine and mara were helping the magician do his performance. it was all kinda surreal. anyway, it was a great experience. i’m gonna have to do it again when the wife gets back in town.

crispin was wearing the same cheap suit in this pic as he was on friday =p

it seemed inevitable after his main sponsors left, then the msnbc folks dropped him… but now don imus is altogether out of a job. i honestly hadn’t even heard of him before this controversy, and probably never would have. way to go al sharpton and jesse jackson for making the world a better place, one racist comment at a time.

here’s a great commentary from columnist jason whitlock. i’m just gonna go ahead and quote it in it’s entirety, becuase i think it’s a good read:

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again.

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

I ain’t saying Jesse, Al and Vivian are gold-diggas, but they don’t have the heart to mount a legitimate campaign against the real black-folk killas.

It is us. At this time, we are our own worst enemies. We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent.

Rather than confront this heinous enemy from within, we sit back and wait for someone like Imus to have a slip of the tongue and make the mistake of repeating the things we say about ourselves.

It’s embarrassing. Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius. Black comedians routinely crack jokes about white and black people, and we all laugh out loud.

I’m no Don Imus apologist. He and his tiny companion Mike Lupica blasted me after I fell out with ESPN. Imus is a hack.

But, in my view, he didn’t do anything outside the norm for shock jocks and comedians. He also offered an apology. That should’ve been the end of this whole affair. Instead, it’s only the beginning. It’s an opportunity for Stringer, Jackson and Sharpton to step on victim platforms and elevate themselves and their agenda$.

I watched the Rutgers news conference and was ashamed.

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for eight minutes in 1963 at the March on Washington. At the time, black people could be lynched and denied fundamental rights with little thought. With the comments of a talk-show host most of her players had never heard of before last week serving as her excuse, Vivian Stringer rambled on for 30 minutes about the amazing season her team had.

Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that the comments of a man with virtually no connection to the sports world ruined Rutgers’ wonderful season. Had a broadcaster with credibility and a platform in the sports world uttered the words Imus did, I could understand a level of outrage.

But an hourlong press conference over a man who has already apologized, already been suspended and is already insignificant is just plain intellectually dishonest. This is opportunism. This is a distraction.

In the grand scheme, Don Imus is no threat to us in general and no threat to black women in particular. If his words are so powerful and so destructive and must be rebuked so forcefully, then what should we do about the idiot rappers on BET, MTV and every black-owned radio station in the country who use words much more powerful and much more destructive?

I don’t listen or watch Imus’ show regularly. Has he at any point glorified selling crack cocaine to black women? Has he celebrated black men shooting each other randomly? Has he suggested in any way that it’s cool to be a baby-daddy rather than a husband and a parent? Does he tell his listeners that they’re suckers for pursuing education and that they’re selling out their race if they do?

When Imus does any of that, call me and I’ll get upset. Until then, he is what he is — a washed-up shock jock who is very easy to ignore when you’re not looking to be made a victim.

No. We all know where the real battleground is. We know that the gangsta rappers and their followers in the athletic world have far bigger platforms to negatively define us than some old white man with a bad radio show. There’s no money and lots of danger in that battle, so Jesse and Al are going to sit it out.

http://www.kansascity.com/182/story/66339.html