The embarrassing revelation that Bob and Mary Schindler’s infamous Mylar balloon video featured a blind Terri Shiavo does little to advance Bill Frist’s prospects as a diagnostician. As such, Frist, who promises to leave the Senate when his term expires, will be hard pressed to resurrect his medical career and will need a job demanding neither intellect nor integrity. Like, for example, President of the United States. To that end, Frist has calculated he must move to the political center if he is to distinguish himself from such Jesus-lovin’ Crackers as Haley Barbour and George Allen. And what better way to snub the Christian Right than by supporting stem cell research. A scant month after Frist decreed that he did not favor expanding federal funding, he stated, “I believe the president’s policy should be modified.” “To me,” he added, “it isn’t just a matter of faith. It’s a fact of science.” These notions are no longer purely hypothetical now that researchers, using the heretical means of “science”, have regenerated severed spinal cords in laboratory rats. A report in the Journal of Neuroscience documents how paraplegic rodents regained motor function in their hindquarters after undergoing glial-restricted precursor cell therapy. While detractors say Frist’s about face is politically motivated, supporters point out that when it comes to “new treatments for certain diseases,” Frist is showing he does give a rat’s ass.
Speaking of turnarounds, have you checked your brokerage statement lately? Since spring, when Ford and GM veered off the road into a culvert of junk bonds, the Nasdaq has doubled the 8% gain enjoyed by the S&P 500. Each index now trades at a four-year high – a term, by the way, I haven’t used since college. Summer has also taken the weight off Jennifer Aniston’s shoulders. The actress was mollified by her high school boyfriend’s decision to cancel an eBay auction comprising faded photographs, old love letters and remnants of (used?) toilet paper. As for acknowledging that Brad Pitt was drilling Angelina Jolie long before the split up, Jennifer is keeping the blinders firmly in place. “I just don’t know what happened,” she related. “At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised by anything, but I would much rather choose to believe him.” Jen went on to dispel rumors that the separation stems from her desire for a barren womb: “I’ve never said in my life that I didn’t want to have children – I did, and I do, and I will!” In the wake of Jen’s outburst, Eva Longoria’s “I’ll have your baby, Brad.” T-shirt lost most of its comic lilt. The Desperate Housewife – or more plausibly her publicist – offered words of contrition: “I do regret wearing it and I have written to Jennifer Aniston to express my sympathies over her marriage.” Which brings up show-biz rule number 17: NEVER apologize for being funny.
By way of coincidence, the corresponding (17th) directive in the NASA handbook states unequivocally: No French pilots! Sorry, that was 16. Number 17 actually implores: If you endeavor to ground an entire fleet of spaceships because of safety concerns, please do so before takeoff. Uh oh. The agency actually cancelled all shuttle flights the day after Discovery blasted her crew (and most of her foam insulation) into outer space. A repeat of the mishap (exterior damage from errant booster rocket debris) that doomed the Columbia mission prompted program manager Bill Parsons to admit, “We thought we were safe…Obviously we were wrong.” For the nonce, the crew of seven is holed up in the International Space Station fixing gyroscopes and small felt extrusions on the shuttle’s belly. But how to get them home? After Commander Eileen Collins quipped, “We always have the option of staying,” the Russians offered to build three Soyuz rockets that could “bring nine people down in next January.” Because the Russians’ space budget is a mere one twentieth of ours, they rely on spacecraft designed in the ‘60s. Confoundingly, our newfangled stuff tends to explode with much greater regularity and the prospect of field repairs left several astronauts feeling “apprehensive [given] what seems like a scary proposition.”
President Bush took time off from sending nineteen-year-old National Guardsmen to be slaughtered and maimed in Iraq to call Discovery’s crew: “I want to tell you all how proud the American people are. You know, Laura and I were just watching Dead Man Walking, and I remembered you guys were still up there. Thank you for being risk-takers for the sake of exploration. You’ve got a strong supporter for your mission here in the White House.”
Ironically, the recent discovery of our tenth planet required none of this messy business of sending people up into space. Cal Tech professor Michael Brown found the celestial body – located nine billion miles from the sun – using a 48-inch telescope and a laptop computer. Brown trumpeted, “This is the first object to be confirmed to be larger than Pluto in the outer solar system.” NASA lawyers, after fifty years of wrangling with Disney over the use of ‘Pluto’, are troubled that Brown wants to name his find after ‘Xena’, a popular NBC/Universal television series. “Can you imagine the Hell of another protracted copyright suit?” queried agency counsel Avery Hirschorn. “Just to think that yesterday you were worried about seven dead astronauts.”