The past month in review: Train Wreck City!

It's been over a month since my last rant. And oy, what a month! One hardly knows where to begin:

- A NASA astronaut manages to reach outer space without the trouble and expense of a ship.

Lisa Nowak was arrested and charged with the attempted murder of fellow astronaut Colleen Shipman. All for the love of yet another astronaut, William Oefelein. I suppose the only positive element to this story is that at least it all happened on Earth. Had this Peyton-Place-in-space happened on the International Space Station or on the Moon or Mars or somewhere, which court would hold jurisdiction? Whose laws would apply? Samuel T. Cogley (from the Star Trek episode "Court Martial") hasn't even been born yet...

- A multi-millionaire (or is she?) ex-Playboy centrefold dies under mysterious circumstances.

Ah, the late, lamented Anna Nicole Smith. Depending on whose bleating you're paying attention to, she was either a postmodern Marilyn Monroe or one of the most addle-pated humans ever to grace the planet. Her demise will fuel conspiracy theories for years to come.

A small confession: when I read the news of Smith's death, I immediately thought of Colonel Tom Parker's famous (albeit apocryphal) utterance upon learning of Elvis Presley's death: "Good career move". Kinda funny but kinda sad at the same time.

It's been said that one of Anna's favourite sayings was "How do you like my body now?" Something tells me that about now she probably wouldn't like the answer to that question.

- Britney Spears - still the odds-on favourite for a Nobel Prize this year.

Yikes. Let me see if I can condense Brit's career and personal travails to date. *ahem*

- Becomes Mouseketeer.
- Meets first love Justin Timberlake and lifelong nemesis (and way better singer) Christina Aguilera.
- Has obscenely successful pop-tart career, showing that style still beats the crap out of substance.
- Dumps (or is dumped by) Timberlake. I forget who did the dumping, and in the end it doesn't really matter.
- Gets married.
- Gets divorced. (it's about here that the insane-chick gene appears to begin asserting itself)
- Takes up Kabbalah.
- Starts behaving more and more erratically, on stage and off.
- Public lip-lock with Madonna starts tongues wagging (I know, I know: poor choice of metaphor)
- Gets married again. Courtship with new hubby fully documented on reality TV.
- Gets pregnant, has kid; shows that her parenting skills leave much to be desired.
- Gets pregnant again and has second kid.
- Dumps and humiliates (if that's possible) second hubby Kevin Federline. Bonus points for (allegedly) dumping FedEx by text message. Extra double bonus points for doing it while said FedEx is on live TV!
- Somehow loses all of her underwear, self-control and self-respect at the same time.
- Strikes up a friendship with professional train wreck and role model Paris Hilton.
- Becomes more famous for flashing photographers and visiting dodgy nightclubs than she was as a performer.
- Checks into rehab; checks out of rehab within 24 hours. Either a miracle cure or the world's lamest attempt to rehabilitate her rapidly-declining image.
- Shaves head and gets two (more) tattoos.

What's next? I'm beginning to think that some newspapers/magazines are going to have to set up a Britney desk, just as they have city, political, and international desks. This girl is a walking (okay, staggering) entertainment section (with or without garish photos) all by herself. And as much as I lament the sad fact that any news organization should know better than to get within 500 metres of anything remotely Britney-ey, the sadder fact is that the public keeps eating it all up with big spoons. Shame on us all for enabling this all-too-public train wreck to continue. Can someone rent this girl a copy of A Star is Born (any version - even the Streisand version) or find her a biography of Judy Garland or Liza Minnelli or something?

- The Conservatives show that they really, really want to be Republicans after all.

Stephen Harper's Conservative government has some freakin' nerve. After spending more than a decade in opposition and doing everything possible to scuttle any effort to respect the Kyoto environmental accord, now they're going after the Liberals in a series of negative TV ads. Let me state this as simply as possible: they're berating the Liberals for not being able to do what the Conservatives never wanted them to do in the first place. Somehow - magically, I suppose - the Conservatives are now trying to paint themselves as the champions of the environment. "Poor stupid Stéphane Dion", they seem to be saying; "he didn't meet the Kyoto targets. Why would anyone want a Liberal government again?"

Until this week. All the opposition parties got together to push through a private member's bill meant to force/cajole/embarrass the government into at least trying to attain the targets set in the Kyoto protocol. A protocol, mind you, that was criticized heavily in 2002 by a certain Stephen Harper as, and I quote, "...essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations". So now Harper is in a rather unenviable position. He now says he believes the environment is important, and his party is now busy lambasting the opposition for not "getting the job done", although the Conservatives were most decidedly *not* on the Kyoto bandwagon from 2002 until, oh, about a week ago. The Conservative spinmeisters must be burning the midnight, er, whatever you can burn at midnight now that isn't fossil-fuel-based, to get out of this shining example of pretzel logic.

Oh, and to come back to the negative ads. I may be wrong, but I'd dearly love to believe that Canadian voters are just a little too smart, and a little too nice, to react to this kind of blatant manipulation. It's not like the Conservatives never did anything stupid (*cough*, GST, *cough).

Whew! There now; that did my curmudgeonly heart a world of good, to get all that off my chest. We now return to your regularly-scheduled Sunday, already in progress.