A recent series of mishaps with our Acme-brand fact-checking machine has made us acutely aware of the challenges that even journalism's giants face in finding out the truth.
Case in point: The New Yorker's futuristic "Next" issue contains a laudatory article about SpaceDev, a San Diego company founded to probe and mine the moon and other heavenly profit centers. A probe scheduled to launch in 2001 may even find precious metals in the SpaveDev-owned Asteroid Nereus. Asteroid B-612, however, does not figure into the company's strategy.
Maybe the zero-gravity environment makes it easier for reporters to free fall for far-fetched business plans, but the article doesn't mention that SpaceDev is also facing Securities and Exchange Commission actions on three counts of making fraudulent claims to investors. We'd chalk up the omission to an honest oversight (our inquiries to the magazine have been greeted with vacuumlike silence), but the article contains other black holes that suggest The New Yorker may be planning to achieve profitability by shilling penny stocks.
While acknowledging that SpaceDev's stock, which does not, in fact, trade on Nasdaq as the article claims, "fluctuates wildly," author Peter Landesman sidesteps the fact that during the past year, these fluctuations have stayed in the strictly boiler-room range of 11/16 to 5 1/2. And the article's vision of extraterrestrial mining towns and whorehouses – not to mention pan-galactic straw bosses – goes beyond even the company's high-flown plan, which mainly involves collecting gas money from scientists who want to hitch equipment on SpaceDev's NEAP probe, according to SpaceDev engineer Terrance Yee.
We can understand The New Yorker's desire to be on the good side of SpaceDev chairman James Benson, just in case his company does discover extraterrestrial gold one day. But at this point, the ideal discovery for all concerned would probably be a Romulan cloaking device.
Two men in pink parachutes sky-dived from the Empire State Building's observation deck Saturday, but if the daredevils were intending any kind of statement beyond fashion, it definitely was not heard from coast to coast. At the same time that they were carrying out this adventure, California Senate candidate and Republican Matt Fong was landing in hot water for a US$50,000 contribution he made earlier this year to the antigay Traditional Values Coalition. After some deft backpedaling, Fong managed to retain the endorsement of California's division of the Log Cabin Club, the gay Republican support group that last made news when Bob Dole ceremonially returned its campaign contributions in 1996. Which raises some questions: Who are these Log Cabin Republicans, and how much abuse are they going to take before they realize that they're just not welcome in the Grand (but apparently not Fabulous) Old Party? The obvious answer: The Log Cabiners see the handwriting on the wall.
Given what we know about voter turnout, there may not be any Democrats left in office after next week, so the Log Cabin Club's preparation for the new bosses may make a certain kind of sense. Other political niche groups, including Jews for Hitler, Dogs Against Belly Scratching, and Albinos United for Direct Sunlight, were undecided at press time.
First Bo Gritz's wife drives the hard-bitten merc to shoot himself in the chest like Tojo, then sub-Mulder Art Bell gets knocked off his radio show – though only temporarily, it seems – by an unnamed "family crisis." While the antigovernment paranoid has been advanced as the It Guy of the 1990s, the incident is strong evidence that matters of the heart remain the real unsolved mysteries.
Let's face it: Obsessed Dale Gribble types have always been more likely to end up autostimulating to Gillian Anderson JPEGs than scoring with Julia Roberts in the back seats of their cabs. The only unfashionable rebel you can count on to find a suitable bride these days is Chucky. Speaking of which, some capsule Yahoo movie reviews of the lethal doll's latest romance may provide advice for the lovelorn.
Chucky is one madd mutha@#$*#! I wanted to see a horror movie, not a chick in a pushup bra! I agree, the worst ... waste of $$$$$$ Two dolls having dirty sex ... a classic CHUCKY MANIA Surpasses Titanic Chucky Rocks The nudity part is pretty funny it wasn't scary Looking for Bride Of Chucky movie script!! Chucky get's lucky? Chuck'll be killed. bor-ing!!! CHUCKY RULES great movie ... best since the first I'm seeing it again next week Chucky's The Friggin' Man!
While John Glenn's voyage today may yet show that senior citizens still Can, the race for one seat in Glenn's old house indicates that many seniors just can't. Fred Tuttle, a 79-year-old Vermont dairy farmer and GOP Senate candidate, will face off against incumbent Patrick Leahy next week, but not before setting new standards in codgerly quaintness and incoherence. In the time-honored manner of the Green Mountain State, Tuttle got a leg up by bashing an out-of-stater – in this case, Jack McMullen, his Massachussetts-born rival – in the Republican primary.
But Tuttle's own hoaxed-earth campaign – he crustily maintains that he won't even vote for himself – that's based on the 1996 movie Man with a Plan, which starred Tuttle himself, suggests a great dadaist stealth maneuver. We're not so sanguine. Again, it comes down to who actually votes, and this is another chance for the GOP to bring some fresh blood into the Senate. After all, Strom Thurmond can't live forever. On the plus side, it's been determined that Tuttle thinks "impeachment" is an ingredient in a good cobbler.
After three years of maintaining top-notch content while the word "suck" was downgraded into a minor nonepithet fit even for grade schoolers and Andy Rooney, we had assumed that the long-standing meshugas about the site's name would have dissipated. No such luck.
This week, former Suck reader "Randal Jarvis" has informed us that he is unsubscribing because he "doesn't really like that name" on his computer, and one "Royce K. DeBow Sr." has done the same, primly informing us that "it's the name that is the problem." Meanwhile, self-described parent "Catherine B. Simpson" hesitates to let her children search HotBot because the cursed name is visible at the top of the page.
About the only show of support we've had lately has come from Arthur Barry, the King of Suction Cups. Unfortunately, His Highness is merely looking to move some fridge-adherents with the Suck logo attached. Far more typical has been the experience of our Number One guy David Nicol, who has been working these many months to get interesting discussions going on his alt.fan.suckdotcom newsgroup. After months of extremely limited success, Nicol found his group glutted with messages the other day – all of them binary fellatio images posted by some covert pornobot.
While we continue to support Nicol in his tireless (albeit unauthorized) efforts to get the message out there, the fact that he's gotten more traffic from dirty pictures than he ever did from discussions of Suck's actual content is probably worth pondering. You can't escape fate, and while the scuttlebutt these days centers on how the Lycos acquisition will affect us, we can't avoid the feeling that our long-term destiny is to end up someday in the ample pocket of Al Goldstein.
