I’m wondering, have any of you ever actually seen or heard Don Imus’s show? He’s a boring, boring man. No, really, he’s a weird old dork who mumbles a lot and rambles off on long, pointless tangents. Sometimes he’ll just mumble about what he’s watching on television, while he’s on the air. My grandfather does that, but he doesn’t have a radio show. He’s in a nursing home. Let’s let that sink in for a second before we go further: Don Imus rambles pointlessly, just a like a feeble old man in a nursing home. Keep that image in your mind, if you would.

So why did the Rutgers women’s basketball team freak out last Wednesday when Imus called them, on the air in his rambling way, “nappy-headed hos”? Yes, it’s stupid, yes, it’s racist, yes, it’s sexist. Obviously, it was a mean and hurtful thing to say. But why even acknowledge it? A stupid person said something stupid. Why is that surprising? Stupid people think, say, and do stupid things every day. What, because he’s on the radio, his opinion suddenly matters? Not in my book.

And why do Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson now have to get involved any time any celebrity says something ignorant? Don’t they have anything else to do, at all? Are they actually trying to make themselves less relevant? At this rate, Sharpton will be making catty remarks at the Oscars with Joan Rivers in about five years.

In a press conference today, Essence Carson, Captain of the Rutgers women’s basketball team, had this to say in response to Imus’s comments: “We’d just like to express our great hurt, the sadness that he has brought to us.”

With all due respect, Ms. Carson, why on Earth would you care what Imus thinks? Being insulted by Don Imus is like being insulted by a bum on the subway. When a stinky old hobo calls me a bastard, I don’t feel any “great hurt”. I casually flip him the finger and get on with my life. With one hundred percent seriousness, I say this to the entire Rutgers women’s basketball team: You’re better than this.  You’re college-educated champion athletes with bright futures. How does anything anyone could say alter that?  Flip Imus the finger and get on with life.

Team member Heather Zurich added, “We were stripped of this moment by degrading comments made by Mr. Imus last Wednesday. What hurts the most about this situation is that Mr. Imus knows not one of us personally.”

Yes, exactly. He doesn’t know you, and you don’t know him. So why do you care what he says? He’s a stranger. He’s nothing to you! So why dignify the statement with any reaction whatsoever? Remember: confused old man in nursing home.  Don’t worry about it!

Maybe I’m just an arrogant bastard with no feelings (it’s been suggested once or twice) but how fragile is your self-esteem if this kind of thing causes you serious emotional trauma? It’s a dick with a radio show who called you a nasty name. That’s what people with radio shows do! That’s practically all they do; they’re not a very creative class of people. For example, Imus has also referred to Rush Limbaugh as “a fat, pill-popping loser” and Tucker Carlson as “a bowtie-wearing pussy.” Fine… those two times, he was right. Nevertheless. He can’t steal your moment unless you let him.

This is the editor, breaking my months-long silence to mention that we have a new writer posting here. Miss Blank is, like, motivated and stuff. Also, she is awesome. I’ll stop here, since writing any more risks scrolling her posts too far down the page, thus (further) denying them the publicity they deserve.

Today marks the release of Richard Gere’s new movie The Hoax, which examines the infamous con artist Clifford Irving. Irving’s claim to fame was an “authorized” biography of the reclusive Howard Hughes, which though the book was sold and money exchanged hands, was an utter fabrication.

I haven’t seen it, and most likely won’t until I can put it in my NetFlix queue, but I feel obliged to use any soapbox I can to shout that there is already a film about Clifford Irving (and the world he became a seasoned fraud in, Ibiza) that I’m certain is much better and has been pushed into unfair obscurity. It’s not a reenactment. It’s not a documentary. It’s not an essay. It may be a documentary-essay.

Orson Welles’ F for Fake began as an account of famed art forger Elmyr de Hory and ended up part biographical, history as it happened (in the case of Irving), an editing tour de force, a fake-out itself, and a totally engaging, infinitely fresh picture. It was one of Robert Anton Wilson’s favorite movies. It’s one of mine. I implore you to get a bottle of wine and sit down with it before you go to watch Gere make with the Hollywood version.

I never thought I would have occasion to type the phrase “Naked Chocolate Jesus” into a search engine, but this implausible day has arrived. I can’t tell you how satisfying it was.

Artist Cosimo Cavallaro planned to debut his latest sculpture “My Sweet Lord” in the Lab Gallery (located within the Roger Smith Hotel) during Holy Week, culminating with a midnight showing on Easter. This rendering of Mr. Jesus Christ is 6-feet tall, 200 pounds, stark naked, suspended above a chalk cross, and entirely made of delicious dark chocolate. I’m just guessing about the tastiness. The world may never know, because Cavallaro was shut down. Shocking shocker. Naked Chocolate Jesus was packed into some ice and sent away; no room at the inn, apparently.

Once word got out about what would be on display at the Lab from April 2-7, the “watchdog” Catholic League got their loincloths all in a bunch and began to bombard the hotel with protests. Bill Donohue, the head of the CL, was very vocal about dissent to the exhibit. He called on his fellow faithful to boycott the hotel, imploring that it was already “morally bankrupt.” He actually called it “an all-out war on Christianity.” Please chew on that for a moment, folks.

So, why the fuss?

Is it the chocolate? Well, I’ve seen a chocolate Jesus before, and I’d be willing to bet that you have as well. I know you’ll think me a heathen, but I’ve even eaten a few. (Including a particularly palatable square that contained the Lord and all twelve of the apostles.) It certainly can’t be the nudity; there’s a naked Jesus statue in St. Peter’s. The problem can’t be the full Monty, right? That’s simply anatomy. Jesus was a man; he has been depicted as such before. Donohue has specifically cited the timing, but I’m not so sure this would fly with his organization at any point. Cavallaro can’t help it, Bill, this just happens to be the time when you will give him a large amount of free publicity.

Cavallaro has a history of pretty disgusting food art. He’s covered the model Twiggy and a room in a Manhattan hotel in cheese and even sprayed pepper jack all over a house in Wyoming. His last exhibit at the Lab, in 2004, was a four-poster bed laden with 312 pounds of processed ham. The move to the chocolate medium just seems classier, non? Maybe we should be supporting him, instead of sending the NCJ off to an indefinite fate, if only to keep the chocolate coming and the rancid cheese out of the scene.

Donohue reinforced his “bad timing” argument by stating that the gallery would not show Martin Luther King, Jr. with “his genitals exposed” on MLK day nor would it show Muhammed naked during Ramadan. (Martin Luther King, Jr. did not technically start a religion, but who am I to quibble with Mr. Donohue on any of his instructive opinions? Perhaps he has him mixed up with Martin Luther.)

This would be the way to go, actually, for squat little Cosimo to maximize the firestorm and get the most exposure out of this incident. (That pun was not intended, but it is a joyful happenstance.) I see a series: all of our spiritual leaders, on their highest holy days, peeled lovingly from a naked, gleaming, cocoa mold. The Buddha would provide a treat for all of Manhattan. Maybe it’s me, but I think that’s a transcendental experience. The chocolate won’t last as long as marble, metal, or wood… but if the Easter bunny can be the star of Holy Week and Santa can steal Christmas, why can’t artists get in on the fun?

Cavallaro describes his art on his website as “the struggle between need and desire; the known and unknown; the warm security of the womb and the chill uncertainty of the world.” Quite the tall order and I’m not certain that I could identify any of those themes in the Naked Chocolate Jesus. Somehow, it doesn’t matter. What matters to me now is where that thing went and how I can get an invite to the party where, inevitably, Jesus will be coming to dinner.

It’s called the Space Race, not the Space Sit There and Pout.

According to an AP article released today out of Cape Canaveral, officials in NASA, as well as members of the Space, Aeronautics and Related Sciences Congressional subcommittee are worried about a scheduled “gap” in American space activity. It appears that while plans to replace our long-outdated space shuttles in exchange for the first round of 21st Century ships is still going forward, the schedule is being pushed further and further back. The current generation of shuttles are scheduled to stop running around 2010, and the Orion capsules, as they’re currently called, aren’t scheduled to be ready for manned spaceflight until March of 2015, eight fucking years from now. This implies a complete absence of American-led space activity for more than four years, and officials are worried that NASA will lose influence and attention to space programs in other countries. They’re probably right.

It gets worse. The AP article explains that, mostly due to federal budget cuts, while the first manned Orion flight won’t be able to go up until 2015, the first manned Orion moon landing “is scheduled for no later than 2020.” It’s going to take until the year twenty-fucking-twenty to get to the goddamn Moon? It’s right there! (Seriously, my calendar says that tonight’s a full moon night, go out after dark and just look at how right there it is.) We did it in 1969. It’s already been thirty-eight years, and you’re telling me that, half a century after the first Moon landing, our big target is another Moon landing? Damn your complacent hides! We should have cities on Mars by 2020!

While we’re on the subject, remember Bush’s 2004 State of the Union Address, where he announced plans to increase NASA’s budget and build a base on the Moon? “The president is strongly committed to the exploration of space,” said Scott “Little Piggy” McClellan in January ‘04. And the “Apollo on steroids” plan (the Orion capsules) was still on the table as recently as December ‘06. But with a dwindling budget and a lame-duck president who now spends all of his time on the defensive and who, in any case, has a strange idea of what “strongly committed” means, results are lacking. In any case, Bush’s plan calls for an established lunar base by 2024 and frankly, that’s just not good enough.

Florida Senator Bill Nelson, who heads the space subcommittee, said “the gap could be narrowed to three years if NASA were to get an extra $400 million above the 2008 budget request and an extra $800 million each in 2009 and 2010.” That’s better, but it’s only one year better. Still, it gives us something to go on. $400 million is worth what, ten minutes in Iraq? So if you’re flushing money down the toilet anyway, there’s no harm in getting creative. NASA’s entire budget request for 2008 is $17.3 billion. In U.S. budgeting terms, that makes it a low priority. How much would it cost to get Orion into space by 2010, so that it can make a smooth transition from the shuttle program? No, fuck that, how much would it cost to get Orion into space this fucking year? Independence Day is in three months, how much would it cost to get a manned flight, in the Orion capsule, to the Moon and back by the 4th of July 2007, to land in sync with a big-ass fireworks display? Don’t tell me it can’t be done. Just tell me how much it will cost, and I’ll start making phone calls.

“Q: Why has this not already happened? A: Commercial manned space travel has been constrained historically due to a lack of funding, safety, and a reliance on antiquated government programs. However, with Burt Rutans’s innovation and brilliant use of technology and Richard Branson’s entrepreneurialism, the era of commercial space travel has finally begun!”

They’re right, you know, it’s about fucking time. Tickets for Virgin’s trips are set to begin at $200,000 and flights are scheduled to begin running by 2009. Branson’s prototype ship, SpaceShipTwo, will be the first in a fleet launching a year before the cessation of NASA’s shuttle program and a full six years before the anticipated launch of the Orion fleet. Last week Virgin Galactic announced that they had successfully leased a spaceport in New Mexico, and were on schedule. This is excellent news. Now all we need is for Branson to have a few strong competitors to really get things moving. He’s already making NASA look pathetic, which takes care of the establishment; now who else has money? Hey Bill Gates, you want to get in on this? Or how about J.K. Rowling? She’s super-rich, and with the final Potter book publishing this summer, she’s going to have a lot of free time. In the right opportunistic hands, Potter branding could probably rival Disney at this point, and using the characters to market a break-out space tourism company could pay off. For that matter, why not Disney? Walt would have loved having his own Moon base.

I tend to side with Stephen Hawking on these things. Planet Earth is in serious trouble, and if we want the human race to survive, we’d better spread our asses out. Colonize the fucking galaxy, just like in an old Robert A. Heinlein or Isaac Asimov novel. Bransonesque space tourism is a great alternative to the “establish government/military bases” model. The novelty of going into space on its own will fade after a few years, and tourists will want to actually go somewhere, be it the Moon, Mars, or a casino on Titan. Some clever bastard’s already working out how to build the first extra-terrestrial luxury hotel, I just know it. Once you get the first shelters and the first shipping routes in place, colonization is the obvious end result.

Look, NASA. You got us to the Moon the first time, and we still love you for it. Honestly. But you’ve really let yourself go. We’ll always have the memories, but if you don’t start living up to your old standards of excellence, we’re going to find someone else who will. Count on it.

The world’s newest pop-culture hero is also one of the nicest in recent memory. No one has a single bad thing to say about Bao Xishun, and from everything I’ve read, there’s nothing dirty to dig up. Which, considering that I can’t find anything on the news today beyond bullshit in Washington, more bullshit in Iraq, and hostages in Iran, is a nice change of pace. Maybe that’s enough of an explanation for why people love Bao Xishun. Maybe a hero who isn’t also a complete dick, or hypocrite, or maniac is refreshing. Maybe we’re just looking for someone we can all look up to. Even at the risk of committing a really terrible pun.

See, Bao is a Mongolian shepherd who happens to be the tallest living man in the world (7′ 8.95″, to be exact), according to the folks over at Guinness. He hit the news in a big way a couple of months ago when he saved the lives of two dolphins at China’s Royal Jidi Ocean World aquarium in Fushun in December 2006. These were regular dolphins, mind you, not the Baiji River Dolphins indigenous to China that were declared more or less extinct during the same month (rough month for dolphins). The rambunctious little bastards had gnawed indigestible bits of plastic off of their tanks, and it was slowly killing them. Conventional methods weren’t working, and surgery was declared a non-option, so in an ingenious move, veterinarians at the park decided to call in the Tallest Man in the Motherfucking World. Hell, he was right over there in Mongolia, so why not? Bao stuck his mighty arms straight down the dolphins’ throats and pulled the plastic out of their stomachs with his bare hands. Ballsy and benevolent, that Bao.

But had we heard the last from Big Bao Xishun? Hell no. Almost immediately after wiping the stomach guk from his hands, he gave us character depth. Bao’s mother, whom he had lived with ever since Rheumatism got him discharged from the People’s Liberation Army, had died. Though content with herding on the countryside, Bao was lonely. Bao had never married. Bao wanted a wife. So what did he do? He put out a personal ad, in newspapers all over the world. I’ve looked everywhere for the text of this fucking personal ad and no one seems to have it, which, now that I’m used to the Internet, is driving me nuts. Without the ad, we’re left with some nagging questions, the answers to which would give us valuable insights into Bao’s character. What’s appropriate to put in a personal ad in that situation? Did he mention that his name is in the Guinness Book of World Records? Did he point out that he was the dolphin-saving guy? Or did he just write, “Tall shepherd seeks pleasant life partner”? I don’t know. If you know, e-mail me at lordhoratio@gmail.com.

Whatever the ad said, it worked, because in March Bao married 28-year-old saleswoman Xia Shujian (Bao is 56). For the sake of tastefulness I’ll leave out the assumed speculations regarding Honeymoon Night logistics, but that doesn’t mean everyone else will. And this is where the buzz really starts to take off. People already remembered Bao from the dolphin episode, and this new development got everyone excited. Look at Bao! He was lonely and now he’s got a cute young wife. Nice guy gets the girl! Adorable girls and their nerdy friends chatted about it on message boards like this one, where “isn’t that sweet” went right alongside “how big do you suppose his you-know-what is?” Last Thursday, an AP article announcing the marriage was circulated in just about every mainstream publication you care to name. Suddenly, everyone was talking about Bao Xishun. It was the most cheerful thing in the news. Bao Mania was born. Could T-shirts and Quiznos endorsements be far behind?

A quick lesson on the nature of Bao’s record height may shed some light on another factor contributing to his rising popularity. See, most enormous people, like “tallest person in medical history for whom there is irrefutable evidence” Robert Wadlow (8′ 11.1″) are actually sick. Wadlow, for example, had a tumor in his pituitary gland, causing the disorder known as Gigantism. Sufferers of Gigantism are just that – sufferers. Sick people. In last-century carnie talk, freaks. But Bao Xishun? He’s been thoroughly examined, and it’s been confirmed that no Gigantism or other pituitary imbalance is in evidence. That means that Bao is neither sick nor a freak, but is instead simply a very tall man. He’s genetically superior to the rest of us. A guy you want to keep in the community, and in the gene pool.

Bao’s height made him noteworthy. His healthy genetics made him impressive, instead of pitiable. His military service made him a good citizen. His dolphin rescue made him kind and charitable. His simple shepherding lifestyle made him humble. His search and eventual marriage made him human. We’ve got all the makings of an epic movie here, people. Bao could be the Chosen One, the Man of Destiny. (Chosen for what exactly, I have no idea, but go with it, I’m trying to establish an archetype here.) Even if he never does anything else for the rest of his life, I guarantee, Bao Xishun is only going to get more famous. Keep an eye on this guy, folks. This could be the first pop-culture superhero of the 21st Century.