Today’s Moron: Prince Harry

Today’s Moron is third in line to throne of my country, and a whole bunch of others, which apparently means he thinks he can act like a dick sometimes. We’ve grown accustomed to it. He was in Canada picking up chicks in a rodeo bar last year, despite having a lady love back home. And he once dressed up as a Nazi. Nice one there, Harry.

His latest gaffe offers more insight into this guy’s mind: he was caught on video using a racial slur to describe a Pakistani person, a fellow British Army soldier. This has gotten him into hot water with his superior officers, and he faces possible demotion. That’s unlikely, though, as he is the prince and all. He’ll get a slap on the wrist.

It can’t be easy being Prince Harry. Think about this: he’s ridiculously rich, one of the most famous people on the planet, young, fit, good-looking and (reportedly) a really fun guy. On the down side, his older brother is the popular one, his father is distant and unemotional, and his mother’s love life and tragic death remain tabloid fodder all these years later. And he’s never going to be king, and he knows it. He faces a life of just being Prince Harry, which means he appears to think he can do pretty much anything he wants.

This seems to include pissing off the Muslim world … not very good foreign policy for a member of the royal family of a country with solders in Middle East war zones. Not good at all, Harry.

When is the Paris Hilton of the British royal family going to learn the same lesson so many other morons have learned: stay away from video cameras. Stay away from video phones. Or shut the hell up.

Also, quit being a racist. It doesn’t look good.

Starbase 66: Episode 2

The latest episode of Starbase 66, the International Star Trek and Science Fiction Podcast, is now “on the air.” You can find it here.

Starbase 66 grows a bit this week, with some nifty new effects and a new feature: The Admiral’s Table, which kicks off with a very, very special guest.

Today’s Morons: The Texting Carjackers

Today’s Morons are a gang of thugs in Columbus, Ohio, who carjacked a guy at gunpoint and took off with his BMW, his cell phone and his cash.
Brilliant crime? No. Brazen, yes. But brilliant, no. Here’s why:
The victim and his buddies text-messaged his cell phone, telling the thugs they had hookers and drugs, and where could they meet up? The criminals actually responded, and instead of girls and crank, the knock on the door came from police, and they went to the clink.
Not a single one of them ever asked the key question: “Why are we getting text messages on this mobile phone we just stole from some stranger?”
Congrats to the victim and his buddies. This is Batman-level crimefighting. Well, maybe not. But it helped that the crooks were the biggest idiots in Ohio. Hell, in the whole country.

Lost: Charlotte Lewis

(Indulge me. As we near the Season 5 premiere of Lost, I’m going to run through the current crop of main characters. There are spoilers.)

And here we have the most underdeveloped new character on Lost. It isn’t her fault, of course; the writers’ strike cut short a lot of development of these newcomers last year. But what we did learn about Charlotte was tantalizing.

She’s a cultural anthropologist, which for some reason leads her to the Tunisian desert to dig up a polar bear in her first scene. I don’t know how that works, either. Next, we find her parachuting onto the island, then getting snagged by Locke and his renegades. Ben steals a gun and shoots her, but she’s wearing kevlar. From there … well, there isn’t much more said about Charlotte. I hope they do more with her in the last two seasons.

Highlights:

• Her name is Charlotte Staples Lewis. This is another of Lost’s literary asides; she’s named for Clive Staples Lewis, or C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books. Remember how time moved differently in Narnia than it did in the “real” world? Hmmmm.
• The polar bear scene is very cool, especially the Dharma collar.
• She speaks Korean, which becomes a really neat little plot point.
• The trade: Sayid gives Miles to Locke and takes Charlotte back to Lapidus and Faraday.
• Charlotte puts Kate down with a gun butt. Kate’s a tough nugget; she may have met her match.
• There are strong hints that she was born on the island, and may in fact be a Dharma baby.

Problems:

• Not enough screen time.
• We still don’t know why she was sent to the island
• None of the flashbacks actually show her on the freighter. What is she really doing?

Apocalypse 2013

All you people who think 2012 is the end of the world (because the Mayans said so) — it turns out you were off by a year. Or maybe not.

A new report from the National Academy of Sciences claims the Earth could be knocked back to the 19th century if a major solar storm expected in 2013 has its way. While admitting the chances are slim, these guys in lab coats say the giant plasma wave, which sounds like a big-screen TV but is actually not, could effectively destroy all technology on the planet.

This would mean no cars, no computers, no communications. No infrastructure. No drinking water. No heating or refrigeration. Food and drug supplies would go bad immediately. Riots in the streets, right? Sheer wild-ass craziness. Basically, the whole world will look like the Bourbon Street the day after Katrina.

This apparently happened before. In the 1850s, a solar storm fried all the telegraph wires in the world. We have a lot more wires now … I remember this happening in the 80s; Quebec lost its power because of solar flares or something. It was pretty sci-fi. But I also remember all the Y2K nonsense.

Anyway, this came on the radio today in the minivan. The kids were abuzz with the idea of not having technology, and eventually concluded that it might not be so bad. And I had to agree. Sure, I wouldn’t be able to write for you fine people anymore. But I could do my best Pa Ingalls impression and chew on a corncob pipe, that sort of thing. We could go back to the land, grow our own veggies, hunt and fish; I could become some kind of travelling storytelling minstrel.

I’m going to have to let Buddy know about this.