Lost in Space

by Jim Washburn

Life on Another Planet? Come on Over!

Scientists have reported the discovery of a planet they categorize as a “super-Earth” orbiting a small sun not so very far from us, as eternity flies. This planet is roughly 2.7 times the size of Earth and has been named GJ 1214b.

I have a pretty good idea of how planets get named:

Scientist’s Wife: “Say, what’s with this hotel cocktail napkin in your pocket with GJ 1214b written in lipstick?”

Scientist: “That’s just a new name I thought up for a planet, honey. You like it?”

Anyway, this orb was able to be spotted with a simple 16-inch telescope because it is closer to the Earth than scientists have previously searched, since it orbits a sun they’d regarded as too puny to have planets hanging out with it. “I guess that shows what the fuck we know,” said Harvard astronomer David Charbonneau, lead author of a Nature article announcing the discovery. Actually he said no such thing, instead opting for, “Nature is just more inventive in forming planets than we were imagining.” He stopped short of crediting intelligent design, probably because he’s smart.

Planet GeeJay, as we call it at the FourStory science desk, has water, meaning it has the potential to contain life, further meaning that, once we’ve dealt with the native Na’Vi, we could colonize it, and with 2.7 times as much space, we’d all get to be really, really fat.

GeeJay is 40 light years away, placing it a mere 236 trillion miles from Earth, which by my arithmetic means that any time now Tiger Woods’ teeth should be shooting by. There. I told a Tiger Woods joke. Can I go home now?

I guess we should talk about El Tigre for a moment. I just don’t see the news story there. (Granted, back when the TV news had just announced that OJ Simpson’s former wife had been killed, I was the guy in the LA Times OC newsroom who asked, “and they think that’s news because…?”)

But let’s face it: “Famous Rich Man Sleeps With Woman” has never really been news.

“Make That Women.” Same there. The Bible’s full of it.

It’s not news, not like this is:

“Man Fools People Into Thinking Golf Is Interesting.”

Yet, in this country at least, we cannot get enough of being astounded every time someone who’s not a rock musician has sex outside of wedlock. What business is it of ours? He’s a golfer, not your gynecologist. Meanwhile, how many people have died and still will because Bush started a needless war in Iraq? I don’t see him losing any sponsorships.

Why do famous, rich men seem to think they can sleep with any woman they want? It’s probably because there are a whole lot of women eager to sleep with them. Most men, rich or poor, would be sorely tempted by that. Some think women have a “must mate with strong hunter” programmed in them since the caveman days, so they’re drawn to success. Society seems to expect that. As Gilbert Gottfried observed back in the Lewinsky days: If your daughter’s going to sleep with a married man, wouldn’t you just as soon that it was the President of the United States?

It isn’t like men aren’t equally eager to sleep with the rich and famous; that desire is just masked by them being equally eager to sleep with virtually anything comelier than a traffic cone.

Plus, there are other ways of putting out for the famous. Do you think there aren’t guys who haven’t, say, given Stephen Stills a money-losing deal on a Gretsch White Falcon just so they could say they’d hung out with him? There’s no difference, except the next morning the woman still has her muffin and the guy’s guitar is gone.

It’s high time for another Tiger joke, isn’t it? “That Tiger’s a lion cheetah.” Ba du dump. “Did you hear Tiger’s bi? Lee Trevino said he’s always after a hole in Juan.” “How much wood would Tiger Woods need, if Tiger Woods would fuck Sandra Dee?” “Those must be Esso hos, because they put a Tiger in their tank.” Wanda Sykes managed to hose two entire races on her show the other week when she opined it was Tiger’s black half that had bought a Cadillac, and his Asian half that crashed it.

All Tiger, all the time. But wait, here’s breaking news: Lil Wayne has just been detained in Texas after Border Patrol agents found marijuana on his tour buses. What did they expect to find, uranium? He is Lil Wayne, probably on his way to compare THC levels with Willie Nelson.

Speaking of weed, I’ve been reading another Louis Armstrong biography, Louis by Max Jones and John Chilton, with long riffs by Armstrong himself. That man did love himself some weed. In one passage, he talks about traveling with his band by chartered bus from Chicago to New Orleans in the 1930s. When they changed buses in Memphis, the new driver refused to carry blacks. When the band gave him some appropriate lip, the police weighed in and arrested the entire band.

There they were, uppity jazz musicians, in jail in the Old South. Armstrong shared a cell with his advance man/MC Sherman Cook. Armstrong recalled, “We’re in this cell, and he turns to me and says, ‘Now look, Louis, I’ve got something in my pocket that could mean trouble,’ and he pulls out a great big joint all neatly wrapped. ‘Hey man,’ I said, ‘we can’t be in any more trouble than we are in right now,’ so we lit up and smoked our way out of trouble.”

Elsewhere, he relates being busted for weed in Los Angeles in 1931, a whole 78 year’s before Mr. Wayne’s accomplishment. Armstrong would smoke with fellow musicians, while playing miniature golf, while breathing. He reputedly smoked nearly every day of his life, this man who many consider America’s greatest artist.

Armstrong even wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower to extol the virtues of weed, along with his other lifelong passion, the herbal laxative Swiss Kriss. What I wouldn’t give for a photo of Ike reading that letter.

While he kept on smoking, to keep the heat off in his later years Armstrong said he and his viper contemporaries had to quit because they couldn’t risk the longer jail penalties pot was earning then. “So we had to put it down. But if we all get as old as Methuselah our memories will always be of lots of beauty and warmth from gage. Well, that was my life and I don’t feel ashamed at all. Mary Warner, you sure was good and I enjoyed you ‘heep much.’”

Do they have Christmas out there on GJ 1214b? If there is life on GeeJay, and they have telescopes pointing this way, since it’s 40 light years distant they’d actually be looking at Christmastime in 1969, around when Armstrong recorded his version of John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.”

Lots of people then were singing it as if it could make a difference. The Beatles were still together. Mark David Chapman was 14 years old. Jimi Hendrix was readying to play “Auld Lang Syne” at the Fillmore East, to ring in a hopeful new decade. We were only fighting one war then, and Richard Nixon had recently been elected president in part because he had “a secret plan to end the war” (which evidently entailed dragging it out another six years, illegally extending it to Cambodia, employing carpet bombings, Agent Orange, etc., until leaving in a chaotic rout, not to suggest that Republicans aren’t our finest wartime leaders). Do you suppose the GeeJaybians would want to visit us? What wise gifts would they bring?

Merry Christmas all, and to all a good night.

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