Empty Seat?

Probably not–they’ll fly a cosmonaut instead. But despite the fact that there are four candidates, there may not be a space tourist flight this fall. According to Av Week, Russia is bidding up the price. They think they undercharged Tito and Shuttleworth, and now want to get the full twenty million.

I’m having trouble understanding this. It seems to me that any price they can get above the perceived value of sending their own cosmonaut should be acceptable–they should simply accept the highest qualified bid. They don’t have a lot of time to dicker over this–whoever it is has to start training Real Soon.

The Rest Of The Story

All of the increased airport security (and more likely, fear of irate passengers) has apparently dissuaded the Arabs (and little old swedish ladies, and six-year-old kids) from hijacking any more airplanes.

How the mighty have fallen–instead of driving an aircraft full of Jet-A into skyscrapers at six hundred miles an hour, they’ve been reduced to driving barges into bridges at five miles an hour.

The accident occured when Joe Dedmon, the 61-year-old pilot of a towboat pushing two barges side-by-side, apparently blacked out at the helm, said Joel Henderson, a spokesman for Magnolia Marine Transport Co., which owns the boat.

“Blacked out at the helm,” eh?

Sounds mighty suspicious to me.

Do they mean “chloraformed at the helm by Islamic scuba divers”?

Hmmmmm….?

Dedmon appears to have passed out for about two minutes and was unable to steer the barges through the river channel under the bridge, Henderson said. Nobody was on hand to take the helm from him.

Well, of course not, they slipped back into the river after they diverted the barge…

[slowly extracting tongue from cheek]

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!