Oh, The Huge Manatees!

(With apologies to Herbert Morrison and Les Nessman)

Ideas that have crossed my mind of late:

How can Dick Cheney have been involved in public life for so many years and still have managed to insult the entire state of West Virginia in one sentence? His remark about having Cheneys in his ancestry on both sides of his family, "but we're not from West Virginia," is beyond jaw-droppingly dumb. Sure, he apologized, but he shouldn't have said it in the first place. Methinks this is a perfect example of the arrogance of power. He's gotten away with so much for so long that he no longer bothers to engage his brain before opening his mouth. Lucky for us his departure from office will come soon. It cannot come soon enough for the well-being of the country.

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Have you seen the Miller Lite "Beer Heaven" commercial? I get the intended message: Miller Lite is so good that you'll think you're in heaven after drinking it. But I wonder: did the ad's creators get the unintended implication of their work? "Drink Miller Lite, and DIE." Talk about your "things that make you go hmmm . . ."!

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Big Brown may be a lock to win the Belmont Stakes and thus become the first Triple Crown winner in 30 years. But no one knows until the race is run for real. Things happen. The Chicago Cubs were a lock to win the NL pennant in 1969, too . . . until a black cat at Shea Stadium and the so-called Miracle Mets wrecked that dream.

If you believe in that sort of thing.

So, while I am going to enjoy the good things I see happening in sports this summer, I am not going to anticipate or presume anything.

While we're on the subject of horse racing: if Big Brown does win it, I will have been privileged to have seen 1/4 of all the Triple Crown winners accomplish the feat. I do wish, however, that Big Brown had a more Triple Crown-winner-worthy name. "Secretariat" has a special ring of class to it. "Big Brown" sounds like a lunch bag . . . or something that goes down the toilet . . . He's a really nicely conformed horse, too, so his name totally doesn't match his quality. I wish it were less pedestrian.

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What's wrong with this picture? WGN, a Chicago TV station, is now announcing all its show times in Eastern and Pacific (which it's calling "East" and "West," God help us!), not in Central, the time zone in which Chicago is located. Count me as one viewer who dislikes that intensely. Why give the "stuck up sticky beaks" (thank you, Graham Chapman) on either coast another reason to look down upon the middle of the country as something to fly over?

Sheesh! We Midwesterners have enough self-esteem problems as it is!

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One of humanity's great talents is to take a disparate batch of things and make something coherent out of them. We see patterns in things, which lets us find the significance of seemingly unrelated things. It's a great survival mechanism. Then again, we also see patterns where none really exist, which can distract us into defending against dangers that aren't really there.

Two benign manifestations of this human tendency are constellations and calendar conjunctions. Constellations I had nothing to do with. I do find it amusing, however, that the Big Dipper is eventually going to look like a stiletto heel before it disappears completely (from Earth's point of view, that is). Calendar conjunctions are one of my own pet patterns, even though I have no idea why. I find it fascinating, for example, that Ernie Kovacs and James Joyce both died on the same day--decades apart. Don't know why that should be of cosmic significance, much less what that significance might be, but it seems somehow to have great import. Likewise the notion that the first day of Lou Gehrig's Ironman streak (2,130 consecutive games played for the Yankees) and his death occurred on the same day, again, decades apart. It's easier to see why this matters, because what killed Gehrig (ALS) is the same thing that stopped his Ironman streak, but at some visceral level, doesn't it strike you as eerie that the two events coincide on the calendar?

And William Shakespeare is believed to have been born and to have died on the same day . . . again, decades apart. April is the cruelest month, isn't it? Unless June is--for Bobby Kennedy was shot, and Ronald Reagan died, on the same day 36 years apart. Both the Left and the Right thus mourn on June 5th.

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There are no new plots in science fiction--just nuances in how we tell them. I was watching an episode of David Tennant's Doctor Who and I suddenly realized that it was just the same plot as Star Trek V and aspects of Quantum Leap all roiled up into one neat package . . . by using a theatrical device that goes back to at least the Greeks. The Doctor Who episode was called "The Satan Pit," and was about a bunch of humans who found a planet orbiting a black hole (yes, even the people in the episode said it was impossible--that's why they were there, to investigate it and figure out what was going on). It turns out that the original incarnation of Evil had been captured and chained in a pit 10 miles plus under the planet's surface--and Evil wanted out.

So It transferred Its consciousness to one of the humans and set things up so the humans would leave, thus taking Its consciousness with them and loosing It again on the universe. The Doctor, of course, saved the day, but all the way through the episode, I kept hearing Captain Kirk saying, "What would God want with a starship?" I also figured out within the first few minutes of the first part of the episode (a two-hour two-parter) that while the Doctor's Tardis had disappeared, it would come back just when all hope seemed lost, thus literally becoming a deus ex machina, especially if you accept that the Doctor is the human incarnation of science as God.

Which is not to say that any of this was not entertaining. It was hugely enjoyable. Hey, I stayed up past midnight on Saturday night two weeks in a row just to watch it, even though I'd already figured out the overall sequence of events.

So the Doctor is like Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap, popping in and setting right things that once went wrong--or should I say that Doctor Who inspired Quantum Leap since the original Doctor Who goes back at least 40 years?

And the whole idea of Evil needing curious humans (or humanoids) to escape Its prison comes straight out of Star Trek V, which in turn owes the idea to any number of previous stage plays, novels, and teleplays.

Let's hear it for Ecclesiastes. There really is nothing new under the sun. Just how we tell it.

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Speaking of science fiction: did you see the Arts and Entertainment remake of The Andromeda Strain last week? Compared to the original movie, what a stinkeroo! OK, the special effects were better, and the cast was more high-powered than the original movie's cast, but the reworked script put in a bunch of cliched and extraneous plot devices that made me roll my eyes in disgust. When it was just a story of an alien plague dropping to Earth and the humans' race to figure it out and find a cure before the entire planet died, it was a taut thriller. Yet its emphasis on science made it somewhat low-key and extremely credible.

But to turn the thing into a mish-mosh of government conspiracies, time travel, and assassination attempts (some successful) diminished the significance of the story and went way beyond my ability to suspend my disbelief. For one thing, would wiping out the killer bug instantly return all the flora (and fauna?--the miniseries never made this plain) back to life the way the special effects showed? I mean, even if "the Andromeda strain" was killed, wouldn't all the Earthly things it had killed stay dead?

Also, the very end of the movie posited the type of time travel "do-loop" that is the bane of serious science fiction writers--people in the future send a warning to those of the past, but the need for the warning doesn't exist until after the warning from the future has gone awry in the past and caused people to do the very things that require sending the warning in the first place. Huh? That's why I call it a "do-loop"--there's no starting or stopping point. You can't have the future event without the past event, but the future event is what caused the past event in the first place. Makes me want to pull out my hair in frustration.

I will give the A&E version some props. A lot of the dialog was snappy (though too many of the characters were walking cliches). Rick Schroeder, as a US Army Major and doctor and biological weapons researcher had the best line in the whole miniseries. When asked by one of his fellow scientists if he had a girl waiting for him outside the lab, he said, "If you don't ask, I won't tell."

That was brilliant, but not enough to overcome the miniseries' plethora of shortcomings. Michael Crichton should be ashamed of himself for allowing this updated "improvement" of his original work to be produced.