Is It Just Me...

...or is the Academy totally wacko? I'll begin by saying that I am not a film aficionado. I see maybe four movies a year. I went to sleep last night before the major Oscars were presented. It's 10:00 the night after and I still don't know who won best picture, best actor, best actress, etc. And that doesn't bother me.

But...I did see the award for best documentary. Just going by the brief clips that were shown, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was conspicuously amateurish. He looked like "Mr. Policeman" in a preachy sixth grade safety movie. So how did that film win the Oscar?

Body Wars

She first gained recognition for her body. Light reflected by that body, captured by a lens and focused on a strip of photographic film rendered an image that was then converted into millions of tiny multicolored ink droplets on the glossy pages of a magazine. Millions of men looked at the resulting likeness of her and said, "I want her body." Women looked at her pictures and wished they could have a body like hers.

She lived in a society that idolizes bodily beauty, and she parlayed that idolatry into glamor, wealth and notoriety. She became "Playmate of the Month, May, 1992," making her a member of the elite pantheon of her body-worshipping world. That led to a sham of a marriage to an aged millionaire and the expectation that his riches would soon be hers.

Worship quickly turned to ridicule as her body ballooned to, shall we say, more generous proportions. Every late-night television comic had a field day making fun of her. Then, she starved her body back to a semblance of her former self. But few of her worshipers returned. She was yesterday's hot topic. Yes, a diet food company signed her up as a spokesperson, and the press took fleeting notice of her weight loss. But still she was more a joke than a goddess. She was a curiosity, relegated to the carnival side show while newer, more intriguing bodies took center stage. We now know that she kept her body going with chemical assistance, and that her body suffered greatly for it.

And now, Anna Nicole Smith is dead. And what of value is left for family and frinds to fight over? Her body!

Smart Cars

My in-laws are staying with us temporarily. While they're here, I sometimes drive their Cadillac, which is a very smart car. My car, a '93 Olds Cutlass, is by contrast as dumb as a sock full of chick peas. There are two keys to the Caddy, and it knows which one you have inserted. When I use my father-in-law's key, the car adjusts the seats and mirrors for him. He's a big guy, so I have to readjust the seat so I can reach the pedals. On the other hand, when I use my mother-in-law's key, I immediately feel like I'm in the trash compacter scene from Star Wars. It doesn't matter what controls you push, that seat is going to keep inching forward until it crushes you against the steering wheel. Only then will it return control to you so you can give yourself a little breathing space.

Does anyone else have a car that's too smart for its own good? Do you have any mechanical or electronic device that's "smart" in a dumb sort of way? Share some stories!

Roger and Me

I'm at Winterfest, a gathering of 12,000 teens and adult sponsors from churches of Christ across the country. In this morning's session, Jeff Walling interviewed Roger Crouch, a Shuttle astronaut. Like many kids of his generation, Roger wanted to be a fighter pilot, then an astronaut. But he was disqualified from both because he was colorblind. Undeterred, he kept knocking at NASA's door for seventeen years before he was finally accepted as a mission specialist--responsible for managing zero-gravity science experiements on board. Roger's first space flight came at the age of fifty-six. Although his two Shuttle missions were a decade ago, he kept the kids' attention with his folksy humor and unassuming style. Roger's comment on his first mission, which was cut short by a fuel cell malfunction (the same problem that doomed Apollo 13): "We lost one of our three fuel cells. If you should happen to lose another one, they make a movie about your life, so we decided to come on home." On the solid-rocket boosters that launch the Shuttle into orbit: "You just pray that the rocket scientists knew which way was up that day, because those things are going to take you somewhere real quick until they burn out."

I felt an immediate kinship with Roger, because I too had ambitions of being a fighter pilot and astronaut, and I too am colorblind. (And, not that it counts greatly in the coincidence department, I am currently fifty-six.) Roger achieved his dream of flight by pursuing a Ph.D. in science and working on projects in which NASA was interested. I achieved my dreams in a much more mundane way when I earned my private pilot certificate ten years ago.

Roger Crouch is a humble man with a servant spirit. He voluntarily stayed around after his presentation for an hour or so to sign autographs and to have his picture taken with a long line of space-travel junkies like me. He's a true American hero and a genuine follower of Jesus.