Extra Bonus Super Happy Funtime!

From the archives of the San Francisco Waterfront Commission.

1) The Leavy Place

2)  Solongaburg

3) El Distrito de Adiós

4) The Exiting Spot

5) The Departadillo

6) Ye Olde Latertown

7) Saloon-Abyssinia

8) Le Lieu de Skidoo

9) Scrambleville

10) Vamooserton

I’ve been asked by my friend Mitt Romney to jot down a few thoughts on why I raise money for the campaign.

First of all, please understand that the time commitment required is a substantial thing for someone like me. As you may know, I’m in the midst of a decades-long rebel uprising in the Mars Colony, and something like that can really keep a fella stepping. People think it’s simple: “Why, just deny them air,” that sort of thing. But there’s way more to it than that. You have to train and oversee a ruthless cadre of brutal enforcers, you have to infiltrate the rebel forces and gather intelligence… I mean, if it were easy as just denying them air don’t you think I would have done that a long time ago? The problem with denying them air is that it’s a blunt instrument. It can’t be the only laser arrow in your space quiver. You also have to use a more granular approach. That’s where the cadre of brutal enforcers and the intel-gathering and so forth come in, and all that takes time. Plus there are just the little everyday things. Putting down a decades-long rebel uprising is a detail-heavy kind of situation, and there’s always something. I barely have an hour during the day to grab a sandwich when somebody isn’t bursting into my office (people think it’s a lair, but it’s really just an office) yammering about Kuato this and Quaid that. So for me to take the time to get my friends together and pitch them on the Romney campaign — it takes some doing, is what I’m saying. So you know I must really believe in Mitt and what he stands for.

And that’s ultimately what it comes down to. Mitt’s message of steely self-reliance resonates with someone like me. I make the air I breathe; I don’t get it for free from some giant alien reactor or something, and I don’t just say that because THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A GIANT ALIEN REACTOR HIDDEN DEEP IN THE TURBIDIUM MINES. That whole notion is just flatly ridiculous. And let me tell you something, even if there were a giant alien space reactor hidden deep in the Pyramid Mine I wouldn’t know how to activate it. You don’t know how to activate it, do you? I’m just asking. What? We’re just talking here. Never mind. The point is, a guy like Mitt Romney understands that he’s never going to have the allegiance of the part of the populace that believes they’re entitled to everything — housing, food, breathable air. So it’s an honor for me to be able to get some of my friends together from time to time in support of that good man. In fact, I’m having a little get-together at the house tonight. You might want to drop by. Melina will be there. I’ll have Doc remind you.

Hello. By the time you read this I’ll have been escorted from the building and you’ll have been installed as the new personal secretary, or “body man,” for His Royal Highness Prince Henry Charles Albert David of Wales. It’s been my pleasure to serve in this capacity for some eleven weeks, which makes me the longest-tenured of the 41 dedicated individuals who have attended the prince since he assumed his official duties in late 2005. Here are some things you’ll need to know.

1) DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ALLOW THE PRINCE OUT OF YOUR SIGHT. One might assume this prescription to be something other than literal. It is not. To give you just one example, during a stay in New York last month HRH excused himself to wash his hands. While waiting for him to emerge from the bathroom I flipped on the TV to find that TMZ had live security-cam video from an S&M club eighty-six blocks downtown, showing the prince frolicking with a large woman who called herself “Casina Royale.” I honestly don’t know how he got out of the hotel suite, let alone traveled the length of Manhattan in that brief interval. Suffice to say that his ingenuity in this area is unmatched. We believe he may have the ability to breach space and time.

2) COSTUMES ARE RIGHT OUT. You may be asking: “Even at Halloween?” Yes. Especially at Halloween. 

3) DO NOT ALLOW THE PRINCE TO DETERMINE THE BEST USE OF HIS OWN TIME. Members of The Royal Family are tightly scheduled. In the case of the prince, one cannot assume that even a very, very short bloc of unsupervised time is risk-free. At a reception for the royal family of Monaco, the prince casually asked if he had a few moments before toasts were delivered. I made the mistake of saying that he did. Before one could blink I received a text to say there was footage on the Internet of the prince naked with Charlotte Casiraghi on a zip line. We found the zip line later. It was strung from a window of the room in which the reception was held. Somehow the prince had had time to rig it, test it, slip from the room and enjoy the assignation before any of us twigged. We believe, but do not know for certain, that he had the equipment hidden somewhere on his person. We also believe he may have fired the line from the window and secured it to the opposite wall by means of a crossbow or other propulsive device. However much one may admire the preparation this took, one must still in all candor admit that it was a lapse. 

4) DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE PRINCE’S EYES. The prince inherited from his late mother a shy, beguiling, downward gaze whose effect trained psychologists have likened to that of a hypno-wheel. Once, early in my tenure, HRH asked me if he might have a moment alone with a troupe of ASU cheerleaders whose camper van had broken down while on a sightseeing tour of the Midlands. I made the mistake of meeting the prince’s eyes and found myself replying “Of course, sir” in a robotic fashion. There was a loud buzzing or sizzling in my ears, time seemed to fold in on itself, and when I regained my senses the prince, the cheerleaders, and our Range Rovers were gone. I managed to hitchhike to a nearby pub, where the television was already running footage of the prince atop a cheerleader pyramid, dressed only in a large diaper and a comically oversized safety pin. (See #2 above.)

5) DO NOT LEND THE PRINCE MONEY. My predecessor in this post was once unwise enough to honor the prince’s request that he “spot me a fiver ‘til allowance day.” A team of forensic accountants was unable to determine exactly how, but within twenty minutes the poor man was legally bankrupt.

5) Finally, ENJOY YOURSELF. The prince is a young man of sterling character, blessed with high spirits and an enormous sense of fun, and I promise you this will be the best job you will ever hold for six to eight weeks.

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Paul’s gotten a bum rap in the press this last 24 hours, and I ought to know, because we’ve been friends since we were kids.

We met at the beginning of fourth grade and hit it off right away. Paul told me he’d spent that summer riding giants at Mavericks, which I thought was pretty impressive for a skinny kid who’d just turned nine, and the school year before advising NASA on the project that eventually became the Mars Curiosity rover. Eventually I came to know that my new friend had a real head for big ideas, and not only because he’d been the youngest-ever recipient of the Bader Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry (for his research into nucleotide derivatives). According to a story Paul told me, soon after he’d landed in London piloting the jet chopper he’d designed himself, he turned to the director of the Society and the other members of the welcoming committee and barked: “Make a note: A giant Ferris Wheel on the South Bank of the Thames.” Needless to say, they were all confused. Years later, of course, my friend’s flash of inspiration became the London Eye.

Our school days were full of the usual hijinx — pulling pranks, teasing girls, doing an uncredited rewrite on the 1981 Oscar-winner for Best Picture, Hugh Hudson’s  Chariots of Fire. I should be clear: That was all Paul, not me. He told me he’d done it during a furious spell of all-night skull sessions, alone in his room. This was so like him. He’d managed to build a a full-sized working model of the Enigma machine the same way, although sadly, I never got to see it because Paul’s mom accidentally threw it out. He just smiled and shrugged when he told me that, and gave me that “What are you gonna do?” look. He loved his parents very much, and in fact had quietly arranged for his father to win the coveted “World’s Best Dad” award in 1980. Now, that I did see. Paul’s dad kept it on his desk. 

See, it’s just this intimate knowledge of Paul’s history and character that makes me so darn certain he’s a person of strong moral fiber, and well suited to the challenges ahead. Not to brag, but I don’t know if Paul ever had a closer confidant than me, and looking back, that really means something to me, because I was an awkward boy who used to get beat up regularly and who all the other kids called “Four-eyes” and “Poindexter” and “Spaz.” Not Paul, though. Paul saw in me a lonely kid who was desperate for the friendship of a handsome, accomplished person like himself, and he became that friend. I’ll never forget what he told me one night when were 11. We were backyard camping in the revolutionary Fold-o-Matic 5000 self-sealing tent Paul told me he’d invented himself, and just before I drifted off to sleep my pal leaned over and whispered in my ear: “Remember: If I ever run for office, I want you to swear everything I ever told you is true.”

Three years ago, in the now-defunct TrueSlant, I reflected on the poetic perfection of Neil Armstrong’s post-lunar career. Armstrong died today at 82. He was a badass. 

Monday’s Washington Post has a fascinating look at the post-Apollo 11 life of Neil Armstrong. It’s not accurate to say that the first man on the moon has been a recluse, as he’s frequently described; but neither has he exploited his achievement for personal glory or commercial success. He became the most famous man on the planet, a hero in a company of heroes, and then he simply walked away, taking a desk job at NASA and retiring two years later. Since then he’s rarely been seen in public, and in his infrequent appearances he’s been reticent to a fault. He seems to have sensed that the music was in what he did, not what he said, and that for the rest of his life he could never say anything that would measure up to the enormity of the achievement for which he had become the unwilling public face.

Tom Wolfe argued in a New York Times op-ed a couple of days ago that the space program died at the moment Armstrong set foot on the moon — that the poetic trajectory of space exploration flattened at that moment,  and NASA was never able to recover. Armstrong may have understood that better, and earlier, than anyone. On Monday he’ll will join Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins at the White House for a 40th-anniversary photo op with President Obama. After which, no doubt, he’ll return to Ohio and live out his days in the unexpected, but poetically perfect, peace and quiet that have characterized his life since the day he stepped into history.