An Unfortunate Case of Harmonic Convergence

Part of my mission as editor and publisher of the Voice of Bruck News Service is to keep you “in the loop” with up-to-the-minute information and poignant commentary. So in that spirit I’d like to take this opportunity to reveal some breaking news:

Anna Nicole Smith died.

That’s right, worm food, room temperature, under the hill, metabolically challenged. Sorry, I should have told you to sit down first. Anyway, she collapsed in a Florida hotel a few weeks ago and was DOA at the hospital an hour later. Her bodyguard valiantly tried to perform CPR on her, and judging from the number of seemingly plasuible paternity claims on her 5-month-old daughter, it wasn’t exactly her first kiss.

Wading through the details of the aftermath of the sordid life of Ms. Smith, I was shocked to learn that Anna Nicole Smith and Pamela Anderson are not the same person. They are actually two different people. For that matter, Paris Hilton and Brittney Spears are not the same person, either. We’re actually talking about four different women--well, three now.

One thing I’m concerned about with respect to the demise of Ms. Smith, and believe me, I’m only losing about five seconds of sleep a night over this, is the one item that they’re not talking about, namely what she actually died of. Supposedly the official medical examination hasn’t happened yet. I also hear that with her body’s rate of decomposition, by the time they get around to it, they’re not going to have much to examine but slick bones and bags of silicone.

But what I’m really concerned about is the timing of the whole affair. Ms. Smith’s death on February 8^th followed by three days the arrest of astrounaut Lisa Nowak for attempted kidnapping and several other charges stemming from her pepper-spray attack on a love rival. If the media is going to hold a round-the-clock feeding frenzy on a “girl gone wild,” I’d take a deranged, lovesick astronaut over a gold-digging, brainless hillbilly any day. So you can imagine my disappointment when the unhinged rocketwoman makes a comically desperate move in her questionable love life, only to get kicked off the headlines for good after only three days by the demise of Ms. Smith.

Since the mainstream media isn’t going to do its job by providing you more detail than you could ever want to know about our veritable “space cadet,” I guess I’ll have to do it for you.

First the operational details: Lisa Marie Nowak, wearing a trench coat and wig, was arrested February 5^th, 2007, in a parking lot near the Orlando International Airport on numerous charges based on her attack of one Colleen Shipman, whom Nowak saw as a rival for the affections of fellow astronaut William Oefelein. Prior to the attack, Nowak had driven over 900 miles straight through from Houston stopping only for gas and supplies (she wore diapers to avoid having to stop for personal hygeine breaks). Following the attack and her subsequent arrest, Nowak was found to have been carrying a BB gun, a knife, rubber tubing, a steel mallet, garbage bags, and $600 in cash. Later in her nearby car, police found latex gloves, a love letter for or about Mr. Oefelein, and diapers (fresh vs. soiled was not indicated).

The veracity of Nowak’s claims regarding a relationship between Shipman and Oefelein is a matter of debate, and I’ll leave it alone at this point. It’s not even clear if Nowak’s feelings toward Oefelein were requited, for that matter. Based on his NASA publicity pictures, the only thing I can say is, to get this amount of attention from the fairer sex, Oefelein must have been a scintillating converstionalist.

One of the “gentlemen” making a paternity claim on Anna Nicole Smith’s baby daughter is Prince Frederick von Anhalt, the husband of Zsa Zsa Gabor (I would never have guessed she’s still alive). We’ve heard very little from Ms. Gabor on the subject, and we’ve heard even less from the would-be cuckold Mr. Nowak. I’d really like to get his take on the situation, but I should probably wait till it comes up on conversation.

Other, less interesting details of Nowak’s arraignment, bond, restraining orders, psych evaluations, etc. are available elsewhere on the almighty internet so I won’t repeat them here.

Have you ever heard about the similarities between the circumstances surrounding the assassination of JFK and that of Abraham Lincoln? If you haven’t, I recommend giving yourself a little webucation on the subject - very spooky! Well I got that same kind of spooky feeling from the details of Lisa Nowak’s background while researching this topic for the VOBNS.

Born in May 1963 - same month and year as Bruck
Graduated HS in 1981 - same as Bruck but of course that follows birth year.
Attended the USNA - Bruck was a few diopters away from attending the USMA (I received orders but vision problems kept me out)
Bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1985 - same as Bruck
Married in 1988 - same as Bruck
Master’s degree in engineering in 1992 - one year after Bruck
First child born in 1992 - one year after Bruck’s first
Interests include music, skeet shooting, and crossword puzzles - stop it, this is getting scary!

So right now while the troubled Ms. Nowak, currently free on bond, is presumably sitting in the living room of a colonial in suburban Houston wearing a GPS anklet and trying to explain the wig, mallet, rubber hose, and love letter to a skeptical Mr. Nowak, and while a confederacy of dunces fights over the baby girl and rotting remains of the late Ms. Smith, I’m sitting by a crackling fire on a winter evening with the extraordinary Mrs. Bruck thinking…

There but for the grace of God go I!

German Culture Mystery Solved

My having frequently visited Germany, and having even lived there for some time, qualify me to make sweeping generalizations about its people and customs. It also gives me license to jump to conclusions regarding their ways and means based on the flimsiest of evidence. Unlike JFK, Ich bin kein Berliner, but if you are what you eat, a substantial part of my composion would include schweinshaxe and koelsch.

Germany has quite a lot going for it as a country, and it’s not my intention to detract from that in any way. My intention is, and always has been, to understand it myself, and to share my hard-won insights with loyal readers of the VOB.

Today’s topic is… restroom ventilation.

Restrooms and elimination facilities vary widely throughout the world, and reveal much about the people that developed and use them. In England, the “WC” is often in a different room from the bath, so if you are inclined to “go to the bathroom” in the bathroom, you might not get a second invitation. In Italy, I once was challenged by a toilet consisting of a round hole in the floor, approximately six inches in diameter. Japan has some very “high tech” toilets which automatically provide heat to the posterior, along with some other surprising but not necessarily delighting features. I learned to just unplug them before sitting down. But also in Japan they have “traditional” toilets which consist of a hole in the floor similar to the Italian floor target, but oblong to facilitate variety in arrangement in excretory organs. And exemplifying the Japanese concept of “Poka Yoke,” or error-proofing, there are outlines of shoes painted on the floor, presumably to maximize accuracy by controlling squat location and orientation.

The German toilets look pretty tame at first, but two aspects of them give me pause:

1) instead of getting dropped off at the pool, your friends sit on a little shelf inside the bowl until flushing, maximizing the fumes they exude.

2) the bathrooms themselves are never particularly well ventilated.

Both these factors conspire to ensure a rather pungent hygeine experience, not just for yourself, but whoever follows for some time after you.

So the question is, why? And this is a very legitimate question, because my experience with Germans indicates that they are very well-endowed with critical thinking skills, and for everything they do, there is a reason. My own conjecture on the subject led to four hypotheses:

1) they have no sense of smell

2) they have a selective sense of smell, evolved over the centuries preceding closed sewage systems

3) they actually like the smell

4) there is a reason related to social consciousness

The first hypothesis is probably incorrect - the senses of smell and taste work together, and the Germans would never be able to produce their fantastic wine, beer, bread, and liverwurst without sensory feedback.

The second hypothesis is probably also incorrect. If Germans, and by extension all other Europeans managed to evolve a race of people immune to the smell of sewage through their exposure to it from centuries of living in cities with open sewers, then most of us white Americans who come primarily from European stock, would also harbor this immunity, which I can assure you is not the case.

The third hypothesis, that they like the smell of their own offal, is obviously preposterous, not to mention insulting, and I only inlcuded it to demonstrate that I have thought this through scientifically, covering all the angles.

That leads me to #4, some reason related to social conscience. Germany has a strong ethic for helping the less fortunate, including those who are physically handicapped. In fact, young men out of high school may opt to substitute for their 9 months’ mandatory military service (“Wehrdienst”), 9 to 18 months’ alternative social service (“Wehrersatzdienst”), and approximately 2/3 of them do. All public transportation has accommodations for the handicapped, and in my observation they are on a par with the United States and Japan in their provision for the handicapped for building access and employment opportunities. With this in mind, I racked my brain to try to figure out the social consciousness angle to explain the tendency to amplify rather than mitigate stench in the loo. Then earlier this week, while using a pungent German sanitary facility, I briefly closed my eyes and while drawing a redolent charge of oxygen into my nostrils it dawned on me: It’s so blind people don’t have any trouble finding a restroom!