Fucking Joementum.

According to ABC News, Lieberman has received the message from Karl Rove: "The boss wants to help. Whatever we can do, we will do."

Slightly ironic that Karl calls George "The Boss," no? Or actually, I don't know if that is irony. Although I use the term all the time, I'm not sure I've every fully grasped its defintion.

Mark Schmitt offers an interesting analysis on his blog (of Joementum, not the definition of irony):

"I think it’s possible that after the primary, unleashed from the obligation of being a checklist Democrat, Lieberman may emerge as a very, very conservative figure, one of those real neoconservatives (in the older sense of the word) whose main politics is to obsess over and recoil at what they see as the excesses of the left. Michael Barone is a good example of such a figure, and that way madness lies. I'm just speculating, but if that does occur, we’ll understand why he couldn’t run a plausible Democratic campaign in 2006: he couldn’t bring himself to."

Most of us still fondly remember (and chuckle at) Senator Stevens' hilarious description of the Internet as "a series of tubes" back last month. But in an effort to never let the Alaskan senator's out-of-touchness die, someone made a mashup of his speech with a much more forgettable horror movie. Check out the horror.

At Cosmodrome love our celebrities. We'll admit it. No shame in it.

But we especially love when actors that dip under the radar, only to return to us years later and make us proud. Like the joy we get whenever we see Max Casella, Vinnie of Doogie Howser fame, as a tough guy in The Sopranos. Welcome back, Max.

Welcome to Day One of the Cosmodrome bloggish. It's not quite a blog. But really, it's a blog.

Patrick Swayze, Bimbos Defend Mel Gibson. Also, Patrick Swayze is Gay.

Quoted directly from the BBC article, emphasis added: "'Hands deserved to be slapped if you do something stupid, but don't take it too far.' Swayze is currently performing in Guys and Dolls in London's West End."

Mr. Swayze continued, "'When you are a pitbull and you love what you do, that talent will find its way out.'"

Mr. Swayze has added himself to a long list of celebrities, including Dean Devlin and Jodie Foster, who have given their respective support to the anti-semite actor boozehound. Rob Schneider however, differed, saying he would even refuse the lead in Passion of the Christ II.

Click here to find out about Mel's party hos, and here to get the full Bloggish.

From Sweden's Wikipedia entry:
The Kingdom of Sweden (Swedish: Konungariket Sverige) is a Nordic country in Scandinavia. It is bordered by Norway in the west, Finland in the northeast, the Skagerrak Strait and the Kattegat Strait in the southwest, and the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Bothnia in the east. Sweden has a low population density except in its metropolitan areas, with most of the inland consisting of forests. The country has large natural resources of water, timber, and iron ore. Its citizens enjoy a high standard of living in a country that is generally perceived as clean, modern, and liberal.

As Jules noted in Pulp Fiction: "Oh, man, I'm goin', that's all there is to it -- I'm fuckin' goin'."

But wait... there's more. Over the years, Sweden has given us some of the greatest (and kitschiest) music Europe has to offer. Inspired by The Knife's amazing music video oeuvre, here's an incomplete survey of the greatest Swedish music videos that YouTube has graciously provided, broken down into five mostly meaningless categories: The Knife & its Derivatives, Pop, Rock, Popular or Shitty or Both?, and Classics.

July 17

Say it Ain't So, Bill!
At a time when his Joementum is fading, CT Senator Joe Lieberman gets a big endorsement just before the primary. The guess here is that the high ups in the party must really want Joe to win; Clinton is a party guy (no pun intended). We still say (hope?) it goes to Lamont.

INTENSE FIGHTING
Bush makes faux pas, is unclear about how far China is from Russia, drinks Diet Coke, calls the British PM just "Blair," and thinks Syria should get Hezbollah to "stop doing this shit." (Can't say we disagree on the last point, although he might be over-simplifying things.) (Video and more here.)

Ok, so the next week is already started. But what better time to look back? We all spend most of the time looking back anyway. Might as well start longingly pining for the week that was 10-16 July 2006. We did this once before and it turned out pretty well.

July 10

Cup Over, Sadness, Sadness
Alright, so it was bound to be a rough week since Sunday heralded the end of the world cup. And oh boy, what an end it was. Everyone's favorite French-Algerian maybe-best-footballer-of-all time with the initials ZYZ fucking dropped that Italian—I remember his name, but I don't want to look up the correct sequence of vowels. Anyway, the world's press went into high gear, giving the deaf lipreaders of the world a chance to really make a difference. Their interpretations of what was said (seen well from this angle) were many, ranging from the standard mother/sister is a whore cracks, to the big T word, to a might I say quite elegant combination of the two: "You are the son of a terrorist whore." But will the world ever know for sure? FIFA has started an inquiry, apparently. Read More...

Welcome to the second edition of MASTERS IN SPACE! Come on, you know that, by the eighth season, Jack Bauer is gonna end up battling some weaponized satellite with his bare-and-against-protocol-hands.

**********

01. First West Coast launch for EELV program
Boeing held the first launch of its Delta 4 rocket for the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program on June 27, 2006, from Vandenberg AFB, Calif. This was the first time an EELV rocket was launched from the West Coast: previously, it had been done entirely from Cape Canaveral, Fla. However, the launches were split between the two coasts as a punishment for Boeing’s misuse of competitor Lockheed Martin’s proprietary information when first bidding on the EELV contract in 1998. Tuesday’s launch was carrying undefined cargo for the National Reconnaissance Organization. Its orbit is unknown, but it is thought to be heading toward a highly elliptical Molniya orbit.
(SpaceFlightNow.com, June 28, 2006)

02. China to build Galileo-type satellite system

As you may have gathered from previous posts, the staff of Cosmodrome has been whipped into a World Cup frenzy over the last few weeks. And this is despite the fact that our knowledge of soccer is pretty minimal for people who have watched (or at least read a live blog of) nearly every match so far. Including the ads.

So of course, I've been consulting with my friends and Wikipedia and beyond to extrapolate whatever I can from my meager knowledge to date. As it turns out, I once played this game - for something like 8 years! In fact, thousands (millions?) [Editor's note - our interns blow, and couldn't find the statistic.] of kids in the United States play the game every year. Will Ferrell even made a movie about this phenomenon, or at least something related to the phenomenon (I've only seen segments of the film when accidentally thinking it's this movie).

Alas, I digress. The best "find", and the one most worth sharing is that all of soccer's history (or most of it) has been saved on YouTube & Wikipedia. Below, you'll find video for all 10 goals selected in FIFA's poll to decide the greatest World Cup goal ever, and a couple of selections from yours truly. Enjoy it, and send us more video of your favorite goals, because you can critique FIFA's selections as much as you want, but considering it came out four years ago, only Cosmdrome will actually listen to what you have to say. ...Get the Videos...

Here are some of the most choice cuts of news on the outer space arms race in this new Cosmodrome seasonal feature: MASTERS OF SPACE! My conviction that government contracts is what my future "consulting firm" must target is fortified by story number seven.

On May 23, 2006, the Pentagon released the 2006 version of its annual report to Congress on “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China.” The Pentagon criticized China’s lack of transparency in military spending. Of interest to readers of this update is the portion on its alleged anti-satellite (ASAT) program: “Beijing continues to pursue an offensive anti-satellite system. China can currently destroy or disable satellites only by launching a ballistic missile or space-launch vehicle armed with a nuclear weapon. However, there are many risks associated with this method, and potentially adverse consequences from the use of nuclear weapons. Evidence exists that China is improving its situational awareness in space, which will give it the ability to track and identify most satellites. Such capability will allow for the deconfliction of Chinese satellites, and would also be required for offensive actions. At least one of the satellite attack systems appears to be a ground-based laser designed to damage or blind imaging satellites.” However, this report is less adamant about China’s reported ASAT programs than earlier versions, and the evidence about the ground-based laser is dubious, to say the least.