• A Russian passenger plane and a DHL cargo jet crashed in mid air, at over 28,000 feet, a couple of days ago.  Rather a needle in a haystack collision there, huh?  I mean head on, with the entire sky to be in, and they didn't just graze, they actually collided.  No survivors of course; you fall to earth in a fireball from 6 miles up, you don't live.  Plane wreckage and body parts are strewn over miles and miles of German countryside, making the clean up rather grisly.  The Yahoo slideshow has some amazing pictures. Nothing gruesome, but the shots of huge chunks of plane just sitting in burned fields are shocking.

The investigation into who fucked up is now focusing on the ground control.  Planes don't have radar in them to see other planes, and you certainly can't do it visually with another plane flying at you, when you're both going 500 MPH at night.  Pilots rely on ground controllers to keep them from hitting each other.  The guys on the ground told both pilots to dive a minute before they crashed, and both dived, and hit each other.  Doesn't that seem like a really stupid system? I mean why wouldn't international air protocol be for both planes in that sort of situation to go right?  Or go left?  Or dive and go right?  Something that would have both planes going in opposite directions, anyway.

• Nice article by Molly Ivins on Bush's current PR-motivated efforts to seem not entirely owned by business interests.

...let us pass lightly over Bush's own business career, including insider dealing and the time he dumped his Harken Energy stock just before the announcement that the company was going bankrupt. In violation of SEC rules, Bush failed to report that sale to the Securities and Exchange Commission until eight months after the fact. The SEC contented itself with a warning letter but has specifically stated that Bush was "not exonerated."

Yes, that's "occurred", spelled incorrectly in the article. Journalism!  In other semi-firework news:

I'm sure there will be hundreds of similar news items available in the next few days.  After all:

All types of fireworks are illegal in Southern California, where I live.  Not to say that people don't have them and use them, but they can't be sold or legally possessed here, other than massive shows that require permits galore.  You can buy pretty much whatever you want in Mexico though.  The risk of fire is the main reason, I assume.  As a kid I used to visit my grandparents in Missouri every summer, and I'd often buy a gross of bottle rockets or other such things to bring back here and shoot off with friends.  And we never burned down anyone's house or blinded ourselves, surprisingly enough.  Throwing a few lit jumping jacks out of a moving car is a hell of a lot of fun though, as is a bottle rocket, especially if you get lucky enough to drop it so it shoots at you and flies past the car as you're driving away.  Not that I'm recommending that sort of behavior, of course.  Of course.

ere's an article so weird, I hardly even know what to comment about.

Gladys Rodgers, a long time friend of Bill Cosby, had lived on an estate he owned for 17 years, gone on vacations with him, helped raise his kids, etc. She's now been evicted.  According to her, some Rasputin type guy has weaseled his way into Cosby's inner circle, with foofah spiritualist stuff, since Cosby's son was murdered in 1997.

Rodgers said Kirby became part of the Cosbys' inner circle after the murder of their only son, Ennis, in 1997.

"I first met him when he came to the house a few years ago to do a spiritual cleansing before [Cosby daughter] Erin's wedding," Rodgers said. "He said he once was a monk and lived in a cave for nine years. He'd attained a spiritual enlightenment that allowed him to see things other people didn't."

So this kook comes to the house the woman lives in just recently, and does some "fire rituals" and concludes that the woman is bringing someone into the house on full moons, in an effort to gain control of Cosby.

So as I read it, Cosby is a dupe, caught up in some bullshit new age spiritualism junk, and believing anything this weird guy tells him.  Even when it's that a very long time friend, a totally normal woman, is trying to gain control of him with witchcraft.  So not only does Cosby believe this kooky guy's magical divinings, but he believes that this woman is trying to do magical voodoo things to him, and he also believes that there was some risk she might succeed?

I wonder if celebrities are really such easy victims for cults and kooks?  You hear about all the Scientology wackiness, and Shirley McClain's certifiable lunacy, and tons of other celebs like Cosby here who are all into astrology or spirit readings or auras, etc.  I'd like to think that lots of people are this gullible and foolish, and we just hear about it when it's a celebrity.  Not to mention that they are rich and therefore more attractive targets for scam artists.

I'm not sure why it's more comforting to me to think that everyone is this dumb and easy a mark, rather than that celebrities are dumber than the rest of us.  Shouldn't I find that truth more worrying?