Bryce Zabel's FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH

Smalls Steps & Giant Leaps: Moonwalk Memories

Bryce Zabel is the editor of "For What It's Worth" and "Movie Smackdown," a Hollywood writer-producer, former chairman of the TV Academy and ex-frycook.

Although nothing can probably touch the media frenzy over the death of Michael Jackson this year, we are still about to experience the mass coverage of the 40th anniversary of the original moonwalkers. Back on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin kicked up their own moon dust when they became the first human beings ever to walk (or bounce) on the Earth's Moon. The world is probably evenly divided now between those who were alive when the Eagle landed in the Sea of Tranquility and those who weren't. I was. It was unforgettable, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. As with 9/11, JFK's assassination, and the deaths of John Lennon and now Jackson, our memories of these super-events are colored by where we were when they happened, what was going on in our own lives, and how we felt about the actual events. 

Where were you?

For me, July 20 remains an important day -- not solely for the awe and accomplishment of the technological and spiritual acheivement of the moon landing -- but equally for the extreme personal impact it had on my young life. 

Let's roll the time machine back four decades. It was 40-years-ago that Neil Armstrong made that little jump off the ladder from the lunar lander: "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."  The ghostly TV transmission had people glued to their sets around the world, blowing past barriers of nationalism and politics. And, up in the Pacific Northwest, it was also exactly 40-years-ago that I was fired from my first job. I have since been fired again, laid off, cancelled, and otherwise unemployed in a variety of ways, shapes and sizes and, as someone with great depth of experience in this area, I can tell you that Cat Stevens was correct when he wrote that oft-recorded song, "The First Cut Is the Deepest."

If you remember The Wonder Years (that great TV series set in the 1960s starring Fred Savage), it'll help you appreciate the tone of what will follow. If you're too young to recall the 60s (when the series was set) or the 80s (when the series was filmed), then you'll have to settle for this shorthand. The series told the story of Kevin, a kid growing up during the time of Vietnam, hippies, civil rights and moon walks, all told with a gentle sense of humor. So, in this story, I'm Kevin. And Kevin's dad (Dan Lauria) had a gruff son-of-a-bitch exterior, always was pissed off, and never connected with his kids. Like my dad, Harvey, who was a high school teacher in Hillsboro, Oregon at the time. It had something to do with his being a part of the "Greatest Generation," having lived through the Great Depression and World War II. Like a lot of guys who had that experience, he was changed by it. It seems so much more understandable to me now than it did when I was a kid.

Anyway, back then, I was the youngest fry-cook in all of Washington County, having scammed my way into a job at the Arctic Circle Drive-In before I was strictly employment legal, I think, based on the fact that my older brother Alan had paved the way. It was a sweet deal -- I was making a full $1.35 an hour, up from my starting wage of $1.10 a year before. Do the math, that added up to a whole $10.80 a day and, if overtime was involved, man, that was serious bread. Of course, those burgers only cost nineteen cents, a quarter for a cheeseburger.

The boss was a tough immigrant -- a Basque from Spain -- named Mariano Bilbao and he was living (or working) the American dream.  Work, work, work and, if you did that, life would be easier for your kids.  His kid was just a baby, and Mariano was in full pay-the-dues mode to get ahead in time for his kid to have the good life he dreamed of.

When the schedule for the week of July 20 got posted, I got a sinking feeling because I had the night shift and, if all went according to plan, Neil Armstrong was going to be moon-walking while I was slinging burgers.  At the time, I was very into the whole moon landing, even more (if possible) than the rest of the country.  I'd actually tried to mimick a Gemini capsule with a refrigerator box a few years earlier in our basement until my mom made me come up and eat dinner. Plus, Harvey, being an American history teacher, made sure we all knew that history didn't come in any bigger size than this.

So I asked Mariano if I could trade shifts with someone.   No.  Maybe we could have a TV in the kitchen so we could watch with every other person within ten miles of a TV?  No.  A radio then, just to listen to hear in real time how it went?  No.

Resigned to missing it all, I accepted my fate, strapped on my apron, and went to work.  Being the boss, even Mariano was at home, of course, watching the moon-walk with his wife.  Back at the grill, I was going insane because there was almost no business because everyone else in town was home watching TV.  About thirty minutes before Armstrong was scheduled to set foot on the lunar surface, I snapped.  I called my dad and told him I wanted to come home to see the moon walk.  Would he come pick me up?

There was a long pause.  I waited on the other end of the phone, knowing that The Lecture was coming. About responsibility, about sticking with your decisions, about not screwing up.  Instead, he said, "You know you'll be fired?" 

I said I knew. I waited again. Surely The Lecture was coming now. Another beat. "I'll be right down."

So my Dad drove down to the Arctic Circle Drive-In on Baseline Street in a moment of high drama in my young life.  We went back home, gathered with the rest of the family around the TV set, held our breath with everyone else and watched Armstrong's ghostly image from the moon.  It was the most exciting TV I had ever seen.  Better than the Beatles on Ed Sullivan kind of TV, if you want to know the truth.  Part of the attraction was the danger.  These guys might die on live TV.  Or they might sink into moon dust and never be heard from again.  You never knew.  

When it was over, dad said we had to go back to the restaurant and I had to face the music.  I had done the crime, now I had to do the time.  As I returned, it was clear that my co-workers had given me up to Mariano, who was there waiting for me and, man, was he pissed.  He was a short guy with a fiery temper and his face was as red as I'd ever seen it.

Mariano fired me that night, as predicted.  My dad told him he was missing a great worker and he was a small-minded man to not understand the importance of what was happening, and how this event had changed the world for everyone.  Even teenage fry-cooks.

All I know is that my dad had never stood up for me quite like that before and never quite like that after.  I remember July 20, 1969 as clearly today for turning in my greasy apron as I do for Armstrong and Aldrin doing the moonwalk.  And I remember July 20 because it was also the day that my dad passed away back in 2001.

So -- that giant leap for mankind -- for me, it isn't about where I was when it happened -- but all about where I wasn't.

For those of you who experienced your own "Moonwalk Memory," please do leave your own personal stories in our comment section. Thanks!

UFOs or SETI: What FIRST CONTACT w/ E.T. Really Looks Like

"When Visitors Come to Call" originally posted on Movie Smackdown!

 Contact (1997) -vs- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) 

The Smackdown. If you're old enough to remember the marketing campaign for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," then you'll remember the goosebumps you got when you heard the phrase, We are not alone.  What was great about that simple sentence was that it promised a movie about aliens that was about wonder and mystery and wasn't about the same old Hollywood treatment of life in the universe, namely that if it bothered to interact with humans it was for a nefarious reason, everything from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" to "War of the Worlds" to the later "Independence Day."   Twenty years after "Close Encounters" came another film that promised to make first contact a matter of humanity's growth out of the cradle and not some intergalactic cage match. Both "Close Encounters" and "Contact" were aliens for smart people brought to you first by the immense talent of Steven Spielberg and later by the immense intellect of Carl Sagan.  In my Hollywood career, I've had the good fortune to discuss UFOs and extraterrestrial life with both of these men and found them to have some very different visions of the subject.  They each have used film to express their views about life as it might exist "out there."  The question is, which version comes closest to what might be the truth about first contact, and which one is the better film?

The Challenger. "Contact" (the movie) directed by Robert Zemeckis is a faithful film adaption of Contact (the novel) written by Carl Sagan.  In both tellings, radio astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster in the film) hits the cosmic jackpot when the giant radio telescopes that are part of S.E.T.I. (Search for Extra-terrestrial Intelligence) actually turn up a non-random signal from across the universe.  Someone is talking to us or, more accurately, talking back.  You see, they've picked up the very first television transmission the Earth ever leaked outward, amped it up and sent it back to us.  It's an excellent surprise and -- without spoiling it -- let's just say that the first TV signal that went out from Earth is, well, unexpected.  After that, the story kicks into where no film has really gone before.  There's another signal buried in that TV re-transmission that is, basically, the blueprints for building a gigantic spacecraft... for one person!  Well, if there was ever a situation designed to stretch our humanity to the breaking point, it would be trying to determine who's going to be that lucky (or, in failure, unlucky) person.  Where will they go?  Will they ever return?  Will they die?  Is it some kind of trick?

DOOMSDAY: The World's Worst Day Ever

Writer/producer Bryce Zabel edits both "For What It's Worth" and "Movie Smackdown!"

Would you like a reason to wake up and smell the coffee, to stop and smell the roses and to tell the people you love that you do?  I've got one word for you:  DINOSAURS.

These poor creatures were cruising along, pretty much dominating the planet like we do today, only they were on a 162-million year streak compared to our paltry length of existence.  Then, one day, out of the blue came a killer that changed everything... forever... practically overnight.

This Thursday night(Feb 26) on Animal Planet at 9pm you can see for yourself when my two-parter on the extinction of the dinosaurs begins.  It's called "Doomsday Falling" and it's probably the hottest episode so far in the very good "Animal Armageddon" series.

Since last May, I've been working as a consulting producer and lead writer on this series about mass extinctions. It's been like going back to college and having to take all the courses I dodged the first time around, plus a few I probably couldn't even spell properly. In terms of being a mind-boggling head-trip, it's been both a treat and a brain puzzle. I don't say this about every project I work on but this one has truly changed the way I look at the world.

Although all the episodes in this eight-part miniseries are excellent if you only catch two of them, they should be the ones on February 26 ("Doomsday") and March 5 ("Panic in the Sky"). Let's just put it this way. The comet or asteroid that hit the Earth 65-million years ago was about the size of Mt. Everest. It was traveling at about five miles per second. When it hit in the waters near what's now the Yucatan, the energy it released was the equivalent of all the nuclear weapons that have ever existed, exploded at the same time, exploded in the same place (are you ready for this?) TIMES 10-thousand. Yeah, it was a big one. Part one deals with the first 24 hours or, as I called them in my script, the Worst Day on Earth Ever. Part two deals with the first year. By the end of it, the Dinosaurs were pretty much gone.

"Animal Armageddon" on Animal Planet

Have you ever actually thought about mass extinction? You know, those times when damn near everything dies and lots of species simply go away forever? It's been on my mind a lot, for almost a year now.

Since last May, I've been working as a consulting producer and lead writer on "Animal Armageddon," a series for Animal Planet about mass extinctions. It's been like going back to college and having to take all the courses I dodged the first time around, plus a few I probably couldn't even spell properly. In terms of being a mind-boggling head-trip, it's been both a treat and a brain puzzle. I don't say this about every project I work on but this one has truly changed the way I look at the world.

"Animal Armageddon" is an eight-part miniseries that begins airing this Thursday, February 12 with a show about the first mass extinction, the Ordivician ("Death Rays"). The first four episodes are scheduled to air between now and the first week of March, and the final four will air sometime this summer.

One thing I can tell you is that if you only catch two of them, they should be the ones on February 26 ("Doomsday") and March 5 ("Panic in the Sky"). That's a two-parter dealing with the death of the Dinosaurs. Let's just put it this way. The comet or asteroid that hit the Earth 65-million years ago was about the size of Mt. Everest. It was traveling at about five miles per second. When it hit in the waters near what's now the Yucatan, the energy it released was the equivalent of all the nuclear weapons that have ever existed, exploded at the same time, exploded in the same place (are you ready for this?) TIMES 10-thousand. Yeah, it was a big one. Part one deals with the first 24 hours or, as I called them in my script, the Worst Day on Earth Ever. Part two deals with the first year. By the end of it, the Dinosaurs were pretty much gone.

WGA Makes Deal - Gives Awards - We're Celebrating!

Talk about everything happening at once...

On the same night that the WGA leadership presented to the membership the details of a tentative deal that looks almost certain to end the strike this week, the Guild also announced the winners of the "Writers Guild Awards '08" and PANDEMIC, a screenplay I co-wrote with my wife, Jackie, actually won the "Long Form Original" category! 

This odd merging of events happened because, pre-strike, the Writers Guild Awards were scheduled for February 9.  Once the strike was on, all attention had to go to that, so the black-tie and gown festivities were sacrificed.  A simple posting of the winners on the web-site was substituted. Then, as fate would have it, the tentative deal came together this past week, and the membership meeting got scheduled for -- you guessed it -- February 9!

Who cares?  Jackie and I are thrilled that the long nightmare of a strike is almost over and with a deal that seems to be reasonable, if not everything we'd want.

"Pandemic" was a Hallmark miniseries, four hours, that was, as the award states, "original," meaning that it was not based on any pre-existing material. It's a number of interlocking stories about an unexpected strain of Avian flu and how an outbreak in Los Angeles leads the military quarantine of the entire area. In its struture, it's a bit like "Crash" with microbes.

On a personal level, Jackie and I are so honored because this award comes from a panel of writers who actually read the scripts instead of watch the movies.  We think it's humbling to be among the honored screenwriters who demonstrate why the work of writers is valuable and worth fighting for at this critical moment in the WGA's history.  Here's to everyone going back to work in the days ahead!

WGA coverage
Daily Variety coverage
Los Angeles Times coverage

Download a PDF of the PANDEMIC screenplay - Click Here

Snakes in the Grass (and Other Locations)

I've just spent a couple of hours in my backyard with the "Hollywood Rattlesnake Wrangler" -- a great guy, Bo Slypapich. Bo is a one-of-a-kind who has hunted down rattlers for everybody from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Brad Garrett and today he came to my house after working for Sally Field.

We had started our morning with what we thought was the discovery by our gardener of two baby rattlesnakes in the back yard. We were referred to Bo and he showed up looking like a cross between Indiana Jones and the male version of Tomb Raider Lara Croft. He had gizmos, belts slung around his waist to hold the gizmos and an enthusiasm for his business that was, honestly, very re-assuring.

Bo started catching snakes over forty years ago with his neighborhood friends in Malibu Canyon. He kept his passion for snakes and built a business in the entertainment industry by clearing locations prior to the arrival of the crew, and securing locations while filming.

"One day I got a call from a local doctor who knew me, and was aware of my business. He asked if he could recommend me to another doctor whose daughter was bit while playing in their backyard by a rattlesnake, and then had crawled under the house. They had been unable to find anyone willing to search their property to find the snake or any possible dens."

Bo has been called to hunt for, track down, and remove snakes who have bitten children, dogs, and adults. Unlike others, Bo will crawl under houses, bushes and porches to find and relocate the snake or snakes.

What's great about Bo, however, is his passion to educate. Rather than a standard service call, he asked me to join him (at a safe distance) as we went throughout the backyard and he did a show-and-tell about what we were doing right and what could use some improvement. He also spoke to my gardener and my wife.

Bo had about ten snakes in the back of his pick-up truck in sealed plastic containers and, for the first time in my life, I got a truly authentic close-up look at rattlers of all sizes. He also had the harmless snakes for comparison. Now, I can actually tell them apart. Rattlesnakes have larger heads and thin necks and, well, rattles for tails. Every other snake you find in southern California has necks the size of their bodies and tails that end in a point.

As it turned out, ours were not baby rattlers which was good because it means there's probably not a nest with mom and other kids. We have, however, been tasked with some garden reconstruction and our rattlesnake fence appears to have been breached by the elements in a few key places that needs repair.

By the way, Bo has never been bitten in all his years. He does not kill rattlesnakes unless he has to. When he goes underneath houses, he has a full body armor outfit.

My friend, Michael Nadlman, also had a Bo and rattlesnake encounter only his was written up in the local paper and you can read that article here. That article, by the way, got linked to by the Drudge Report which gave it a global warming related headline and, as a result, the article got 40,000+ hits in just three hours.

Read all about Bo at his website, www.rattlesnakewrangler.com and, yes, somebody is actually developing a reality TV show for him. I'd definitely watch.

Pandemic: Aftermath

Last night, after a barbeque, my wife Jackie and I sat down with our friends to watch "Pandemic," the three-hour Hallmark Channel "special event" film that we co-wrote together last year. I've already written a lot about it: you can catch up to that by clicking here or clicking here. We even got a good review in Daily Variety.

I gave my friends my standard disclaimer on projects that I've only been the writer on: I didn't cast it, direct it, edit it or produce it. Don't give me credit for those choices but don't blame me either. It was also fun because we'd used a number of our friend's names in the production. One of them, Hendler, could have been turned into a drinking contest there were so many mentions. Another friend who watched with us, Steve Friedlander, was the character played by Bruce Boxleitner. Other friends, Scott and Andie, watched as a character named after their daughter got sick, but rallied and recovered. Two other friends, Don and Morgan, had their character cut from the film, in just another cruel Hollywood reality.

One thing that was interesting is that the simplest thing in a review is to dismiss the science behind the whole thing as improbable and/or stupid (and a few reviews did try to make that point). Today, though, Doctor Joan Bushwell (if I'm not mistaken, this is a name she uses in order to keep her privacy, taken from The Simpsons) has come to our defense! She has a blog, along with other science enthusiasts, where she talks about her two passions: pop culture and science. Today on her blog, Doctor Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refugee, she writes:

As a scientist, I thought "Pandemic" had its redeeming moments. In terms of attention to scientific detail, it far surpassed my favorite guilty pleasure, Outbreak, a film that is campy-bad and injected with an Ebola-virulent bolus of laughable "science." That, and Dustin Hoffman's chewing up of the scenery are what makes "Outbreak" such a noteworthy sci-fi film for Mystery Science Theater 3000 style viewing.

As an example of "Pandemic's" details, one of the CDC-Atlanta scientists nicely explained the concept of antigenic shift that resulted in the virulence of the Riptide virus. To the writers' credit, they did not take the clichéd H5N1 route, but instead opted for a fictional (I think) strain called H3N7. The hemagglutinin piece is not fictional, and is the variant of the Hong Kong 'flu virus of the 1968 pandemic. I'm not sure about the neuramidase variant, but I liked this touch. The writers used part of a strain that already infects people readily, and applied the antigenic shift to it. This is at least consistent with a "stuck-on-the-tarmac-make-small-talk-with-your-neighbor" conversation I had a couple of years ago with a virologist from Childrens Hospital in Philadelphia when we were stuck at the PHL airport. He noted that nasty flu strains often result from antigenic shifts from those that are already transmissible among humans. He allowed as how H5N1 deserved close vigilance, but that other strains could readily be the next big thing.

Anyway, she actually writes more and you can read the whole thing by clicking on that link before the break-out quote.

Other reaction. San Diego film critic Fred Saxon (and former CNN film critic) wrote me an e-mail:

Thank you for scaring the bejesus out of me and certainly everybody who saw the TV version of your “Pandemic” script.  Well done! Having said that, let me say this: I know you’re the writers and not the directors, but please allow me to comment on the experience. It wasn’t long before I wondered if you wrote another Faye Dunaway face lift (or two) into the script. Hmmmm? If she has one more she’ll have a goatee.  And Eric Roberts, did you write that he should be so old?  Another thing, the blood looked totally fake on the plane.  Hey, what’s up with that music?  It’s going non-stop, like in “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire”, but more annoying. Could have been much more effective had it not been continuous.  I’m just sayin’...

Fred, by the way, is also a recovered stand-up comedian, if you hadn't guessed. I won't take a cheap shot at Faye, other than to say she was originally written to be an Arnold Schwarzenneger-type governor, but the music comment was interesting. About a month ago, Jackie and I got a copy of the locked cut, but without music. Completely sweetened for dialogue and background sound, though, and it actually was more compelling. Usually, I think music really takes a piece to the next level, so this was an odd experience for me.

Also, in a few places, Jackie and I ended up getting confused by our own movie. That's because we were hired to write it as a four-hour mini-series to air in two two-hour parts. That four-hour has already been seen internationally and will make up the DVD release, but the Hallmark Channel wanted one three-hour. Take away the 45 minutes of commericals and last night's airing was about 150 pages worth of film from a script that we turned in (at producer's request) at about 250 pages.

Although he may be biased, Movie Smackdown! critic Mark Sanchez sent us this e-mail this morning:

No space aliens, costumed oddballs or special effects overload. Distinct characters, a plausible story arc and a satisfying conclusion. It's a fine, attractive project because it's not like the blockbusters clogging the multiplexes these days. At the risk of sounding ridiculous, "Pandemic" offers an accessible big story that is still human-scale in its dimensions.

Well, at least it was produced. In a world where everyone has a spec script in their desk drawer, this is a very good thing.

Love Is Eternal: Neolithic Italian Lovers

While the world ponders the fate of spaced-out lover Lisa Nowak, I was drawn today to an enormously touching view of love from the ages.

This comes straight from Mantua, Italy, south of Verona, where archaeologists have found the intertwined skeletons of two lovers from the Neolithic period. As you can see from this phenomenal  photograph, the two bodies, which cuddle closely while facing each other on their sides, were found together locked in an embrace. What's better is that the place where they were found in the area where Shakespeare set "Romeo and Juliet." Have we found some even older and more real star-crossed lovers?

The scientists say that these two probably died young, based on the fact that they had all their teeth back in a time when dentistry, charitably, was probably even worse than that scene in "Castaway" where Tom Hanks has to whack out a tooth with a rock.

Here's what the Associated Press had to say, starting with Luca  Bondioli, an anthropologist at Rome's National Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum when he said the find has:

...''more of an emotional than a scientific value.'' But it does highlight how the relationship people have with each other and with death has not changed much from the period in which humanity first settled in villages, learning to farm the land and tame animals, he said. ''The Neolithic is a very formative period for our society,'' he said. ''It was when the roots of our religious sentiment were formed.''

Here's another point of view from that article (and another photo, taken with flat lighting, over to the left here), quoting from Elena Menotti who led the dig:

Experts might never determine the exact nature of the pair's relationship, according to Menotti, but there is little doubt it was born of a deep sentiment. ''It was a very emotional discovery,'' she said. ''From thousands of years ago we feel the strength of this love. Yes, we must call it love.''

How great is that? A reminder of love going back five or six thousand years. It's almost certain that these two were buried at the same time. That could be an indication of a possible sudden and tragic death. DNA testing will be able to test whether the two were related.

Whatever the facts turn out to be, as opposed to the sick obsession of Lisa Nowak, here is a profound example of something that looks like it might even be noble. If it's a message from the past, it's well-timed.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if somehow this image becomes a famous poster someday. Certainly it will be in textbooks forever. It should be. And that's my opinion, for what it's worth...

Energy Crisis: Sense & Nonsense

All these feelings have been building for a long time. Usually I keep my mouth shut because, frankly, a lot of my friends are still invested in a lot of ideas that are just silly when it comes to actually fixing the problem. But I guess I'm finally just so pissed off at our reluctance to really grapple with our dependence on foreign oil and our inability to really talk about the real issues that, well, I've actually stopped caring what they're going to think. I guess I'm just more fed up with politicians of both parties who would rather point fingers than get down to business. And I'm upset with all of us who have let them get away with it including myself.

Here's the main clue, folks, the fact that nobody really wants to talk about.

You can't conserve your way out of this coming gas shortage, and you can't drill your way out either.

You have to do both. And that's just in the short run so we can stretch out the supplies long enough that maybe, just maybe, we can successfully transition to the post-oil world before it transitions without us.

And here's the fact that almost nobody says out loud, most especially politicians.

Gas is too cheap. This is particularly true if we want to use less of it. Keeping the price low just means that we use as much of it as we can get our hands on.

But, of course, cheap gas is a political war cry. When prices rise, we demand investigations of oil companies and politicians say they'll do everything they can to get the price down and the news media covers the whole thing like it's World War III. It's insane. We want it for the lowest possible price and, unless there's a problem with that, we don't really care where it comes from.

Probably half the people reading this blog weren't even alive when the 1973-1974 Arab oil embargo hit. I'd just gone off to college where I was thrilled to have my used 1965 Ford Mustang to get around in, and pretty scared when it turned out that in order to drive it I had to wait five or six hours in a gas line to get not even a full tank of gas. Trust me, we don't want to go there again, but we could... and a lot faster than anybody wants to believe.

Think about this. Back in 1973, when that oil crisis just clobbered us, we imported a whopping 34.8 percent of our oil. Thank God we've wised up, right? Not so fast. Today we import 60.3 percent.

When I was waiting in line in 1973, if someone had told me that past the turn of the century, we'd have gotten that much worse, I never would have believed them. Back then we all thought to ourselves, "Never again." If I'd have pictured the world of 2007, it would have been one of mass transit, small cars, and a conservation ethic in full bloom.

Instead we are more exposed than ever and our dependence simply gives more and more power to the least stable part of the planet. A lot of people who hate Americans are in charge of selling us the gas that keeps our cars and our economy running. Who let this happen?

The answer, of course, is everybody. People didn't hold their representatives accountable, and the politicians hardly wanted to propose anything that would actually hurt to implement. And before you make snide remarks about President Bush and his friends in Big Oil,  just stop. This isn't one that can be blamed on him. I wish he was interested in doing more, but Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton all failed to bite the bullet on this one. And so did each and every congress over the past three decades. Because, hey, if gas ever gets as expensive as it deserves to be, given what a precious resource it is, governments will fall. People are willing to pay more per ounce for bottled water than they are for refined gasoline. Where's the sense in this?

The Washington Post's columnist Charles Krauthammer really nails the nonsense factor in a column today. He makes the point that I feel so acutely today: that we are, even now, just talking more bullshit to each other. The very things we should do, if we truly want to get started, well, we aren't even thinking about them. They're all off-the-table. The only things on the table either won't work period, or are too long term to help us move quickly.

We can argue all we want about Iraq and whether getting out or staying in is the right thing for our nation's security. I simply argue that the far bigger issue right now is to stop doing what we're doing, grow a set of political balls, and make some tough decisions. But, of course, we won't. We only deal with things when they become a crisis -- like an Energy Crisis, yes?

At least when the next one hits, we'll all have our i-Pods and satellite radio to listen to in our cars as we sit idling in line, wasting more gas.

Here is the full-text of the Krauthammer column. I'm not saying the man's perfect, but at least he's willing to take a shot at it which is more than the president or the congress seem willing to do...

ENERGY NONSENSE
Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

Is there anything more depressing than yet another promise of energy independence in yet another State of the Union address? By my count, 24 of the 34 State of the Union addresses since the 1973 oil embargo have proposed solutions to our energy problem.

The result? In 1973 we imported 34.8 percent of our oil. Today we import 60.3 percent.

And what does this president propose? Another great technological fix. For Jimmy Carter, it was the magic of synfuels. For George Bush, it's the wonders of ethanol. Our fuel will grow on trees. Well, stalks, with even fancier higher-tech variants to come from cellulose and other (literal) rubbish.

It is very American to believe that chemists are going to discover the cure for geopolitical weakness. It is even more American to imagine that it can be done painlessly. Ethanol for everyone. Farmers get a huge cash crop. Consumers get more supply. And the country ends up more secure.

This is nonsense. As my colleague Robert Samuelson demonstrates, biofuels will barely keep up with the increase in gasoline demand over time. They are a huge government bet with goals and mandates and subsidies that will not cure our oil dependence or even make a significant dent in it.

Even worse, the happy talk displaces any discussion about here-and-now measures that would have a rapid and revolutionary effect on oil consumption and dependence. No one talks about them because they have unhidden costs. Politicians hate unhidden costs.

There are three serious things we can do now: Tax gas. Drill in the Arctic. Go nuclear.

First, tax gas. The president ostentatiously rolled out his 20-in-10 plan: reducing gasoline consumption by 20 percent in 10 years. This with Rube Goldberg regulation — fuel-efficiency standards, artificially mandated levels of "renewable and alternative fuels in 2017" and various bribes (er, incentives) for government-favored technologies — of the kind we have been trying for three decades.

Good grief. I can give you a 20-in-2: tax gas to $4 a gallon. With oil prices having fallen to $55 a barrel, now is the time. The effect of a gas-tax hike will be seen in less than two years, and you don't even have to go back to the 1970s and the subsequent radical reduction in consumption to see how. Just look at last summer. Gas prices spike to $3 — with the premium going to Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavez and assorted sheiks, rather than the U.S. Treasury — and, presto, SUV sales plunge, the Prius is cool and car ads once again begin featuring miles per gallon ratings.

No regulator, no fuel-efficiency standards, no presidential exhortations, no grand experiments with switchgrass. Raise the price and people change their habits. It's the essence of capitalism.

Second, immediate drilling to recover oil that is under U.S. control, namely in the Arctic and on the Outer Continental Shelf. No one pretends that this fixes everything. But a million barrels a day from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is 5 percent of our consumption. In tight markets, that makes a crucial difference.

We will always need some oil. And the more of it that is ours, the better. It is tautological that nothing more directly reduces dependence on foreign oil than substituting domestic for foreign production. Yet ANWR is now so politically dead that the president did not even mention it in the State of the Union, or his energy address the next day.

He did bring up, to enthusiastic congressional applause, global warming. No one has a remotely good idea about how to make any difference in global warming without enlisting China and India, and without destroying the carbon-based Western economy. The obvious first step, however, is an extremely powerful source of energy that produces not an ounce of carbon dioxide: nuclear.

What about nuclear waste? Well, coal produces toxic pollutants, as does oil. Both produce carbon dioxide that we are told is going to end civilization as we know it. These wastes are widely dispersed and almost impossible to recover once they get thrown into the atmosphere.

Nukes produce waste as well, but it comes out concentrated — very toxic and lasting nearly forever, but because it is packed into a small manageable volume, it is more controllable. And it doesn't pollute the atmosphere. At all.

There is no free lunch. Producing energy is going to produce waste. You pick your poison and you find a way to manage it. Want to do something about global warming? How many global warming activists are willing to say the word nuclear?

So much easier to say ethanol. That it will do farcically little is beside the point. Our debates about oil consumption, energy dependence and global warming are not meant to be serious. They are meant for show.

Krauthammer's won the Pulitzer Prize, which doesn't make him infallible, but it does make him smart. Maybe you have a better idea and we'd all love to hear that, too. Meantime, catch you in the gas lines!

Let's Get Small: Plutonian Edition

Now that international astronomers have everyone thinking about the cosmos for at least a day by throwing Pluto out of the Solar System, let's give a passing thought to our place in the universe. We know that Pluto got tossed out of the planetary club for being a shrimp, a "dwarf planet" that is so small it can't even control its own neighborhood. Okay, then, size matters, so think about this...

Back when Steve Martin was a stand-up comic, he made a splash in 1977 with his debut album "Let's Get Small". My friend, Thomas Skala, sent me something by e-mail a couple of weeks ago that has absolutely nothing to do with that other than by the time you get through this photo journey you will feel even smaller than Steve Martin felt at his smallest. Ready? Here's picture number one.

Now this should make you feel pretty good. There's our home planet Earth looking like the biggest baddest mother on the block. Mars, which is our closest cousin in the solar system they say, looks like a puny runt compared to us. Now let's roll in the outer planets in the solar system.

Whoa! Suddenly we're looking pretty damn tiny. I mean, if Jupiter is a basketball, then we're a marble, barely. Mars has turned into a BB. Now let's pop in our own sun, Old Sol.

Suddenly our scale is, well, underwhelming. We need the arrow to see the Earth because, at its current size, we'd miss it. We're getting seriously small. But at least we can agree that it's all relative because the sun is immense, right?

There's our sun next to a few of the other suns our astronomers have discovered out there in the galaxy. This is pretty shocking because our sun has become the BB and Earth doesn't even compute. At least we can console ourselves that that other gassy giant Arcturus must be huge beyond all belief. Not so fast.

Yep, that's Arcturus down there, looking like a speck compared to Betelgeuse and Antares.

FYI, Antares is the 15th brightest star in the sky. It is more than 1000 light years away. There are 14 brighter stars that we know about.

Definitely feeling small now?

BTW, I don't know the source of these photos. I'm sure that thanks to the reach of the Internet someone will soon tell me so I can post the credit and if any of you scientists out there want to toss in your own analysis, fire away. Or if this is all one of those demented hoaxes that would be fine to know, too. It might be a relief to think we are bigger than this makes us out to be, but I doubt it. Maybe they're right, though, maybe size isn't everything when it comes to sex or significance.

Me? I'm gonna give Steve Martin another listen and try to stay psyched up enough to get out of bed tomorrow...