Eloquent Incoherence

According to a report by the Justice Department Inspector General, the FBI lost 160 laptops and a number of weapons during a 44-month period ending September 30, 2005. Of these 160 laptops, 10 contained classified information and 51 may or may not have contained classified information. Believe it or not, the figures represent an improvement over the FBI’s prior record of handling sensitive inventory; the Bureau lost 300 laptops and 300 weapons during the previous 28-month period. That’s an average of over 10 laptops and 10 weapons lost every month over the course of two years and four months.

In response to the report, Assistant FBI director John Miller acknowledged the problem and noted the “significant progress” the Bureau has made in the past five years. Miller also took issue with the report’s count of missing weapons, claiming that 43 of the unaccounted weapons should not have been counted because they had been reported missing prior to the time period covered by the report. In other words, “you can’t count those weapons; they were missing from a long time ago.”

Ladies and gentlemen, your tax dollars at work.

For some reason, I’ve always gotten a kick out of reading weird news stories, and today’s news about a bizarre NASA love triangle saga is quite a gem. According to police, 43 year-old Lisa Marie Nowak drove 1000 miles from Houston to Orlando to confront Colleen Shipman. Nowak believed Shipman was romantically involved with William Oefelein, whom Nowak had apparently been obsessed with. All three individuals are NASA astronauts. Nowak wore an adult diaper during the drive so she wouldn’t have to stop for bathroom breaks. Wearing a trench coat and wig, Nowak waited for Shipman at Orlando International Airport, where Shipman had just arrived after a flight. As Shipman got into her car in the parking lot, Nowak slapped her window, began crying, and attacked Shipman with pepper spray when Shipman opened the window. Shipman managed to drive off and call police from a parking lot toll booth. Officers later found Nowak attempting to dispose of a garbage bag containing a BB gun, a steel mallet, a folding knife, four feet of rubber tubing, several plastic garbage bags, $600 in cash, and the trench coat and wig Nowak had been wearing during her confrontation with Shipman. After searching her car, police found latex gloves, an unused CO2 cartridge, copies of e-mail correspondence between Oefelein and Shipman, a letter in which Nowak professed her love for Oefelein, and handwritten directions to Shipman’s home. Nowak faces charges of kidnapping, attempted vehicle burglary with battery, destruction of evidence, and battery.

Nowak is married (to someone else) with three children. She is a Navy captain who has logged over 1500 flight hours in 30 different aircraft, including the space shuttle Discovery. Shipman is an Air Force captain who was stationed at Cape Canaveral, FL. Oefelein is a Navy commander who piloted the most recent voyage of the space shuttle Discovery. The extent of Nowak’s relationship with Oefelein remains unclear; the two never flew on a mission together but participated in an 11-day training program in Quebec. Given that Nowak clearly has some psychological issues, it wouldn’t come as a shocker if her relationship with Oefelein was entirely imagined.

UPDATE: Prosecutors have added attempted first-degree murder to the list of charges Nowak will face. It’s unclear if police have uncovered new evidence indicating that Nowak intended to murder Shipman or if the additional charge is merely a tactic by prosecutors to keep Nowak in jail after the judge rejected their request to deny her bail. If it’s the latter, I’m not sure how prosecutors can simply tack on a serious charge to keep a suspect behind bars; the facts of this case, as the press has reported them, don’t seem to support a murder charge. If her possession of a knife, mallet, and BB gun is the best that prosecutors can do, I expect that the charge will probably be thrown out. Charging her with murder just to keep her in jail is a pretty dirty move, in my opinion.

CLARIFICATION: The American phrase “going postal” derives from a series of unrelated incidents that occurred during the 1980’s and 1990’s in which disgruntled U.S. postal workers went on shooting rampages at work. The phrase has come to refer to any violent outburst of rage occurring after a sustained buildup of stress. Although statistical evidence does not indicate that postal workers have a greater propensity for violent outbursts, the high profile nature of these incidents led to the widespread perception of postal workers as “those guys that always go crazy and come back with a gun and shoot everybody”, thereby giving giving rise to the phrase “going postal”. Perhaps this NASA incident will shatter the widespread perception of astronauts as “clean-cut, athletic go-getters” who are better than the rest of us (and yes, I do consider references from Seinfeld and The Simpsons to be accurate indicators of public perception).

This might quite possibly be the strangest news story I have read in a long time. The discovery of several suspicious-looking devices at various places in and around Boston triggered repeated bomb scares that shut down parts of the city and sent local, state, and federal law enforcement agents into a frenzy. The devices turned out to be electronic lightboards depicting a middle finger-waving character from the Adult Swim television program “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”. The lightboards were placed at random sites throughout several major American cities as part of an advertising campaign by Turner Broadcasting, which owns Adult Swim. The advertising firm that came up with the idea apparently didn’t bother to get permission from city officials and didn’t anticipate that the stunt would cause so much fuss. “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” is a rather bizarre cartoon series about a talking milkshake, a box of french fries, and a mass of compressed meat, which perhaps makes the strange nature of this promotional campaign and the ensuing controversy appropriate. The publicity is likely to boost the show’s ratings, which means the campaign worked (but probably not in the way Turner intended). It’s a shame that the poor guy who dropped off the lightboards has to be charged with a felony over it.