Even for a nation so infatuated with romancing the stranger, we made Anna Nicole and Ozzy Osbourne TV stars, it was an odd news story. Not that this stopped millions of us from watching it live-heck we felt we had no choice, we were drawn to the screen. I'm speaking about Falcon Henne, projectile vomiter, and Rocketeer (almost), who, we're now told by local law enforcement authorities, was part of an elaborate hoax by parents who majored in self-aggrandizement perhaps to seal a reality TV deal.
Just me? I'm a little disappointed with how angry the same sheriff's department now seems to be especially since they were so mellow the other day in the immediate aftermath of this whole thing going down. I'm trying to remember the name of the college professor the other day who'd told police the runaway balloon could carry up to eighty pounds and see if it's the same name as the college professor who now assures the Associated Press that the balloon couldn't carry the six year old thirty-seven pound boy.
I'm thinking maybe it was Jimmy Webb, but I have the feeling, while that name comes to mind, the context is different. I suspect they may be one and the same professor and I look forward to yet another party hiring him as their technical expert in (what do I know?) a movie adaptation of this adventure (Tom Cruise can play the grown-up Falcon as they're already about the same size).
We never tire of this stuff, do we? Go back fifteen years. Substitute a White Bronco for a silver duct-taped balloon. Like some sort of a seance, we're eyes on the screen 24/7. Are our own lives so empty we need this to fill them up, or to make ourselves feel better? Don't know how things are at your house, but Grandma's dying of cancer now, the cattle all have brucellosis, we'll get through somehow. (okay, not all of us. Warren, for instance will not be joining us for the rest of his life).
Near the end of the work week, and not a hard week but not an easy one either, and here comes a postcard from a parallel universe that resonates as far as Siam causing us to stop whatever we're working on and dropping whomever we're doing, to worry about the well-being of a little boy none of us had ever heard of and wouldn't have known had he fallen from the heavens and landed on our front lawns (not that we would have needed to know his name to call the K-MOO News truck).
No gloves, no Bruno Magli shoes, no golf clubs, no "Kato" Kaelin, no Dream Team defense lawyers, unless Daddy Dearest can cut a deal with Dick Wolf and get some of the attorneys from one or more of the Law and Order TV shows. And the best part, and maybe the most America in the Twenty-First Century Part of All, is within two weeks we'll have forgotten all about these folks as their memory will have been replaced a dozen times over by the next big things.
Pity OJ didn't own an Excursion-more vehicle for more passengers. (Bet the Bronco was the only ride no one ever called 'shotgun'.) The spinoffs could have kept us all busy until the silver balloon landed.
-bill kenny
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