Fun Facts From Zach's Almanac: Malice in Wonderland...the space program...and going to the dogs...

Alice couldn't have dreamed up a better piece of convoluted logic from any character she met in Wonderland.
Wednesday, January 18, 2006; Posted: 9:48 a.m. EST (14:48 GMT)
SAN QUENTIN, California (AP) -- In the end, California's oldest condemned inmate did not seem quite as feeble as his attorneys made him out to be in their efforts to save his life.
With the help of four big prison guards, Clarence Ray Allen shuffled from his wheelchair to a gurney inside San Quentin's death chamber early Tuesday, a day after his 76th birthday.
Having suffered a heart attack back in September, Allen had asked prison authorities to let him die if he went into cardiac arrest before his execution, a request prison officials said they would not honor.
"At no point are we not going to value the sanctity of life," said prison spokesman Vernell Crittendon. "We would resuscitate him, then execute him."
This warped perception has got to be right up there with George Carlin's observations on the incredibly odd yet insisted upon practice of sterilizing the needles used for lethal injection during capital punishment executions.
When is the guy being executed, going to possibly find the time to get an infection from someone failing to sterilize that equipment?? Tomorrow?


NASA had to once again scrub its launch of its ten-year mission to send a space craft to Pluto.
It's too bad really. What, now that hunger, poverty and disease have been eliminated here on earth and everybody can afford doctors and medicine, we really have nothing better to do with billions of dollars over the next decade but wait for up close and personal Polaroids of yet another heavenly piece of rock, void of life or even the atmosphere to sustain it. Hell, it isn't even in our approximate neighborhood!
Listen, I don't have a problem per se with the space program in general. Oh, I might squirm a bit if we went forward with developing some real estate already conquered beyond our immediate planet, but it would make sense to me in a fashion. Bio-spheres on the moon, colonization, mining or a geo-synchronistic, manned space station/complex that could be used for a way station or to perform scientific experimentation in zero gravity…I'm all for it, as a way of creating industry and massive employment right here on Terra Firma. But ten years of waiting and all that capital dedicated to Pluto just so a handful of techno-geeks can celebrate yet another nonevent on the front page of the national newspaper…? No pun intended, but that's a stretch, isn't it? Especially right on the heels of reaping all those benefits from doing the same with the rings of Saturn and crashing a washing machine into the the head of a comet? And don't forget those cute and lovable rovers we have on Mars! The returns on all these projects are doing us all a mountain of good down here, aren't they?

All this reminds me, since we're on about Pluto and such, of a quandary that has nagged at many of us (well, one or two of us, I suppose) since the fifties and long precedes the space program…
How come Pluto has to be a dog, but Goofy gets to be kind of a people-dog hybrid??
Sure, Goofy gets to wear clothes, communicate in a complex language, drive automobiles, has opposing thumbs and gets to go fishing and stuff with Mickey, but Pluto has to live like a dog? Lives in a dog house, tags along, chases sticks, chews bones… Doesn't anyone think we'd pick up on that?
Both of these guys are simply dogs, aren't they?
What's with the gap in their evolution and where's the missing link for these guys??
Now an answer to this would be valuable scientific research!
Well, for one or two of us, I suppose.
And that's just a few short of the slide rule guys who we see exuberant, each time some machine crashes down on the planet with yet another cup of space dust and debris.