Bulletin: When It Comes to “Paper or Plastic?” Parents of Diaper-Wearing Female Astronaut Prefer the Latter

Yes, Channel 11, which we mistakenly identified in our previous post as having the “smartest newscasts” in Houston, came up big---huge, in fact---on Friday evening in the All-Nowak Sweeps when it scored footage of the haggard looking mission specialist returning to her Clear Lake-area home after a short trip somewhere---perhaps, the station related, to her "physician's office."

What sort of undergarments Nowak favored for that short trip was left unrevealed.

Even better, from a fleshing-out the story standpoint, was the brief clip of an elderly couple Channel 11 identified as Nowak’s parents lugging plastic bags of what appeared to be groceries from Randall's inside the accused attempted murderess’ home.

Well, Greg Hurst said it was groceries, but for all he knows it could have been more adult diapers---or heroin!

At troubled times like these we again must cite the time-tested wisdom of Dewey Compton, the late, great Harris County Ag Extension Agent, who, back in those faraway days of oil shocks and double-digit inflation, famously observed: “No matter what happens, folks gotta eat.”

Our friend Il Pinguino, who teaches at a local college, we forget which one, checked in to say that the Situationists, “that tiny band of alcohol-swilling successors to the Dadaists and precursors of the punks,” had this Nowakian obsession sussed out decades ago:

The French intellectual/agitator Guy Debord railed back in the ’50s and ’60s against the news and entertainment media's "colonization of daily life."

Debord's best-known work was The Society of the Spectacle. Sound familiar? The historian Andrew Hussey, summarizing the book’s central concept, wrote that Debord described "the controlling powers of the 'spectacle'---the notion that all human relations are mediated by images from television, film, advertising, newspapers and magazines. The 'spectacle' (Debord argued) is the enemy of impassioned human existence."

We couldn’t agree more. We realize it’s past time to return to the moment, to reassume ownership of our somewhat desolate and transitory existence and hope we can motor through the day without getting snagged by one of those red-light cameras.