I know Scooter Libby was found guilty. We should talk more about that. And I know we've been overindulging in look-at-the-celebrity-fall-apart vicariousness. Let's cut back on that a little.
But I surely do love the Lisa Nowak story, which just keeps getting more and more interesting:
In the latest twist in what has been a media maelstrom in the United States, a Florida state attorney has released e-mails that Capt. Nowak also had in her possession, messages between her old boyfriend and his new flame.
The e-mails read like notes between love-struck teens, albeit ones with access to flight simulators and entry suits.
"Will have to control myself when I see you," Capt. Shipman wrote on Dec. 21, 2006, while Commander Oefelein was aboard the shuttle Discovery. "First urge will be to rip your clothes off, throw you on the ground and love the hell out of you."
In another e-mail, Cdr. Oefelein asks Capt. Shipman to accompany him on a crew trip to Europe in April.
"I promise to stop bugging you with these annoying trips, but I need my beautiful Irish girl to keep the evil, ugly bread-canister ladies away from me," he wrote.
I'm glad I got my obsessive, romantic letter writing out of my system before e-mail and the Freedom of Information act. There's one stink bomb of a letter out there I hope has long since been reduced to ashes. I was home on leave from the Army and started dating a woman who was a friend of the wife of a high school buddy. It didn't work out; we just didn't click. Of course, I didn't see it that way at the time. I wrote her a blistering letter about how blind and stupid she was not to see that she was giving up the greatest relationship in the history of the world and in the process treating a wonderful guy so shabbily -- I seem to remember it went on for several, rambling pages in exactly that vein -- and left it propped up at the bottom of her apartment door. I never heard from her again, which was a valuable lesson for someone who became an editorialist. Sometimes even the most brilliant arguments fall on deaf ears.
