Your mother's a drunken astronuat

I am very sympathetic to the plight of those who get busted for DWIs. For who hasn't driven somewhere, imbibed overly, and then faced the next step of getting back home.

The calling a cab solution is fine and good in the short term. But whenever there develops a significant distance between yourself and your automobile a longer term logistical challenge ensues. Favors will have to be called in. It will end with you helping with an exhausting summertime move or providing a short term housing solution for an excitable dog.

The truth is, I also feel bad when I read an airline pilot has been sacked for flying drunk. What the hell are they supposed to do during a three hour layover in Buffalo? Plus planes basically fly themselves these days. And it's not like there is anything to run into up there.

Come to think of it, there are many activities that "polite society" frowns upon mixing with alcohol but I say bottoms up:

Air traffic control Wouldn't two of everything make it doubly safe for everyone?

Surgery I'll take my surgeon relaxed and happy over yours uptight and preoccupied with his alimony payments and getting sued by John Edwards.

Teaching If I had a virtually unlimited number of wishes, one of them would be doing it over again with drunker teachers.

Boating Tell me a single good reason to go boating sober and I will reconsider.

Law enforcement The drunker the cop, the more likely he will respond to your criminal transgression and smart mouth with a quick beating -- rather than a lingering arrest.

Leader of the free world Would an off the wagon George W. Bush be any less popular? I'm still waiting for the real second term shake up.

But today I learned there is a limit to even my tolerance when it comes performing tasks while intoxicated. That limit is the earth's atmosphere. Granted I wasn't even aware we had a drunk astronaut problem until I read this report from NASA -- which found multiple examples of "heavy use of alcohol" in violation of the space agency's 12 hour bottle to throttle ban.

It doesn't so much bother me that our astronauts are getting sauced before performing perhaps the most dangerous task legitimate society has to offer. What irks me is that an astronaut makes what . . . one maybe two space flights over a twelve month period? Meaning, save no more than 24 hours a year, Buzz Lightyear can be as drunk as he wants and still in compliance with NASA.

What a stunning lack of self control, to fall afoul of NASA's minimal alcohol regulations. Mix that with diaper woman, and I'm starting to get the feeling that if our impulse challenged astronauts ever came across extra terrestrials it would be the humans who start with the provocative prodding and probing.

Death Watch: Boris Yeltsin

Boris Yeltsin died today at the age of 76. Yeltsin was the first elected president in Russian history. A populist, above all else, Yeltsin led a life filled with street fights, finger-severing grenade incidents and mysterious falls into river banks, all of which appealed to the common Russian, who also enjoys the "occasional" beverage

In August of 1991 Yeltsin gained international prominence by defying a hard line communist coup against Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (Russia was still part of the Soviet Union back then.) While Gorbachev sulked, house arrested, in his vacation home in the Crimea, Yeltsin, probably sauced after his typical breakfast of potato vodka, commandeered a tank and a megaphone and denounced the "junta" to a crowd of sympathetic protesters.

Thus began the legend of President Boris Yeltsin. One that ended in 1999 with a 2 percent approval rating and a 50 percent decline in overall GDP. According to Guinness, Yeltsin holds the world record for being the most hospitalized political figure.

In Yeltsin's death we can take the same lesson as we could from his life: You can preside over the most precipitous fall of a "superpower" in human history, but as long as you are a white haired man with a ruddy complexion and a penchant for odd behavior and slurred speech you will be remembered, first and foremost, as a spectacular drunk.