Between a (crack) rock and a hard place

Life is full of difficult decisions. But none tougher than deciding between singer-turned-reality-TV-star Whitney Houston and singer-turned-reality-TV-star Bobby Brown when the question is "who's the more fit parent."

Luckily this is not a decision most of us will ever have to make. Judge Franz Miller wasn't so lucky. After carefully weighing Houston's drug-addled insanity against Brown's drug-addled insanity, Miler, in a victory for drug-addled insanity everywhere, awarded custody of 14-year old Bobbi Krista Brown to her mother.

There is no doubt Miller will live to regret his ruling -- whatever his ruling would have been -- and this acts to highlight the great service our men and women in robes provide by arbitrating the unarbitratable.

In ancient times and more barbaric societies Bobbi Krista Brown would have been chopped in half. And then bartered for crack.

I love the 80's -- The Osama bin Laden edition

It turns out super-villain Osama bin Laden harbors a not-so-secret flame for Whitney Houston. Whitney's been looking a little ragged lately, but as far as the medieval cave-dweller is concerned it is still 2001 and Whitney hasn't crawled that far up the crack pipe.

Like any good American, I've been trying to figure out how our government could exploit Osama's crush. Suddenly it came to me in the form another cultural touchstone of the 80's, the John Hughes film Sixteen Candles.

Towards the end of the movie big-man-on-campus Jake Ryan convinces his prom queen girlfriend that the school-geek Farmer Ted is actually him just by telling the hopelessly inebriated blonde that he is Farmer Ted and Farmer Ted is he. So convincing was this simple technique the evening ends with a pleasurable sexual experience for Farmer Ted.

I figure all we need to do is convince Whitney Houston that Osama Bin Laden is actually her long-time hubby, bad-boy Bobby Brown. This should be no problem as long as the government keeps plying the former pop princess with CIA grade crack. (They'd also have to get her a little sun and fatten her up intravenously so she would at least resemble a shadow of her former self.)

Then we would drop her in the Tora Bora region and tell her Osama/Bobby is in a cave somewhere consorting with a bunch of chicken heads. Whitney, with all of the flair and tracking ability of a Black woman scorned, would find Osama/Bobby in no time. Osama, thinking Whitney had come to him to find the "truly Islamic" destiny he had always envisioned for her, would take her in no questions asked.

That's when the tracking device and Hellfire missile come into play. We lose Whitney too but, you know, War on Terror.

While nobody still thinks killing Bin Laden would make much a difference, it would be nice to see Whitney Houston remembered for doing honest, noble work and not for being hunched over in an alley somewhere.