MONDAY, July 12, 2010

In a taped telephone call, Mel Gibson unleashed a racist, hate-filled rant against his estranged girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva.  A YouTube version has surfaced in which he’s seen mooning her dressed in a kilt.

It turns out that the Russian-American spy swap in Vienna almost didn’t come off as planned.  At the last minute, the Russians threatened to walk away unless the U.S. threw in  Yakov Smirnoff.

A treasure hunter using a metal detector on a English countryside unearthed thousands of Roman coins which archeologists are calling the most compelling evidence yet that the original Caesar’s Palace had slot machines.

Delhi, India’s new $3 billion international airport features 95 airline counters on sixty-three levels serving 400 departure-arrival gates.  It’s so efficient, the air traffic controllers fill their time between flights providing tech support for Microsoft. 

Sky Chefs, Inc., which prepares in-flight meals for the major airlines, faces stiff fines for maintaining facilities contaminated with bacteria.  Investigators became suspicious when they noticed “Truffles and Smoked Norwegian Salmonella” offered in First Class on Delta.  

Excerpted from THE LAUGH MAKERS

AIR PENTAGON

Throughout his career, Hope’s friendships with high-ranking politicians paid tremendous dividends. Whenever he visited the capital, the red carpet was promptly unrolled. He was beeper-friendly with government officials from congressmen to press aides to Pentagon generals, and for Reagan’s two terms, he was only a phone call away from the Oval Office.

In May 1987, the Hope Squadron was airlifted to Pope Air Force base in Fayetteville, North Carolina aboard the personal plane of Gen. Dwayne Cassidy, the chief of the Air Force’s Military Airlift Command.  We would tape a 90-minute special there celebrating both Hope’s eighty-fifth birthday and the seventy-fifth anniversary of the outfit that had transported him from base-to-base during his overseas Christmas tours. 

Also on board sharing the general’s special VIP quarters that included a kitchen (complete with chef ) were Dolores Hope, Lucille Ball and her husband Gary Morton and the Hopes’ toy poodle, “Toby.” The pampered pooch was seldom left at home whenever the Hopes traveled.  Since Hope believed that spaying constituted cruel-and-unusual punishment, the catered-to canine had left his distinctive scent on some of the most expensive hotel suite curtains in the world — including his favorites in New York’s posh Waldorf Towers. 

The first inkling I had that there might be trouble on our flight to Pope came as I was returning from the galley after breakfast to catch a nap in the passenger seats they had set up for us in the rear of the plane, further from the engines and a little quieter. I passed a bird colonel standing at the bottom of a seven-foot ladder with a large maintenance manual open on the ladder’s shelf. He was studying it intently while handing tools to someone who, from about chest-high, was invisible. He reached for another tool and I could see stripes — he was a tech  sergeant!

Colonels don’t ordinarily follow a sergeant’s orders. I went to find Jim Lipton, an experienced pilot himself, to see what I could find out.  “Don’t tell anyone else,” he whispered, as much as one can whisper on a Starlifter in flight. “The pilot may not be able to lower the flaps all the way when we land. They think it’s a hydraulic problem, and they’re trying to find the leak.”  I said, I thought rather calmly under the circumstances, “Can we land without the flaps?”

We could, but, since the flaps slow the plane, it would require a longer air field — about 250 more feet than Pope has. And foam — lots of foam.  We were still about an hour-and-a-half from touchdown. Plenty of time to isolate that leak, right? No one else seemed to notice the little drama I had spotted immediately. Writers are just more observant, I guess. Sometimes, it’s a curse.

After a nail-biting fifteen minutes, the sergeant smiled, replaced the sound-baffling panel he had removed to access the hydraulic lines, and climbed down the ladder. I think I saw the colonel salute him. We would land with the flaps fully extended after all. And that, my friends, was the closest we came to real trouble — as far as I was ever aware — during the thousands of miles I flew with the Hope show.  Pretty remarkable, no?

Tomorrow:  Reagan drops in 

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