Whither the British clown?

As if the news of the world these days wasn't troubling enough, now Britain has a clown shortage. Yes, there is a dearth of circus performers being allowed into the country due to changes in visa policies. This is how bad things have gotten:

"My season started in February," says Martin Lacey, owner of the Great British Circus, "and I've got comedy acrobats stranded in the Ukraine, and Mongolian horse riders who were refused their visas in Ulan Batur." The holes in his lineup have forced Lacey to draft last-minute substitutes. "Our Mexican clown is stuck in Mexico, so we've got a trapeze artist pretending to be a stooge just to get everybody out of trouble," he says. "It's a mess."

So, for any British Park Bench readers who are adept at juggling flaming chainsaws, taming lions or wearing big floppy shoes and squeezing into small cars, your country needs you -- now more than ever.

Hee. I love that story so much.

If the Star Trek fans could do it, so can the Firefly fans

NASA is holding a contest to help name the International Space Station's Node 3 and its adjoining cupola. Right now, the name Serenity is in the lead with 86 percent of the vote. If you're inclined to vote, please do so early and often because the Colbert fans have joined the fray and tossed his name into the ring. Much as I would love to have something in space named for Stephen Colbert, I'm holding out hope that one day we'll simply rename Ursus Major in his honor. So let's win this one for Serenity by voting here.

Odds and Ends

I've been hording links the way I'd horde pie if I had an invisible body...which is to say, I'd horde A LOT of it. So without further ado...or thoughts of fruit filling...here they are:

+ Have you seen these "creatively" edited versions of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes? Very funny and I think they have the perhaps unintentional effect of making Jonathan Frakes a better actor, so win-win on that one!

+ Speaking of "Next Generation," I'm really looking forward to the cast reunion on "Family Guy" coming up on March 29. New details on the episode were released today:

In the episode titled “Not All Dogs Go to Heaven,” the "Next Gen" crew (Patrick Stewart, Levar Burton, Gates McFadden, Michael Dorn, Wil Wheaton, Denise Crosby, Marina Sirtis, Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes) will provide guest voices as the Griffin family heads to the annual Quahog “Trek” convention.

"Stewie blows a fuse when he doesn’t get a chance to ask his favorite ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ cast members any questions," reads the logline. "He devises a plan, builds a transporter and beams the entire cast to his bedroom so they can spend a fun-filled day together in Quahog.

Wil Wheaton talks a bit about it on his blog here.

+ Did you hear that a giant asteroid almost annihilated the planet on Monday (of course it was a Monday)? Yeah, I can't decide whether I should feel good about this (hey, we survived!) or bad about this (holy shit, it could have hit before I saw the end of BSG!).

+ Speaking of annihilation, Oklahoma chose a song about how everyone dies as their official state rock song. Yup, Oklahoma got cool and emo by choosing The Flaming Lips' "Do You Realize?" Now they should build a giant pink robot and put it next to the Oklahoma sign so all the musical theater fans who stop and take pictures in front of it will be thoroughly confused...and hopefully a little bit scared.

+ This has been kind of a depressing post. Let's turn this ship around, think happy thoughts and look at Jamie Bamber's contribution to animal rights:

I officially forgive PETA for trying to get the world to call fish "sea kittens."

+ The debut date for the upcoming Spider-Man musical, with music by U2, was announced last week. Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark will hit the stage in February 2010. Half of me thinks this is intriguing (the half that likes U2) while the other half of me just kind of wishes comic books would go away so people could produce original stories again...but that's just me being cranky.

Ken's trophy wife Barbie turns 50

"C'mon, shark, sure she's all gristle, but just bite her for us awkward girls!"

Perhaps nothing symbolized the schism between me and the other little girls growing up more than the Barbie doll, which turns 50 this week. When I look back on my childhood, I realize that the moment I turned my nose up at the plasticine chick was the moment I went from regular girl to nerd girl. While my neighbor Jenny coveted her collection of each and every Barbie iteration -- Princess Barbie, Beach Barbie, Cheerleader Barbie, Dyspeptic Barbie, Third-Nipple Barbie, the list goes on -- I simply coveted the times her brother and I would sneak into her Pepto-Bismal pink room, steal a Barbie, decapitate it and replace the head with a Jawa noggin or a Hammerhead cranium (a terrible waste of Star Wars action figures in retrospect), litter the doll's limbs outside her bedroom door and then watch her cry.

I also enjoyed lighting the Barbies on fire, strapping them to the back of the neighborhood alley cat and having a rodeo, and dragging them behind my Big Wheel until they disintegrated. Now, I don't know if I did this because I enjoyed the "attagirls" I got from her brother (whom I harbored a deep and abiding crush on, mostly because he was the only boy in the neighborhood with a rock polisher) or because I genuinely hated the dolls (or Jenny). Either way, though, the desecration of the Barbie became a well-honed hobby of mine from the ages of 6 to 9. And if I'm perfectly honest, I still look back on that destructive time with just a wee bit of pride -- the doll did look pretty hilarious with a hammerhead stacked on her inhumanly thin shoulders.

This is not to say I disliked all dolls. I was a fan of the Cabbage Patch -- I liked their heft and homely faces. And I loved stuffed animals which I would dress in little clothes the same way the Barbie lunatics dressed their little anorexic annies. I'm not sure why I hated Barbie so much. Probably because she always seemed so snootie. She was a tiny, plastic version of those girls I was always afraid of at school, the ones whose clothes matched and who never spilled juice on themselves at snack time or accidentally vomited after spinning too long on the tire swing. I kind of hated them...and so I set their dolls on fire. (Actually, I was afraid of matches, so it was my friend Matt who did the lighting. I just stood by with the bucket of water because nerdy girls are nothing if not safety conscious, even at a young, destructive age. Stop, drop and roll, that's our mantra!)

So happy birthday, Barbie! I'm sorry I enjoyed watching you melt in an apocalypse of flames on the neighbor's driveway, and I hope you have another wonderful 50 years of creating unattainable and inhumane physical expectations for small, impressionable little girls all over the world! I look forward to eating cake and then immediately purging it in your honor. Rock on.

What did you think of Barbie growing up?

I love you, Royal Shakespeare Company...

It's being reported that the Royal Shakespeare Company will film the David Tennant "Hamlet" production that just ended this past January. Added geek bonus: Patrick Stewart will reprise his role as Claudius. Here's the article:

The 37-year-old Dr Who actor and the entire cast of the RSC production are preparing to make a film version of the play in June to record for posterity his portrayal, which was described by some as the greatest Hamlet of his generation.

Speaking at a lunch held at the Haymarket Hotel, Oliver Ford Davies, 69, who was nominated for his portrayal of Polonius, tells me: "We are intending to film it over two or three weeks in June. It won't be a full feature film as there isn't time but it will certainly be more than just the filming of the stage. It will be fantastic to work together again."

Tennant unfortunately only managed 11 performances at the Novello Theatre, after already appearing for a run in Stratford-upon-Avon, when he suffered from a prolapsed disc, obliging his understudy Edward Bennett, 29, to fill in on 21 occasions.

Please don't let this turns into one of those, "we're only releasing it in the UK because America is too illiterate to buy more than three copies of this" endeavors. I swear, we can read and like our iambic pentameter just fine!