fter years of fiscal excess in the 1980’s, when the organization famously spent millions of dollars on magic space beans, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s legendary cost-cutting backfired this week when NASA head Dean Michaels admitted that he personally regrets equipping the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, currently orbiting Saturn, with a 27-shot disposable camera.

“Though the decision seemed a wise one at first,� apologized Michaels before we cut him off to identify the speaker, “due to the camera’s low cost and ease of processing at over 10,000 Photomats and convenience stores across the country, we are finally now coming to understand why no one has ever used one of these things for deep-space photography before: They suck big-time.�

Providing an array of blurry, blown-up photographs to illustrate his point, Michaels offered a shot-by-shot analysis of the confusing images from Cassini’s Fuji QuickSnap Outdoor.

“Jesus, that’s not even what we were aiming at!� Michaels yelled while examining the first photograph. “That’s the Alpha Centauri! Fucking Fujifilm.�

“This one, I have no idea what this is,� Michaels admitted, gesturing to a blurry gray photograph featuring a vaguely floral print. “Can anybody see anything in this? I’m not even sure if we’ve got it right-side up.�

Most intriguing of all the shots, however, was #17, which seemed to provide bizarrely compelling evidence that Cassini had somehow managed to snap a picture of a NASA technician’s thumb from deep space.

“This one’s a miracle of bad photography,� explained Michaels. “People should be praying to this thing instead of some batshit on an underpass somewhere,� Michaels added, referring to the Mother Mary apparition discovered earlier this year under a bridge in Illinois.

Beyond the photo quality issue, NASA also ran into problems with the camera’s 27-exposure capacity, which is fine for most weddings or a day at the beach, but somewhat restrictive when trying to capture the vast wonder of the solar system.

“Yeah, that was a boner,� admitted Michaels. “We’ve only got three shots left and four more planets to go, so it’s going to be tough. We’re going to have to line them up for a panoramic shot or something, hopefully without the sun in the background since that always makes everything look all dark and washed-out. What can I say? We were in the checkout lane and it seemed like a good idea. It has definitely served us better than the Bic lighter and CrystalBurst gum that Stevens wanted to get for the same money.�

Critics are citing the Cassini debacle as the organization’s biggest embarrassment since the 1990 launching of the super-powerful Hubble telescope, which has mostly been used by technicians to take scarily detailed bird’s-eye view photos of their homes from outer space, after expensive repairs were made to fix the out-of-focus lenses NASA ended up with when a sponsorship deal and partnership with mall-based eyewear provider LensCrafters backfired.

But NASA supporters call such claims ludicrous, since they totally disregard all the malfunctioning toy trucks the large contingent of RC-car enthusiasts at NASA have landed on foreign planets between those two events.

“We went to the fucking moon, people,� Michaels snapped after this reporter asked if they might have been better off trading up to a disposable camera model with a built-in flash, considering the darkness of space. Michaels defaulted to a common NASA dodge that comes up whenever critics point out the organization’s frequent misadventures. “Think about that for a second. The moon. What have you done?�

he 12 jurors in the Michael Jackson trial surprised some hopeless optimists last week when they returned a verdict of “not guilty� on all 10 counts, allowing the King of Pop his legal freedom and probably inspiring some questionable lyrics from a future album. Among the reasons given by the jury for their decision, more than one, two in fact, said they believed Jackson probably did molest virtually every child who came into his mansion—but not this kid, according to the evidence.

Legal analysts, and by that we mean lawyers without jobs, have pointed to startling revelations during testimony of witnesses to explain the “not guilty� verdict in the Jackson case. Among the more surprising disclosures was that the accused, long thought to be a 13-year-old boy, was in fact a diminutive man with a long police record, known in street parlance as Philadelphia Freddy.

“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for this money-driven legal system!� screeched the gravel-voiced midget, shortly after the announcement of the verdict.

The defense painted a strong picture of a short, unruly child/crime boss and his money-grubbing mother, who parlayed a brush with cancer into a molestation gold mine and tried to catch Michael Jackson in a kid-touching trap, to no avail. Jackson, who had previously settled out-of-court molestation cases on at least two previous occasions, could not be fingered, pardon the expression, in this particular molesting accusation. Jurors claim that although they really wanted to hang Jackson out to dry for all the other occasions of molestation he’s been guilty of, in this special and rare instance, he wasn’t guilty of that specific crime.

“It’s obvious Michael Jackson is a sick, sick man-child,� said a juror, who asked not to be identified, but looked like a “George� to us. “But in this particular case, as brought by Jackson-hounding D.A. Tom Sneddon, there wasn’t enough evidence to nail his peculiarly shaded ass. It’s too bad, because I think he molested three or four kids of some of the jurors, but we weren’t actually trying those cases, and had to go by what the judge instructed us.�

Some critics of the case have not only charged Sneddon with fumbling an easily unfumbleable ball, but have alleged the way the case was framed by the judge made it hard for a jury to convict Jackson of the crime. Among the strange instructions, Judge Rodney Melville warned jurors could not consider previous allegations of sexual abuse made against Jackson, and Jackson’s celebrity status had to be ignored.

“I ask you again,� said Judge Melville, “to think of Michael Jackson as any ordinary man who can afford the world’s most powerful attorneys at his beck and call. If you like, you may also think of Jackson’s heartfelt song, ‘Man in the Mirror,’ and how it made all of us think of how any one of us has the power to change the world. Me, I personally love to think of his small but pivotal solo in the ‘We Are the World’ song.�

Santa Barbara District Attorney Tom Sneddon, described by some as a bloated law enforcement official out to bring down the King of Pop, no matter the humiliation done to him and his office, said he regretted the jury’s finding, but had no complaints against the case his office had built, the jury itself, the judge’s role in the case, or the case of the defense. He only wished they had been able to call as a witness one of the other “possible million� boys Jackson had likely molested.

At the same time, a nationwide poll performed by people with lots of time on their hands, found that up to 49% of respondents thought the jury had made the wrong decision, and that Jackson was guilty of molesting boys. Though the exact same percentage also hoped similar charges would be brought against Huey Lewis and the News, anything to make sure they didn’t show up on some future VH-1 ‘80s nostalgia special.

As every high school yearbook from the era can attest, "What the Hell Was That??" was the catchphrase of the year for 1908 in Russia, thanks to the infamous Tunguska Explosion in Siberia earlier that year, which rocked the fallacious common notion that an entire forest wouldn't suddenly just blow up for no apparent reason. Exactly that happened to 2,000 square kilometers (10,000 miles) of forest on a remote central Siberian plateau on June 30th, at 7:14 am. Some historians argue that it was actually at 7:13 am, but researchers have independently verified that every one of them, to a man, is an asshole.

So what the hell was that, exactly? Ask a hundred different people and you'll get seven different answers, and ninety-three people who look at you like you just crawled up out of a manhole naked. In truth, they're all wrong, unless you ask the question while participating in a Gay Pride parade and really are naked on the street. But that's obviously never happened to anyone so let's drop the subject and never bring it up again, regardless of any "Griswald Dreck Gone Wild" photos you might have seen circulating on the Internet.

Let's start with what we know. That morning began like many others, with simple Siberian farmers and herdsmen going about their regular business, planning a communist revolution. Some commented it was strange that they couldn't hear any birds singing that morning, but were quickly reminded that all the birds had been shot for treason. Then suddenly, without warning except for the fact that all the animals and insane people in Russia began digging like mad in unison, a huge fireball brighter than the sun erupted from the earth, incinerating everything within miles of ground zero, including a herd of reindeer who had come into work on their day off. Traders 60 kilometers (14,000 miles) away saw the fireball shoot high into the sky, felt intense heat, and then heard a deafening explosion fifteen minutes later. The noise later turned out to be an unrelated event, when a local herdsman conducting scientific experiments attempted to boil a bathtub full of gasoline. But few could deny it added to the drama.

30 kilometers (9.7 miles) away huts were flattened, pigs were eaten by wolves and Russians were knocked the fuck off their couches. Forest fires burned for weeks afterward in the region until the locals got tired of the rich, soothing campfire aroma and decided to put them out. Unfortunately, the preferred firefighting method of the day was to drop napalm from a plane and run like hell, waiting for the trees and the fire to duke it out in a battle royale of natural forces, so due to this an additional 1,500 square kilometers (6 miles) of forest were lost.

Tremors from the impact were recorded over 5,000 kilometers (87 feet) away at a meeting of tremor enthusiasts in Jena, Germany, and noctilucent "night-shining" clouds were seen all over Europe for weeks after the event. Repeated requests for an encore by excited Europeans annoyed Russia for years, and led indirectly to the start of WWI a few years later.

The Russian government finally got around to investigating the explosion in 1927, after years of complaints that Siberia smelled like burnt reindeer meat. Conventional wisdom said that the Tunguska event was the work of a giant asteroid hitting the earth, so that was obviously wrong. Scientists were unable to find any evidence of an asteroid in the region, except for the fact that everything was flattened like it was hit by a giant asteroid or something. Neither the months of half-hearted looking around nor the posted 1 million ruble ($14) reward for anyone returning the 100,000 ton asteroid believed responsible turned up any tangible evidence.

Since then, numerous theories have been developed by scientists and the bored to explain the Tunguska event. As with any mysterious event, it's much easier to determine what didn't happen than what actually did, and these theories are a wonderful overview of what didn't happen. Just to rankle the scientists who supported the asteroid theory, some others argued that it must have been a comet instead, which would explain the lack of debris since comets rarely stick around and wait for the cops to show up. The first group of scientists countered that it couldn't have been a comet, because comets are gay, and so it had to have been a stony asteroid that disintegrated before reaching the ground, commonly known as a Houdini. The second group of scientists thought that sounded made up.

Scientists who were snubbed for inclusion on either the asteroid or comet teams formed their own club out of spite, centered around the idea that the explosion was actually caused by a chunk of antimatter, or even better, an anti-chunk of matter. Everyone agreed that was definitely made up, but it was ruled admissible as long as the third group of scientists agreed both that Houdinis were real and that comets definitely weren't at all gay. After that, everyone was happy.

That was, until the mysterious superstar astronomer Carl Duck appeared briefly from his Haight-Ashbury lair in 1968 to announce that the "Tunguska thing" was all about a black hole, dig? Most of the other scientists of the day agreed that Duck was a really cool guy and if he said it was a black hole, then 'nuff said.

Unfortunately, more would still be said on the subject. During the 1970's, when restrictions on who could be quoted as a "scientist" were relaxed to help out news organizations, all kinds of new theories came out of the woodwork. One of the more popular ideas was that the nuclear engine of a Martian spaceship had blown up over Siberia that morning, probably one based on Ford Pinto technology. Another competing theory had it that the blast was the effect of a laser shot from extraterrestrial civilization trying to contact Earth, though none could explain how a race sophisticated enough to build a powerful interstellar laser could be that stupid. Scientists hoped that if this theory were true, with any luck the extraterrestrial race would not prove to be too friendly, as a couple more calls on the bomb phone could spell the end of life on Earth.

But enough with the theories, Dreck, you demand, what really happened that day in Siberia?

Two words, faithful readers: Nitroglycerine fertilizer.

Due to a quirk in the Russian alphabet, the words for "nitrogen" and "nitroglycerine" look almost identical, enough to fool a generation of Siberian farmers into turning that region into one giant, growing bomb in the early 1900's. They learned a tough lesson that day in 1908, as much as you can learn anything when you're vaporized into a mist of carbon dust that catches on fire after some asshole drops a lit cigarette out of his blimp. But, as the president says, learning's overrated.

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