You may think an article about curses is a little too fringe weirdo for the Internet’s preeminent science blogger but that’s not the case at all. Some things, even things you would usually disregard as mistaken correlation/causation hysteria (see my important work – The Science of Freak Magnets – for an example) don’t have any other explanation, so they become science because they make us re-think things, change our paradigm … whatever term you want to use.

The obvious curse of the movie “Top Gun” is one such event. It can’t be coincidence and I’ll tell you why soon enough.

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I am, I confess, among the most boring men in my family. In a family lineage that includes war heroes, riverboat gamblers, inventors, crusaders and even a guy named King Arthur, I instead write science humor on the interwebs.

Not much to brag about.

That’s not to say I don’t do stuff – I have travelled all over Europe, parts of the mid-east, and a decent chunk of Asia. I’ve gone up against the Bulgarian mafia, done falconry in England and faced down Turkish police. There just isn’t a lot to explore these days and real-life adventuring is so obscure as to be a little weird to take on as a career: There are no inner reaches of Africa left unmapped and the Amazon has better cell phone reception than I get in Silicon Valley.

Heck, even being an astronaut means you only get to drive a glorified delivery van to a warehouse orbiting the globe.

But I look like I do stuff and a few months ago I was at a conference and a woman came up to me and started babbling about interviewing me after a near-disaster in the Lincoln Sea part of the Arctic Ocean during the ESA’s CryoSat-2 mission last year. I looked at her quizzically and finally she noticed.

“I have the wrong person, don’t I?” she asked. I nodded my head (1). “Well, they described him and said he looked like a younger Harrison Ford so I assumed it was you.”

She meant the Harrison Ford in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, of course, and not that knucklehead Han Solo in “Star Wars” who mumbled something unintelligible about making the Kessel Run in “less than twelve parsecs.” No one in my family would ever make that kind of grade-school physics mistake.

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People who have known me for a long time know that when I am not dazzling the world with scientific brilliance, I am a Formula One race car driver who also solves mysteries on TV. What the rest of you may not know is that I was also the star of a major motion picture.

It was a different take on the James Bond story – I played an American spy who pretends to be a scientist and the movie was about what would happen if all those spurned women from my adventures got together for revenge. They kept the title simple and to-the-point: Cash Must Die. Sadly, this movie lost its financing during production ( Chopper Chicks In Zombie Town III went over budget and they diverted the money, those bastards ) and the script is tied up in legal so this movie poster is all that remains.

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John Tierney of the Times writes:

I went to Garth Sundem, the wickedly ingenious author of Geek Logik, a new book of mathematical formulas for deciding questions like whether you should sleep with a co-worker, whether you should join a gym or see a therapist, and whether you can wear a Speedo without frightening small children.

I asked Sundem to set his sights even higher. The result of our labors (well, mostly his labors, but I want a piece of this scientific breakthrough) is the Sundem/Tierney Unified Celebrity Theory, an equation for predicting the odds that a celebrity marriage will last.

By comparing the many failed marriages with the few successes (like Johnny Cash and June Carter, or Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward), Sundem identified telltale factors likes celebrities’ ages, marital track records and levels of fame.

Younger couples have worse prospects than older couples do, particularly if they rush to the altar before getting to know each other. Britney Spears and Kevin Federline have only a 1 percent chance of making it to their fifth anniversary, according to our equation, and the most famously impetuous young couple of all, Romeo and Juliet, would have had zero chance of lasting five years.

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Want To Cure Global Warming? Make Really Big Sunglasses

Sometimes aging scientists get nostalgic for no good reason. Sometimes aging scientists get nostalgic for a very good reason. Environmentalism of the 1970s is a very good reason for scientists to get nostalgic.

You see, when I was a young scientist the big fear was a new Ice Age. Yes, the trend had been that in the 20th century to-date, even with all those big factories pumping out noxious gas and fumes, the earth was cooling. Pollution was the problem, they said. Too much sulfur was preventing the sun’s yummy rays from entering terra firma.

Now it turns out global warming is the problem. That means – you guessed it – we don’t have enough pollution preventing the sun’s yummy rays from entering our atmosphere.

Fear of a new Ice Age at least made sense. Throughout earth’s history, 90,000 of every 100,000 years has been Ice Age. And it’s been 12,000 years since the last one, which means we are overdue.

Global Warming doesn’t make as much sense. Most global warming doesn’t come from people or factories, it comes from plants. I don’t know about you, but I get tickled trying to think of ways environmentalists can blame Big Business for too many plants. Then again, TIME Magazine can write most anything with a straight face – they did a big cover story on global warming that had in its first paragraph, “Suddenly and unexpectedly, the crisis is upon us.”

Maybe the guys at TIME are confused about what the words “suddenly” and “unexpectedly” actually mean. I can’t pick up a newspaper without reading about global warming. TIME goes on to say that we’re all going to Hell in a handbasket because of glacial ice sheets melting and a 20-foot rise in the oceans. It’s like WaterWorld, only with better actors.

Wait … Archimedes lived a long time ago and even he knew better. Those glacial ice sheets can melt all they want and it doesn’t make a bit of difference in the level of the oceans. Now, if all of Greenland melted, that would be a problem – but the temperature of Greenland itself isn’t rising at all.

Some scientists are no different from any other government pork-barrel recipients. They only think about funding. Like the saying goes, “No bucks – no Buck Rogers.” Since global warming is the cause celebre du jour, that is where some will go to get money.

So what are those scientists claiming is the answer to global warming? Make really big sunglasses. Or mess with the clouds to act more like our old friend pollution – the easiest answer of all is to inject more sulfur into the atmosphere, which is one of the proposals geo-engineers have out there.

Yes, you read it correctly. We spent trillions of dollars creating government regulations and re-tooling factories to halt the emission of sulfur into the atmosphere so now we will need to spend trillions to create a government agency to inject sulfur into the atmosphere. Sometimes I hate scientists. And I am one. And I hate irony!

Let’s not panic just yet. After all, global warming only became a problem when George Bush took office in 2001. Al Gore says we still have 10 years before catastrophe occurs. And 10 years just happens to be 2 years until the next election plus the 8 years to the end of his second term as President if he wins. So at least we know he has a plan.

It may be indefensible but it wouldn’t be a fun day if I didn’t try and defend it for that very reason. Why bother, you ask? Sure, you’re thinking ‘he’s the cracker mack daddy of science’ so I never need to smack my b*tch up to get her to act proper, but this doesn’t mean arguing the merits of the occasional love tap can’t be valid as an intellectual exercise.

I am inspired by this topic because Sean Connery’s ex-wife says he used to slap her around and if it’s good enough for the original James Bond it is at least worth thinking about. Obviously publicists denied the whole thing ever happened and sometimes you have to go right to the source, so I called up Mr. Connery and asked how things were going with his current bride after three decades.

“She needs a firm rein,” said Sir Sean, “I’ve whipped her when she was ripe for it, and it has settled her down nice and grateful for it. This isn’t on the record, right?”

“No, Mr. Connery, my blog is nothing if not discreet.”

That put him at ease and he expounded a little. He was quick to say you can’t punch your chick like you would a man. “There’s a difference,” he said, “between firm and being the kind of creepy wife beater you and I would knock on his ass. And then there’s sex.”

That made sense to me, especially since someone as cool as Sean Connery made it sound like we were compadres. Wait, did he just say sex?

“Cash, a girl’s bottom is a prime erogenous zone but the sexual arousal nerves in the bottom are buried in a layer of fat and require harder stimulation — like in spanking — to trigger them. You really should know all this. I have read your stuff. On your blog you always sound invincible.”

His sarcasm didn’t go unnoticed and I didn’t have sex last night so my temper was short.* “Hey, I am not sure I have to take that crap from a guy who starred in Meteor.”

“I nailed Natalie Wood every night during that shoot. Who have you done?

“I don’t see how that is relevant …”

“Easy, lad. All I am saying is I read that crap of yours about a line of women longer than the Wall of China and I am telling you, if you really want the chippies, star as James Bond in a movie some time.”

Well, I had to concede that point. I couldn’t even get cast as Rick in the Magnum P.I. feature film. But we still hadn’t gotten to the part about whether or not he slapped his ex-wife around.

“Cash, I have gone over this a million times. It was a different era. Before disco. We didn’t have guys wearing gym shorts to go to clubs. Do you think Leo Sayer could have gotten a girl in the ’60s?”

“No, you needed to be a man,” he continued. “Sometimes there are women who take it to the wire. That’s what they are looking for — the ultimate confrontation. They want a smack. Don’t tell me you’ve never done it.”

“Well, my girl isn’t from the ’60s. I’m pretty sure she’d set me on fire if I did that.”

“You never know, Cash. You never know. The divorce rate is probably a lot higher today because women don’t respect men enough. A good ass whippin’ might take care of some of that.”

I thanked Sir Sean for his time but came away feeling like I hadn’t come up with a slam-dunk defense for hittin’ your chick. Plus, today isn’t all bad. Today’s youth don’t wear gym shorts on television but they perfected the concept of “friends with benefits” and I think that is a reasonable trade-off. And I don’t care who invented that whole Brazilian Wax thing, they pretty much deserve a Nobel Prize.

* How did I not have sex last night, you wonder? Sweety said she had an appointment with her gynecologist the next morning. “Do you have an appointment with your dentist too?” I asked. This was, apparently, not the appropriate response.

What happened to Australia? Weren’t they once the country of loose women, plentiful booze and cute little kangaroos that box? What is this sudden fixation with “The Hoff?” Because their credibility has dropped a lot.

And Hoff? What were you thinking when the advertising people said, “We liked your last ad for Pepsi but it just wasn’t gay enough” ?

Did you simply reply, “How about if I get on a swing and scream like a pre-school girl? Would that be gay enough?”

Because if you did, they then said, “Yes. Yes it would.” And this ad was born.

I haven’t giggled this much since The Hoff claimed he was responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Some days I worry there won’t be enough funny stuff happening for me to get in a quality post and entertain the millions who visit this blog.

I shouldn’t worry. All I need to do is Google ‘David Hasselhoff’ and something good is bound to show up, like him having a hit record in Germany or his own hair. But this Pepsi advertisement for Australia is a huge bonus.

Now, I am not sure what he is doing here but I bet you all have some ideas. Come on, this is an easy one. You can make fun of the advertisment, him and Australia all in one shot. And Crocodile Dundee. Those jokes are always funny too. But not Linda Kozlowski. She was the only reason to watch that movie.

If there’s one thing I know, it’s Buddhism. So I can vouch for the fact that Buddhists are absolutely thrilled that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are getting married in a Buddhist ceremony precisely because it doesn’t really count to them. No one objects to being trivialized by western Hollywood types less than Buddhists. I don’t doubt that Brad is serious on some level – he is trying to co-adopt her kids one crazy way or another. And only in Hollywood is that even possible.

Besides, who doesn’t want to fake marry a girl and then adopt her children? Wait, did I just say that? I meant “Have sex with a travelling band of hot midget Gypsy women.” Twice.