Wow. Letterman, “Joaquin, I’m sorry you could not be here tonight.” Priceless!

It’s 1,500 feet across from cliff to cliff, and more than 1,000 chilling feet down to the bottom of the Royal Gorge on the Arkansas River near Canon City, Colo.

“You’re going to see me on the other side. This isn’t an ‘Evel-Knievel, get-a-lot-of-media-out-and-just-screw-it-up’ gig, you know,” stuntman Eric Scott told CBS station KCNC-TV correspondent Rick Sallinger prior to the flight.
[...]
With spectators watching heart in hand, Scott ascended–and 21 seconds of suspense later–was back standing on terra firma, on the other side of the gorge.

“Concrete never felt so good,” he said.

Too cool. Here is video from the flight:

For another perspective, here is TV coverage of the event:

Here is more video from an earlier attempt to fly into the gorge and return to the launch sight. What’s cool here is, you get to see what he sees from the helmet cam. That is a long way down.

Time to buy one of these babies!

The deer actually got up an ran off. Unbelievable.

Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey was rushed to the hospital Thursday night after collapsing and losing consciousness during a speech on the war on terrorism, a Justice Department official said.

Mukasey slumped to the floor near the conclusion of his remarks before the Federalist Society’s annual dinner at a northwest Washington hotel, said Peter A. Carr, chief spokesman for the department.

Here is the video of his collapse and it is a bit disturbing:

The latest word on Mukasey is he seems to be OK, but they are keeping an eye on him:

Justice Department officials including Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip gathered at the hospital. In a formal statement released near midnight, department spokesman Peter Carr said: “The Attorney General is conscious, conversant and alert. He is receiving excellent care and appreciates all of the good wishes and prayers he has received. The doctors will keep him overnight for further observations.”

Hopefully, Mukasey will be fine and this will all be something we laugh about in the late night talk shows or Saturday Night Live in the weeks to come.

Mitch Mitchell, the jazzy and versatile British drummer in the Jimi Hendrix Experience, died Wednesday in a hotel in Portland, Oregon. He was 62 and had recently finished a national tribute tour, Experience Hendrix.

The cause was unknown, said Bob Merlis, a publicist for the tour.

Mitchell was one of two Englishmen in the Experience, the group that catapulted Hendrix to fame in the late 1960s.

Along with the bassist Noel Redding, who died in 2003, Mitchell was recruited in a rush in the fall of 1966, after the journeyman Hendrix had been discovered in a New York club and whisked to London by Chas Chandler of the Animals.

Rest in peach Mitch. I can only imagine the reunion tour that is happening in heaven right now.

WASHINGTON — Federal investigators probing the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis said Thursday that the structure was heavily loaded with construction equipment — equivalent to the weight of a 747 airplane — hours before a set of improperly designed joints failed catastrophically.

The added weight, combined with errors in the original design of the so-called gussett plates, appeared to produce the breaking point in the Aug. 1, 2007, disaster that killed 13 people and injured 145.

Too much construction weight added to the failure? The equipment was like parking a 747 on the bridge? That squealing noise you hear is the sound of thousands of attorneys racing toward Minneapolis. Yikes.

In LA this week, news came out that Paula Goodspeed committed suicide near Abdul’s home:

Paula Goodspeed, 30, was found dead, an apparent suicide, Tuesday evening in her car, which was parked a few doors down from Abdul’s Los Angeles home. Reuters reported that prescription pills, along with CDs and pictures of Abdul, were found in the car.

“It appears to be a suicide by overdose,” Detective Robert Bub of the Los Angeles Police Department told Reuters.

Rest in peace Paula.

Leave it to Lindsay Lohan to be the first celebrity to offer support and excitement for her candidate while at the same time insulting him. In a recent interview with Access Hollywood’s Maria Menounos this week, the troubled starlet stated her excitement for our country’s “first colored” president.

Here is the actual video from the Access Hollywood website.

In listening to the interview, she actually said, “it’s our first colored president”. Are you kidding me? How can someone claim to be involved in the race for President and be so far out of touch with the world today? This is not the 1970s and you are not Archie Bunker.

See what happens when actors go off-script.

Leno: “How have you been doing?”

McCain: “Well, I’ve been sleeping like a baby. I sleep two hours, wake up, and cry. Sleep two hours, wake up, and cry.”

Here are all three parts of the interview:

This interview was a nice tie-in with Veteran’s Day and reminds me just how good McCain can be with the media. This truly seems to be his home.

We’ve all heard the stories about Palin’s $150,000 wardrobe, but how that wardrobe was purchased sheds additional light on the incident and Palin herself. As reported in the NY Times:

On Wednesday, two top McCain campaign advisers said that the clothing purchases for Ms. Palin and her family were a particular source of outrage for them. As they portrayed it, Ms. Palin had been advised by Nicolle Wallace, a senior McCain aide, that she should buy three new suits for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul in September and three additional suits for the fall campaign. The budget for the clothes was anticipated to be from $20,000 to $25,000, the officials said.

Instead, in a public relations debacle undermining Ms. Palin’s image as an everywoman “hockey mom,” bills came in to the Republican National Committee for about $150,000, including charges of $75,062 at Neiman Marcus and $49,425 at Saks Fifth Avenue. The bills included clothing for Ms. Palin’s family and purchases of shoes, luggage and jewelry, the advisers said.

Sorry, but this sounds like an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies. “Todd, get out of that cement-pond and load-up the truck. We got us a blank check and we gona shop in the big city! Gona get me some luggage and clothes for the young’uns.”

But wait, there’s more.

Fox News reported Wednesday that Palin’s lack of knowledge on some topics also strained relations. Carl Cameron reported that campaign sources told him Palin had resisted coaching before her faltering Katie Couric interviews; did not understand that Africa was a continent rather than a country; and could not name the three nations that are part of the North American Free Trade Agreement — the United States, Canada and Mexico.

Africa as a country? Ouch. If you missed the Palin/Katie Couric interview (because they didn’t have electricity in your cave), here is a taste.

It hurts just watching that again. I still can’t make any sense out of those incoherent ramblings. Clearly, she could have benefited from some serious preparation from staffers who knew what they were talking about. After all, this does appear to be her first rodeo. Perhaps the staffers were distracted:

The disclosures are made in “How He Did It, 2008″, in Newsweek’s Special Election Project, a behind-the-scenes account of the presidential election produced the day after the polls closed.

The magazine also claims that at the GOP convention in St. Paul, when aides Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her, Ms Palin walked into the room wearing only a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat to Todd, adding: “I’ll be just a minute.”

This story just gets better and better. What is really freighting is she appears to be the best candidate the Republicans have to offer in 2012. Clearly, this is the time for some serious change.