Octopodial Chrome

A hairy lobster has been discovered in the Pacific. A truly strange looking creature.

Ben Stein has just written a remarkable column at E! Online, his final under the Monday Night at Morton’s tagline. It is a profound reflection on the nature of celebrity and human worth, and is quite unusual for normal entertainment fare. You need to read this, now. Some quotes:

Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world./p>

And:

We put couples with incomes of $100 million a year on the covers of our magazines. The noncoms and officers who barely scrape by on military pay but stand on guard in Afghanistan and Iraq and on ships and in submarines and near the Arctic Circle are anonymous as they live and die.

I am no longer comfortable being a part of the system that has such poor values, and I do not want to perpetuate those values by pretending that who is eating at Morton’s is a big subject.

And finally:

We are not responsible for the operation of the universe, and what happens to us is not terribly important. God is real, not a fiction, and when we turn over our lives to Him, he takes far better care of us than we could ever do for ourselves.

In a word, we make ourselves sane when we fire ourselves as the directors of the movie of our lives and turn the power over to Him. I came to realize that life lived to help others is the only one that matters. This is my highest and best use as a human.

I can put it another way. Years ago, I realized I could never be as great an actor as Olivier or as good a comic as Steve Martin–or Martin Mull or Fred Willard–or as good an economist as Samuelson or Friedman or as good a writer as Fitzgerald. Or even remotely close to any of them.

But I could be a devoted father to my son, husband to my wife and, above all, a good son to the parents who had done so much for me. This came to be my main task in life.

Ben Stein is—as though anyone needed to know—the actor most famous for Bueller…Bueller.

A fellow has designed Fourth Amendment Shipping Tape; it has the entire Fourth Amendment printed on itself, and every time the jackbooted Homeland Security thugs open your luggage, they have to literally slice the fourth amendment in half to perform their unconstitutional search (and possible seizure). Certainly, the animals who perform the work won’t care, but at least we can feel somewhat better as our personal belongings are illegally pawed through and stolen.