Far Out

Q: What do Martha Stewart, space tourism, and Microsoft Word have in common?
A: More that you think.

Sometimes we make fun of movies for being too ridiculous and far-fetched.... what about when real life is too weird to take seriously?

Introducing Charles Simonyi, former Microsoft employee, and ¨chief architect¨ of MS Word and Excel. Recently Charles paid over $20 million to ride shotgun on a Russion rocket to the International Space Station. That makes him Space Tourist #5, and the self-proclaimed First Nerd in Space. He spent almost two weeks in space, documenting his trip with blog entries, photos, and vidoes, on his website charlesinspace.com.

The Russian cosmonauts he rode up with have awesome names like Oleg Kotov and Fyodor Yurchikhin (pronounced exactly like ¨your chicken¨). In one video on the website, they are asked how Charles performed during the flight up. In an incredibly thick, almost cartoon-like Russian accent, Dr. Your-Chicken responded, ¨Yes, ov course Charlez iz not professional cosmonut…. but ve dunt hav anny problem vis Charles. For us he iz vun ov crew member.¨ (Translation: ¨we don´t have any problem...¨ he´s ¨one of crew member.¨) Classic. If it were in a movie, we´d complain it was too corny.

And the icing on the cake... in Kazakhstan on launch day to see Charles off was none other than Charles´s ¨good friend¨ Martha Stewart. There was talk that Charles might be proposing from space. Yeah. Very, very weird.

PS -- Don´t worry, I´m not done posting about Honduras yet. Check back soon...