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Lake Butthead.

Last month, as I was walking through the parking lot to my office, I wondered, “Whatever happened to Mathias Rust?”

There was no significant provocation for this. No one was running a “history of punk-rock Cold War pranks” or “I Love the ’80s” special. It was just the idle maunderings of this brain of mine.

For those of you who don’t remember herr Rust, here’s the skinny:

In 1987, a certain someone flew a little Cessna plane into Moscow and landed it in the middle of Red Square. The Russians immediately arrested the 19-year-old German pilot, and threw Mathias Rust into jail for an 8-year sentence. He served 18 months before getting out.

The damage to the Soviet rep was done, though. There are some who read this act to mean that the great Soviet military wasn’t All That, and that Gorbachev’s double-whammy of trying to keep up with Reagan’s SDI initiative and getting hit with Rust’s merry prank were the kickers that led to Glasnost.

The rest of Rust’s story is filled with some lowlights, but he’s supposedly living in Berlin with his 2nd wife, and maybe he’s got his house in order. There’s a website called “Whatever Happened To” that relates stories like Rust’s, a service for which I’m quite appreciative.

I wonder how tough it is to live a normal day-to-day after your crowning achievement comes at the age of 19. I mean, since I live in my hometown, I used to wonder this about some of my high-school classmates, who kinda epitomized Springsteen’s Glory Days.

But it’s one thing when that achievement was making a great touchdown catch, and another thing when you’re known for pantsing a world superpower that was devoting 25% of its GNP to its military.

I hope he’s living pretty peacefully, maybe having a kid or two, and getting them ready for flight lessons.

I knew the coffee was strong out in Washington state, but I had no idea it was strong enough to make the dead rise up and vote in the last election.

Lil Jon and BusinessWeek: perfect together.

Will Eisner died today. He’s a pretty legendary figure in the history of the comics. I would’ve met him a few years ago at a small press comics expo, but he got stuck in Florida, due to bad weather, and had to skip the show.

Also, Kelly Freas died on Sunday. He illustrated a ton of science fiction book and magazine covers, and was best known for the cover of a Queen album (that one with the big robot). I didn’t know Freas’ work that well, but he did paint a cover for my friend Paul’s book Strange Trades.

I would’ve written about some of the celebrity deaths that occurred between Christmas and New Year, but I would’ve made a really tasteless joke. So bad, even I knew it was tasteless.

It seems that Edge (definitely the best online magazine named after a shaving gel) has posted the results of its annual question to scientists and ‘science-minded thinkers’: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”

The answers are pretty neat, though sometimes high-falutin’. I’m glad they didn’t pose the question to laymen like me, because I would’ve had to respond, “That the 1997 NBA Slam Dunk Contest was fixed.”

Nice article by Niall Ferguson about the historical precedent to today’s Russia. Check it out.

The site was down for about 12 hours on Monday. Evidently, my web-host was doing some sorta New Year’s updating of the hardware, and it All Went Awry. Sorry if you didn’t get your expected dose of Virtual Memories.

Not that there’s a ton to write about. My girl & I spent New Year’s day down in Princeton, where we met an old friend of mine for lunch. Then it was back home to watch the third installment of that Lord of the Rings.

I enjoyed the heck out of the movies, but it sorta bummed me out that, when you get down to it, evil only loses by accident.

The official VM girlfriend and I spent New Year’s Eve watching the first two Lord of the Rings flicks. No, seriously. She loves those movies, but I’d never seen them before, and after our disastrous attempt at watching all three Matrix flicks back in November on Showtime, we decided to make a New Year’s event out of it.

I did the reverse-tourist thing during the movies: while others watched the LOTR flicks and then went to New Zealand to see the sites, I watched the movies and pointed out likely locales for some of the scenes, from my travels in 2003. “If you can’t do it half-assed, do it ass-backwards.”

My buddy Tina, an Australian I met during that trip, sent me a nice holiday package the day before, which was a nice precursor to our geek-out evening.

At the end of the second movie, it was 11:55, so we clicked over to ABC for Regis Philbin’s fill-in on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. We drank bad champagne and toasted the New Year in private, a pleasant change from past years, which tended to involve a lot of drinking.

As ABC went to a commercial break, and Snoop Dogg gave a videotaped “Get Well Soon” message to Dick Clark, replete with cryptic gang symbols, I raised my glass to my love, and said, “Let these movies be the most drama we deal with in the new year.”

Be well, everybody. I’ll try to write more, and on more varied subjects, in the year ahead. That’s the only resolution you’re getting out of me this time around.

Build your own Lionel Richie head.

My girlfriend thinks we should follow this process to build our own Christopher Hitchens head, but I’m afraid that it’d have its own gravity field and destroy the world.

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