Not-Ready-For-Primetime Posts

• Judith Regan, the one who was going to publish that O.J. Simpson book about how he might have done it, has been fired. Read all about it here, but riddle me this - according to the article, she has been known to complain that her more literary side was often overlooked during her tenure at HarperCollins. Her more literary side. This from a woman who published Juiced, the sensationalist account of how Jose Canseco brought steroids to baseball, and How To Make Love Like A Porn Star, by Jenna Jameson. (Actually, I'll bet that one has to do with steroids, too.) But, you know, maybe the O.J. book would have changed all of that. I guess we'll never know. Maybe she can call James Frey - last I heard, he was looking for a publisher.

• I learned from watching National Lampoon's Vacation that they don't close the state of Florida. Maybe they should think about it, though. Earlier today, MSNBC reported, by way of the AP, that a convicted murderer in Florida took almost twice as long to die during the lethal injection process as normal, according to this article. Apparently the medical examiner's findings contradict the findings of prison officials - the M.E. says that the first injection missed the vein and went into the guy's arm flesh, but the prison people say that the chap had liver disease, which necessitated a second death cocktail because apparently his liver could not metabolize the poison. Governor Jeb Bush suspended the death penalty in the state of Florida, because of what happened (or, more accurately, because of what failed to happen properly). That might have been noble if these kinds of things went on every day, but they don't; he could have kept his mouth shut, and there still would not have been any lethal injections for awhile. This in the same state that printed general election ballots for the 2000 election that were so confusing that people who thought they were voting for Al Gore actually ended up voting for Pat Buchanan. They can't get an election right, and they can't get lethal injection right. Anything not going wrong down there in the Sunshine State?

• And, last but not least, there is this: As if the view into the Grand Canyon was not already, er...grand...enough, now you just might be able to step out past the edge of the canyon and look down into the abyss. That's right, something called the Skywalk is being built in the part of the Grand Canyon that belongs to the Hualapai Indians. The article I'm looking at now is on CNN. Construction began last April, and it's scheduled to open in March (2007, I presume). The project's architect says that the structure will be able to withstand canyon winds of 100 miles per hour, hold a few hundred people (that's an AWFULLY vague number, I think) without bending, and have shock absorbers to keep it from "wobbling up and down like a diving board and making people woozy." Yeah, because wobbliness is the only thing about this idea that would make people woozy. I'm up in the air on this one, so to speak. Don't you suppose someone is going to figure out how to jump off of this thing and commit suicide? Granted, there are plenty of other places in the Grand Canyon where one can off one's self, but most of those involve taking serious chances with bouncing quite a lot on the way down and probably enduring a remarkable amount of pain. This one would have you going 4000 feet straight down - à la Lord Denethor in The Lord Of The Rings - to a single destination point where death awaits with open arms. On the other hand, the idea of looking down through glass into the bottom of the Grand Canyon has a certain appeal. I say we all take a trip out there and get up on the ledge and put our foreheads to the glass, to see if we can see Cameron's dad down there - who's with me?