Bubble Boy On Balloon Boy

I call myself "bubble boy" because that's how I feel. I was overprotected as a kid, with my full knowledge and consent, but only rarely do I mean 'bubble boy' in that sense; comparatively speaking, I was much more adventurous than the majority of today's children, who spend their every waking minute watching one screen or another and who almost invariably get chauffered to school each and every day.

I call myself "bubble boy" with crystal clarity and even a touch of pride about my naivete. Truth is, I don't understand people. Sometimes this is, admittedly, a handicap, even a serious one. Sometimes, though--increasingly often in this latter age, I contend--it keeps me from going completely off the rails.

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You just never know what popular culture's gonna vomit up next. News event: Boy flies off in homemade balloon, and practically before the damn thing is off the ground, it's all over the Internet. T-shirts are being hawked, because, hey, who cares about a six-year-old kid when there's money to be made?

Turns out it's a hoax. Sad to say, these days that's my first reaction whenever I hear anything like this. Sometimes I've got absolutely zero evidence to that effect and yet I'm still sure of it. Kid's missing? Really? Are you sure? Maybe his parents are just attention-whores. Let's test that hypothesis, first. Hey, they've been on Wife Swap and a few other television shows, and there was at one point some sort of deal with them to create a reality series. Interesting, interesting. And the dad variously states the balloon's for "alternative transportation" and for experiments on finding extraterrestrial life. Yeah.

Let's just wait a little while and see if the kid's found, say, in a box in his attic. The sheriff in the case noted "the suggestion that the boy ... was coached to hide seems inconceivable." Not to me, it doesn't. I don't know what attitude's worse, frankly: my instant suspicion or somebody else's instant avarice.

But what really gets me about this case is what usually gets me. No forethought. You're a total dickweed using your six-year-old to get international attention. You've concocted this elaborate scam, forcing authorities to spend many thousand dollars searching for nothing. You've even managed to get an international airport shut down. Good on you, sir.

It goes without saying you made sure there's no video of the whole sorry event, right? And when you coached your six-year-old moneymaker to hide, you also made sure he wouldn't do anything silly once found, like blurt out "you guys said we did this for the show". Right? Because that would be just dumb. It would mean that instead of making money, you might be forced to pay lots and lots of money. You might have your kid taken away from you, which probably means very little to you except that everybody around will know just what sort of parent you are. Kind of puts a crimp in the bank account. Kind of spoils the fantasy-reality you've spent so much time and effort crafting. Kind of makes you a class-A idiot.