Convenient: an “underwater robot” apparently “bumped into” the venting system that was channeling the Gulf oil spill, and the whole cap system is being rejiggered. According to the AP: “The current worst-case estimate of what’s spewing into the Gulf is about 2.5 million gallons a day.” Thanks, machines! And here is a weird thing that will make all the people who think Hillary Clinton murdered Vince Foster sit up and take note: Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen “said two people related to the spill response have been killed, one in a swimming pool accident and another on a vessel conducting oil skimming. He had no further details of the deaths.”

Here are some really rather scattered thoughts by yours truly, on the occasion of gay pride week, regarding being gay and being a consumer. Warning: uses the word “faggots” quite a lot.

Now there is a blog devoted to trashy Europop! There’s a tribute to Barbara HetmaÅ„ska! Between this and Fire Tom Friedman, there’s now a website for everything!

The new video from J. Cole, the first rapper signed to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label, features a marching band and lots of fiery explosions. But if you’re wondering where J.’s chain is, he says it’s like your girlfriend, in that it hasn’t come yet.

The 13-episode “fifth series” of “Doctor Who” comes to a conclusion on Saturday night in the UK, unless you are watching it on BBC America, in which case it concludes in like July or August or something. Who knows? I am pretty sure “no one” is watching it on the American schedule. In any event, I said some harsh things about a recent episode and I would like to take it all back now. I mean, I was right, and that episode had issues, but it has since been revealed that this series is awesome. The penultimate episode was A+, and though I expect there will be no Rose Tyler end-of-story-arc style weeping instigated in the finale, this is still some solid, solid Doctor Whoing. We express our apologies, nerds!

A month after a mini-war broke out in Kingston when the government bowed to U.S. pressure to arrest him, alleged drug lord and political power broker Christopher “Dudus” Coke has finally been taken into custody in Jamaica. Coke will likely be extradited to New York (that sort of happens all the time, doesn’t it?) where he has been charged with illegal trafficking of drugs and weapons.

Here are a few other good ones from Wikipedia’s list of famous aptronyms:

German author and professor of psychiatry Jules Angst
BBC meteorologist Sara Blizzard
Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt
New York Yankees general manager Brian Cashman
Toilet inventor Thomas Crapper
Milwaukee Brewers first-baseman Prince Fielder
Model and actress Megan Fox
Convicted embezzler Bernie Madoff
Founding chairman of the New York Port Authority Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge
Botanist Michael Pollan
Metallica producer Bob Rock
British poet William Wordsworth

Starting in September, love guv Eliot Spitzer is now your TV chitchat host on the CNN at 8 p.m. every night (that hour when you don’t watch TV). He’s been partnered with a lady. That lady is Kathleen Parker. She is not bright, basically, though she has a Pulitzer, just like Jennifer Jason Leigh did in the Hudsucker Proxy. CAREER WOMEN, what can you do, etc. I have already canceled this CNN show in my mind.

“What if Tom Cruise is a genius?”
-Uh oh. Knight and Day is raising some thorny questions, apart from the obvious one related to Cameron Diaz being “the same height as Mr. Cruise onscreen”.

This is a very funny-and very important-little Jeb Bush profile from Matt Bai in the Times today. It’s fascinating, and there are some very odd things about it!

1. “Jeb, who now runs his own consulting firm, seems at ease out of public office.”

That this passes without a word on who Bush’s clients are seems negligent. (They are: “everyone,” I gather. Jeb Bush & Associates is just a little shop-it’s all Bush, making connections, bringing friends together.) Also, describing him as being “out of public office”-although, obviously, true! He is not in public office!-barely begins to explain Bush’s extremely central position in all Florida (and even southern U.S.) politics. When Bai writes “He has been deeply involved as an informal adviser to the party’s candidates for governor,” that approaches expressing the kingmaking, political don position that Bush is in.

2. Jeb Bush “is said to have mentored Marco Rubio, the Senate challenger in Florida who gave the Tea Partiers a national lift.” Okay, so Rubio-a longtime lobbyist, which makes him the most unlikely person to be so successfully identified with the Tea Party-”is said,” in fact, to be exist at this level solely due to Bush’s steering and stewardship. When people talk about Rubio, they talk in almost literal terms about Jeb Bush being something even more than a Darth Vader to Rubio’s Luke Skywalker.

3. “…Some influential Republicans persist in believing that Mr. Bush might still make a strong candidate in 2012… Mr. Bush says he has no interest in running, because he wants to make money for his family, but his political allies seem to read a ‘for now’ into such statements.”

In fact this extremely rare appearance of Bush talking to a reporter, and this is something he does not much do, is related to these very “some influential Republicans,” which are, actually, “pretty much all of them,” and is also part of their quest to float a trial balloons of how a third Bush candidacy would go. (“Some” is probably properly to be said as “including Jeb himself.”)

As for money: well, being in office cut down on his income for a while, sure. That’s the problem with politics (though Cheney showed how to solve it). Bush left the Florida’s governor office with a net worth of a mere $1.3 million, and immediately renewed his real estate broker’s license, went on some fancy boards and became a consultant to Lehman Brothers.

This making “money for his family” is a strange thing to say, isn’t it? All of his children are grown and scattered around; two are in their 30s! His son George Prescott Bush, at first moved to Texas, went into real estate and has since disappeared from public view after joining the military; last anyone heard, he was going to be shipped overseas. Who knows what Noelle is up to, but the other Bush son, still in his 20s, also went into real estate as well as politics after college, at least in part because it’s an easy way to make money when you’re from a well-connected family and also because Jeb was, for a time, South Florida’s most successful real estate broker. Jeb Bush is often called a “real estate developer”; that is incorrect.

If things go even vaguely right, Jeb Bush will be a candidate for president, if not in 2012, then not long after. That America would even consider a third Bush is, to me, bizarre-even if Jeb Bush is the least objectionable of any Bush. But everyone knows that we’re a country where brands succeed almost solely based on name recognition. That advantage is incalculable.

Did I mention that I kind of really like “Party Down”? Oh, right, I did! The second season comes to a close this Friday night at 10 on Starz, but the finale features the long-awaited return of Jane Lynch as Constance, who has hired the team to cater her wedding. Here’s a clip from the very beginning of the episode, which guest stars Alex Rocco. Enjoy. I really, really like this show.