Take Your Protein Pills and Put Your Helmets On

At long last, our national nightmares are over: Anna Nicole is interred, Britney may or may not be scribbling 666 on her head in rehab (if you believe the British press), and Scooter Libby's been found guilty on 4 of 5 counts. But what's next for my favorite space case, Lisa Nowak. We know she's not being charged for attempted murder. Today's Orlando Sentinel has an article with email snippets from Colleen Shipman's emails to Bill Oefelein giving us some framing for the story.

Frankly the snippets released in the story have me siding with Nowak on this. From the Sentinel's story:

"First urge will be to rip your clothes off," reads one of the notes from Air Force Capt. Colleen Shipman to Oefelein while he was aboard shuttle Discovery in December. "But honestly, love, I want you to totally and thoroughly enjoy your hero's homecoming."

***

During his 13-day mission as the pilot of Discovery, he carried a charm given him by Shipman and photographed it floating inside the shuttle cabin, records show. He later e-mailed the picture to Shipman, but she had trouble seeing the trinket.

"I don't see the charm though! *pant, pant*," Shipman e-mailed back to Oefelein. "It's like those erotic hidden picture games that they have at the bar ..... only you're fully clothed in the picture."

***

Oefelein previously had given Nowak a key to his Houston apartment as well as his password for access to his home computer, he said. Police found copies of his password as well as Shipman's handwritten flight itinerary from Houston to Orlando when they arrested Nowak at the airport, records show.

During a visit to Oefelein's apartment, Shipman told police she noticed some information about Nowak saved on his computer. He explained that Nowak sometimes used his computer, Shipman said.

"I told him that it made me very uncomfortable and it made me want to pull away from this relationship cause it made me think that he didn't quite cut ties maybe," Shipman said in her statement.

A few days later, Shipman's concern proved prophetic.

"We went to a club in Houston," Shipman recalled in her interview with police. "And then we came home and we had a few drinks, and we were laying in bed and he called me Lisa."