Our favorite little asterisk has run several gems in the past year, but this one, about the first astronauts to go up after the 2003 Columbia disaster, took the top prize. You don’t get to see a national tragedy reduced to a dimwitted sexual double-entendre very often. Kudos. To be fair, this headline appeared in The Times four days before it appeared in TBT*. If TBT* ever wrote their own stories, we promise we would’ve picked one of those.
This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2005.