Spaceballs

12:30 PM -- If you're planning on improving on your golf swing this holiday weekend, then spare a thought for Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin who will be to taking a zero-gravity shot during a spacewalk today.

A Canadian golf club maker has reportedly paid the Russian Space Agency for the promotional stunt, which will take place outside the International Space Station. "Tiger" Tyurin's shot, however, has not been without controversy. Those killjoys at NASA, according to the BBC, held up the shot for months while experts made sure that the golf ball would not make its way back to the space station.

Just imagine it -- the International Space Station drifts off into the outer reaches of the galaxy after its systems are wrecked by not an asteroid or a meteor shower, but by an errant golf ball. Pretty impressive, eh? Even my uncle Joe would struggle to cause that much damage with one of his legendary slices.

Apparently, station commander Michael Lopez-Alegria will be filming Tyurin's historic drive, so whatever the outcome, it will be recorded for posterity -- maybe. Let's just hope that NASA manages to keep its hands on the footage, and avoids a repeat of its recent storage snafu, when the agency misplaced some 13,000 magnetic tapes from the Apollo space missions. (See Houston, We've Got a Storage Problem and NASA Goes to the Dark Side.)

In the meantime, enjoy the holidays, and remember -- swing with the hips and keep your left arm straight!James Rogers, Senior Duffer, Byte and Switch