Aloft
Associated Press / NASA TV
I’ve been known to bad-mouth the shuttle in these parts — mostly a tough love thing — but I gotta admit that I got a little choked up to see it leap off the pad this morning. Bravo, NASA.
Eileen Collins and the crew had what looked like a flawless ascent. CNN noted that her voice before the solid boosters peeled off was shaky, but c’mon she’s on top of 6.6 million pounds of thrust. Like trying to have a phone conversation sitting on the roof of a locomotive.
NASA’s launch announcer always has a brief prepared tag line right when the countdown goes from minus to plus. This time he said “… beginning America’s new journey to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.” This is interesting because none of that journey involves the shuttle. NASA is looking forward, so much so that they used the return to space of the shuttle to reaffirm its retirement. I like this.
And the camera on the external tank! I’ve seen other launches from this angle, but never from the shuttle. That was damn cool. I’m scrounging for footage of the separation of the tank from the orbiter — something no one had ever seen previously. Amazing how smooth that was and to see the orbiter engines direct it to orbit.
No word on the fuel sensor gauge, but, as a friend who had a flaky gauge on his Wagoneer noted, the key is just to jot down your mileage as you tank up. Isn’t that what mission specialists are for?
Friendly confinement
For Father’s Day I received a behind-the-scenes tour of Wrigley Field with my wife and oldest son. What a gift. If an unsanctified place can be holy, Wrigley is it.
One thing that struck me is how completely devoid of advertising the park is. You sense this when watching a game, but that’s the thing about a lack of in-your-face advertisement: when it isn’t there you focus on what matters and don’t consciously register its absence. In fact, you have to look really hard to find any advertisement. Up until a few years ago there was none, zero, zip. But now it exists on seat-back cupholders (which, if you are looking at that during a Cubs game, you got bigger problems), occasional scrolls on the three small LED boards, and — during big games — on the green screen in back of home plate. The green screen is particularly Wrigleyesque in that visitors to the park don’t ever see the superimposed ads. Only the shleps at home.
The other thing that really strikes you is what a shit-hole Wrigley is off the field. Built in 1914, the park is just a tad younger than Fenway — and it shows. The press rooms are like veal pens, the visiting team locker room is laughably awful — it actually smells like mildew, and I bet the Cubs clubhouse is less spacious than many minor league locker rooms. But hey. It is a ballpark. For ballplaying. No reason to dally in the locker rooms. Just get out there and play on the best field in baseball.
Fans on the rooftops. The L clanking by. Sailboats on the lake visible from the cheap seats. Manual scoreboard. Old Style beer. Amen.
Terror incognita
News from London. News from Egypt.
The latest from the UK shows just how cowardly terrorism is as an act. The image of a smoldering, confused would-be suicide bomber running out of a tube car looking for his partner — but you said it would blow me up — is simply pathetic. Too incompetent even to remove himself from the gene pool correctly. Terrorism is like any kind of media-borne meme. The more it spreads initially the more powerful it is. But there is a point at which it saturates and after fails to have the impact it once did. When horror turns to anger terrorism has failed. The problem is that terrorism is also a last-ditch effort, an act of desperation, and when people are desperate logic rarely works. It will take a long time for these cowards to realize that the initial power of their acts has long since dissipated.
I was thinking about why the London transit system, particularly the Underground, is such a target and I think the answer is fundamental to terrorism itself. Mass media of course is the accomplice of terrorism, the mechanism for global broadcast and amplification that allows a relatively small act to frighten millions. Terrorism succeeds or fails on this basic premise of small-to-large. The tube system is nothing but a physical network, the very embodiment of a vast, interconnected system where a small event ramifies outward until a much larger effect is achieved: total system shutdown. But there is a difference. Mass media is unidirectional; the tube is a true network. Media can only echo, amplify, send out. The tube — and all networks — adapts, re-routes, compensates. Human society is a network too and it adapts just like the tube does. Another lesson likely lost on the desperate.
And then Egypt. Beautiful, idyllic Sharm. When I was there in 2003 a shopkeeper ran after me on the boardwalk and begged me to come to his store. I thought he was just a pushy bazaar denizen, but when I got inside with my brother and co-worker he pulled out a book and showed us entries from people all over the world. He asked visitors to write something representative of their country, a kind of guestbook passport. He had dozens of European entries, but no American. It took me a moment, but I ended up writing the words to “Take My Out To The Ballgame.” The shopkeeper loved it and asked me to sing it. I’m no singer, but I didn’t care. I did my best. National pride, I guess. The shopkeeper shook my hand, hugged me, and sent us out with a massive smile. I have nothing but wonderful memories of Sharm. It cuts deeply to see the destruction there, like watching a gorgeous person senselessly disfigured. But there’s no fear, no terror. Only anger.
Three movies you do not need to see
I had close to 48 hours of flight time while in and in route to China so I watched a bunch of movies, my full Netflix backlog plus a bunch of DVD’s I had ripped to my HD. I scored with House of Flying Daggers (though I didn’t love it quite like I did Hero) and Napoleon Dynamite (the dramatic power of a vacant teenage stare!), but oh did I bomb on my other selections. I don’t mind bad movies, movies who know they are awful and revel in it. But truly terrible movies try real hard and still suck.
You know you have a winner with a line like this: “For maximum damage we use bullets coated in a photon-accelerated luminescent resin. Cuts right through ’em.” For you laypeople, that’s a glow-in-the-dark bullet. Scary! Alone In The Dark was incomprehensible. It started with many paragraphs of written prologue, apparently because test audiences were completely befuddled. It didn’t help. And the funny part is that this movie derives from a game (never a recipe for success) and intends to provide the backstory to it. So when the backstory needs an explicit backstory you know you’re not telling the story right. Part Aliens, part Relic, part Night of the Living Dead, part Men in Black, with a silhouetted Top Gun love-making interlude and dashes of glamband hard-rockin’ video, Alone in the Dark isn’t comically bad (that’d be watchable) — it is irresponsibly bad.
Boogeyman wasn’t much better. When the one and only plot point of the whole movie is for a grown man to confront the fears from his bedroom of youth there just isn’t a lot of room for drama or even fear. The dark is scary. We get it.
Hide and Seek could have been decent. Dakota Fanning and Robert DeNiro do a pretty good job. But it is a plodding movie. The payoff twist at the end doesn’t offset the pain of making it there. Though seeing Elisabeth Shue shoved out of a second-story window is almost worth it.
Decompile
Sentence diagramming. Man, did I love sentence diagramming. I can almost hear Sister Bernadette, my obese, structuralist 7th grade teacher, coming up with ever-obscurer sentences to slice-and-dice. It is so out of vogue to teach sentence diagramming now. I’m not even sure they teach the parts of speech anymore. This is a shame. Diagramming was like a game, a kind of puzzle where you were forcing organic, fungible elements of language into a Cartesian, controllable structure. Diagramming a sentence was like decompiling a program, with similar messiness. There are tools now, but nothing beats the one-on-one encounter with a hellishly convoluted syntax:
All this … the reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which these dreams of oriental imagery and mythological tortures impressed upon me.
Never heard of sentence diagramming? I know some people similarly handicapped. Read up at Wikipedia.
Blown home
Typhoon Haitang has blown through Taiwan and buried itself on the mainland. As category 5 hurricanes go this one was surprisingly mild, I’m told. The eye skirted Taipei to the south so we missed the worst, though it did get damn windy there for a few hours. Trees that were individually lashed down were uprooted and rows of parked scooters were scattered like Matchbox cars, but there was very little flooding and no broken windows that I could see. Frankly, it was anticlimactic — which is probably exactly how extreme weather should be. From my hotel window I could see a lone 7-11 convenience store. It was my little measure of how bad things were getting. It never closed.
Unrelated. If a cell phone company can know enough about your whereabouts on the global network to charge you international roaming rates then surely the technology exists to warn callers that a call recipient is in a radically different time zone, no? It would be great to receive an alert like “Are you sure you want to dial [name]? It is 3 AM in his timezone right now.” Oh, and to the person who called for a password in the middle of the night: I have virtually no recollection of our conversation. How’s that for password security?
Time to go home.
It’s a long march to the melon
The meals in China have truly been great. We’ve commented repeatedly on how the communal Lazy Susan-style delivery of multiple dishes is the perfect way for Westerners to encounter new foods. Take a bit, leave a bit, or just keep on spinning the wheel if you don’t like black jellied mystery meat. The only difficulty is that it is hard to know where you are in a meal. The number of dishes is sometimes unknown even to our hosts. Watermelon is always the last dish, but, as you learn quickly, it can be a long march to the melon.
Thanks to Jack Blanchard for this exquisite piece of gastronomical propaganda. Gastroprop?
The beast approacheth
Haitang is now a Category 5 Super Typhoon. And it is headed straight for the island of Taiwan. The eye will likely make landfall on Monday night. The red arrow helps you locate me. If you look closely I’m the one inadvisably standing in front of a big plate glass window.
Who would have guessed my first hurricane would be in the Pacific? Batten down the hatches!
Divine ship
The day after NASA scrubbed its return to space China announced that Shenzhou VI, its second manned flight, would go into orbit in October. China Daily reports that the announcement came on the occasion of the handover of a meteorological satellite from its maker to the Chinese government. Let’s call it what it was, though. They’re rubbing it in NASA’s face!
Keeping with the China and excrement theme, Shenzhou VI will apparently contain a new toilet. Useful, since there’ll be two taikonauts this time.
By the way, there’s an official bottled water of Chinese taikonauts. Can you even imagine such a thing in America nowadays?
Mission Elapsed Time: 20:00:21:06:42:40
Recently this blog (and my Flickr account) turned 20 years old, forever in Internet years. I went back through it all, retracing digital footprints made on what feels like a different planet. Here are some highlights.
The Terror Tourist
A roughly monthly exploration of places in horror fiction — real or imagined, geographical or psychological — culled from The Heavy Leather Horror Show.
Subscribe to the podcast or the email newsletter or just read through the archives posted here.
The Ampcamper
How I hauled myself, two teens, an 80 lb dog, and a whole load of crap 4000+ miles across six states in twenty days using an electric vehicle. And survived to tell the tale.
