July 2011 Archives

My colleague Jaquandor sums up my feelings very nicely:

I would like, just once, to see "compromise" in American politics mean something other than "Republicans get very nearly everything they want while Democrats get very nearly nothing of what they want."

I'd also like to see Democrats just stand up for what they supposedly believe in. The damned ship is going down, so why not go down fighting? Does the Democratic response to everything need to be to resignedly remove their pants while saying, "Well, now, let's just close our eyes and think of America"?!

As long as I've got the blood all angried up with politics anyhow, let me say something about this debt-ceiling nonsense that's been dragging on for weeks and weeks: enough of this bullshit! It's time to stop all the pointless grandstanding and just raise the damn thing already. It's a simple administrative procedure that's been done dozens of times in the past, and there's no reason why this occasion has to have everything riding on it. No reason, aside from the Republicans being their usual overbearing, obstructionist asshats, of course.

Don't talk to me about the debt or our out-of-control spending either. The fact is, Republicans don't give a shit about the debt unless there's a Democrat in the White House. They just don't. The debt ceiling was raised 18 times during Reagan's term as president, and nobody said a word about it. Dick Cheney said, and I quote, "deficits don't matter." Yes, I know it's grown much larger in the handful of years since the Dark Lord shot off his mouth, but I stand by my statement: nobody would be talking about this issue now if the president had a little R after his name when he appears on television.

It's painfully obvious to me what this debt-ceiling fight is about. It's about the same thing all the fights in Washington have been since at least the days of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America: scoring political points. Finding a way to dominate, to set the agenda, to frame the argument, and ultimately, to assume and retain power. It is about the Republicans thinking that finally, after decades of trying, they've found a weapon they can use to bludgeon the New Deal to death, and to (hopefully) deny a president they've never accepted as legitimate a second term. Maybe even finding a way to impeach him, depending on what action he's forced to take by their infuriating intransigence. In other words, Republicans are willing to destroy the country's credit rating and very likely its economic recovery (such as it is) in order to score some points in their never-ending political game. They're not frightened of imploding everything because they don't believe the federal government has any right to exist anyway.

And then there's the Democrats, proving yet again what a pack of craven pussies they are. They've basically handed the Republicans everything they wanted and haven't fought for anything progressives want. Way to go, you cowardly slime. Not that the Republicans have accepted any of it. That's largely why I think this whole conflict is nothing more than political: the Dems have rolled over for them and they still won't play ball. Which is pretty much how things have been for the last three years.

Finally, there's President Obama. Barack, my friend, I've stuck with you for three years even as you've wimped out on single-payer healthcare and stubbornly refused to put your foot down with the lunatics on the right, who would happily send you to Gitmo in the delusional belief that you're a Muslim sleeper agent raised from birth to become a president just so you can bring down the country from the inside. But it's finally reaching a point where you're embarrassing me, man. Stop with the "Mr. Reasonable" bullshit already. The Republicans are not going to deal with you. They are not going to accept you and they are not ever going to like you. Just stop banging your head against that wall of bipartisanship, rally your own troops, and try being more of the flaming liberal the right claims you are. Tell them no, they're not going to gut Medicare and Social Security, they're going to grow the hell up and do the responsible, logical, decent thing that will go a long ways toward fixing everything: let the Bush tax cuts expire instead. But of course, you won't do that, because you're really not a flaming liberal, are you? By any sane measure of your actions, you're actually a moderate Republican in the same mold as Dwight Eisenhower. Too bad you don't have the prosperous times and sane Congress Eisenhower was blessed with.

This is a dangerous moment in history, I think... we could finally be seeing the moment Grover Norquist prophesied, when federal government is shrunk down small enough to strangle. Some people rejoice at the thought. Let's hope they've been saving and investing wisely for their retirement. Because everybody does that, right? Right?

I don't suppose very many people outside of Utah have even heard the name Tim DeChristopher, so I'd better provide some back story before this evening's rant begins.

It all started in the waning days of the George W. Bush administration, December 2008, when Dubya authorized the BLM to auction off millions of acres of public land leases here in Utah -- some of which were uncomfortably close to the scenic landscapes of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks -- for oil and gas exploration. Many people, myself included, feel like the Bushies were trying to pull a fast one, handing their friends in the energy industry some prime real estate at dirt-cheap (so to speak) prices in a hastily organized deal while the rest of the country was distracted by the approaching spectacle of Barack Obama's inauguration. But some people noticed. And on the day of the auction, one of these people -- a 27-year-old economics student from the University of Utah named Tim DeChristopher -- decided to do something about it. He somehow got inside the auction and started bidding on parcels of redrock country himself. He later said his goal was simply to drive up the prices and make life a little uncomfortable for the energy-industry representatives in the room, but in a quirk of fate, he actually started winning auctions that he had no intention of paying for. He instantly became a hero to the environmental movement for successfully "monkey-wrenching" the corporations, and he later saw some vindication when the auction was ruled illegal because the proper protocols had not been followed, and most of the leases that had been sold were rescinded. But of course there was a price to pay for daring to cross the powerful people: he was charged with two felony crimes related to his disrupting the auction.

Because of the nature of this state -- vast tracts of undeveloped land that are breathtakingly beautiful, surprisingly fragile, and geologically rich, all at the same time -- Utah is often ground-zero for big environmental battles. Huge swaths of Utah's territory are owned by the federal government, which generates much resentment in a largely conservative state that, frankly, doesn't have a lot going for it aside from lots of open space. People in the outlying and very desolate parts of the state crave the jobs that oil and gas fields, as well as various types of mining operations, would bring. But naturally those very same regions are the unspoiled wild places that environmentalists want to ensure remain unspoiled, essentially locked away from the locals who would tear them up in search of something of more tangible value.

With those kinds of tensions percolating through the atmosphere, it probably goes without saying that DeChristopher's trial generated a lot of emotion, and a lot of theater. And as it happens, I've been a witness to much of it, due to the fact that I work right across the street from the federal courthouse. The plaza just west of my building has hosted a number of big -- well, big for Utah -- rallies in support of DeChristopher, attracting heavyweights lefties like Peter Yarrow of the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary; the actress Daryl Hannah; and Utah's own Terry Tempest Williams, an acclaimed naturalist and writer. It was all rather entertaining during the trial itself. But the fun ended this week, following DeChristopher's sentencing. (There was never any question he would be convicted, of course, not in this state. He may have been on trial in a federal court, but it was a federal court in downtown Salt Lake City, under the auspices of a judge who was born and raised here. And in this state, you do not cross Big Business or interfere with the free market and win your case. A casual glance at the comments in the Salt Lake Tribune suggest a not-insignificant percentage of Utahns would like to see him tarred and feathered. Of course, an also not-insignificant number of people would like to nominate him for sainthood. Utah also happens to share a lot of history with Edward Abbey, whose novel The Monkey Wrench Gang is said to have inspired radical environmentalism in the first place... yet another of those diametrical contrasts that make life here so interesting.)

DeChristopher was sentenced Tuesday to two years in a federal minimum-security prison as well as a fine of $10,000, which is surprisingly light in my opinion. Not because I think he deserved more, but because I expected the judge to throw the book at him. (The maximum sentence could have been a full ten years in prison.) His supporters on the plaza disagreed, however. They apparently thought he should've gotten simple probation. I've also heard they were angry because the judge hadn't allowed him to explain the necessity of his actions in order to do something to limit climate change. Whatever was motivating them, they were getting ugly by the time I got off work. And this is where my rant begins.

Roger Ebert's latest blog post makes me feel a little better about my growing curmudgeonliness, er, sense of disconnectedness from the culture around me. He begins by quoting a writer I've never heard of, Marshall McLuhan:

"Most people...still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world."

So far, this all sounds like the kind of ivory-tower "critical theory" claptrap that spooked me away from pursuing a Master's degree in literature. But the post becomes quite a bit more interesting when Ebert applies McLuhan's rearview theory to his own life. And here's the section that really caught my eye:

In the media, I am analog by training and long habit. Phonograph records seem logical to me. Now that I can obtain any music in an instant on the internet, the music is no longer present. When I owned an LP album, I possessed something tangible. When I download an album from iTunes, I can listen to it, but I possess nothing I can touch. When I enter a theater and see a movie, I experience it differently than when I watch a video. The instant availability of tens of thousands of movies diminishes them somehow. In my nature I subscribe to the principle that a movie involves a screening in a place and at a time. The movie is an event.

I do not make the mistake of believing my experience is better than those raised in digital immersion. Nor should they believe theirs is superior to mine. We are simply different; I have an older frame of reference. The fact is that my argument with video games may be a matter of my embedded nature. The thought of spending hours playing one fills me with dismay. Nor are many gamers eager to read Balzac's Lost Illusions, which I have just finished. Some are open to both. I applaud them.

Bingo. Now, I haven't read Balzac myself, nor do I think it likely that I ever will. But this is merely a difference between my tastes and Ebert's (or possibly an example of my own embedded nature, being a generation younger than him; certainly I'm more open to superhero movies than he seems to be!). Aside from that, however, what he says about tangible media so completely mirrors my own feelings that I wish I'd written it myself. I especially like the bit about how movies used to have a real significance that has been lessened by the evolution of home (or, I suppose these days, personal) video. I was just saying something along those lines to a younger coworker the other day... a much younger coworker who has no memory of  what it was like back when you had to see an incredible movie as many times in the theater as you could, because once it was gone there was no guarantee you'd ever see it again. He couldn't imagine such a thing; I have moments when I miss it.

It doesn't really matter, I suppose. Human beings have been lamenting for centuries how different things are now than when they were kids, and how, in their eyes, things used to be better. But it is nevertheless good to occasionally find some reassurance that you're not the first to feel that way, as it often seems.

Incidentally, I told you the next couple entries wouldn't mention the space shutt-- oops. Sorry.

Over on my Flickr photostream, where the image from the previous entry resides, our friend Cranky Robert asked if I could explain a bit about the book you see in that photo standing alongside my bottle of The Good Stuff. I thought some others among the Loyal Readers might be curious about that as well, so here is an extended and somewhat reworked version of what I said over there:

The book is a childhood treasure of mine, a Christmas gift I received when I was ten or eleven. (If I recall correctly -- and I'll admit that I might not -- it was a stocking stuffer along with a non-fiction book about black holes and the novelization of the Disney movie The Black Hole.) Copyrighted in 1979, two years before the first orbiter actually reached space, Shuttle: The World's First Spaceship was a work of pop-science, essentially a primer for laypeople (and precocious 11-year-olds like myself) on just what the shuttle was, how it was supposed to work, and why it was going to be cool. Like so many similar publications from that general era -- I'm thinking primarily of magazines like OMNI, Science Digest, and Popular Mechanics, as well as a number of book-length works by so-called "futurologists" -- it was breathlessly optimistic and filled with wild predictions of space stations, orbital factories and laboratories, solar-power-collecting satellites that would beam energy back to Earth, and, eventually, vast cylindrical colonies in space. And all of these would be constructed and/or serviced by shuttles and their descendants, which would of course be refinements of the shuttle's spaceplane design, and not Apollo-style capsules, which is where we're headed back to now in the post-shuttle era. All that stuff about cities in space may sound laughable now, but it really wasn't so outlandish when I was a kid. In a culture where we'd just recently had men walking on the moon, it all seemed plausible, if extremely ambitious. And back then I believed we had the ambition. I wanted to believe that, anyhow.

As you may have gathered, this book was the source of many of my visions of the future that never arrived. I was interested in the shuttles before I read it -- which is why Mom and Dad got it for me as a gift -- but Shuttle: The World's First Spaceship was what really fired up my dreams and gave them specific, real-world forms. More real-world than Star Trek, anyhow. And so, for the purposes of the photo and the occasion, the book seemed like the most appropriate symbol of what I was saying goodbye to. (It was also convenient to hand, and small enough to sit beside the bottle and glass without distracting attention away from them.)

And at this point, I imagine my Loyal Readers have read quite enough about space shuttles for a while. I still have some thoughts on the subject, but I'll hold onto them for the time being and promise the next few entries will be on different subjects...

To the good ships Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour. May history record that they were stepping stones on the way to something wonderful, and not the dead end many would have you believe. Here's to their two brave crews who didn't make it home. And here's also to the dreams of a generation born just slightly too late to have witnessed the glories of Apollo; the shuttles were our spaceships. The fact that they never quite lived up to the promises we were made is disappointing, yes. But they were magnificent machines nevertheless, and they should be remembered as such...

When I flipped on my TV at 3:45 this morning to see if anyone was covering the landing, all I could find was a mess of infomercials, a rerun of the previous night's Tonight Show with Jay Leno, and some talking head blathering on about the debt ceiling. That speaks volumes about this whole situation, doesn't it? Thirty years ago, all three major broadcast networks (this was before Fox, of course) devoted hours to the comings and goings of the space shuttles. Today people have other things on their minds, like Magic Bullet blenders and which political party is more effectively holding the nation's economy hostage with their maneuverings. Fortunately, though, I had the Internet to turn to, and the NASA TV website. I got the live video feed up and streaming just in time to hear the double sonic boom as Atlantis homed in on Kennedy Space Center.

I'll be honest, I was feeling pretty anxious as I sat there alone in my home office in the wee, dark hours, surrounded by an empty house and a silent world. I had this irrational fear that in spite of all the checks and inspections, something was going to happen to Atlantis as she re-entered, or as she touched down, and the whole damn shuttle program would end on a note of tragedy and ignominy. But no... it was a perfect landing, as smooth as a high mountain lake on a windless day. The only way it could've been better was if the sun had been up. There's not much to see during night landings until the shuttle crosses the threshold of the runway and gets illuminated by the floodlights. Oh, NASA tries to make things interesting with night-vision cameras and a feed from the pilot's heads-up display -- and I'll admit it is kind of neat to see the runway lights rising up out of the darkness through the cockpit window -- but for this last, final, ultimate landing, it would've been really wonderful for Atlantis to be gleaming a triumphant white in a blue sky as she coasted past lush green swamps and waterways flashing like mirrors. C'est la vie, I suppose.

The last space shuttle came to a complete stop at 5:57:54 a.m. EDT, or 3:57 here in Salt Lake City. I continued to watch until 4:20, even though nothing was visibly happening. (I remember being so impatient as a kid watching the coverage of the early missions, because I expected the astronauts to just fling open the shuttle's door and hop out immediately after landing, the way my various fictional space heroes did. I had no idea what was taking them so long!) As odd as this may sound, I was simply enjoying the sight of the orbiter resting on the runway, her details gradually filling in as the sky brightened behind her. There were lights in the cockpit windows, shining out with a warm amber glow, and the scene reminded me -- rather incongruously -- of those idealized paintings of woodsy cabins after a long, successful day of fishing. I found myself imagining the mission commander walking around beneath her, inspecting and admiring his ship while enjoying the cool, moist air on his skin and the warmth and smell from the coffee cup in his hand. Or perhaps I was imagining myself doing those things. For a moment there, I really wasn't sure.

I couldn't stay up until the astronauts disembarked, as much as I wanted to. The sun may have been rising over Florida, but it was still practically the middle of the night in SLC, and I had a long day of work to look forward to, and a concert tonight that will keep me up late again, and I don't sleep as much as I ought to anyhow. So with a half-smile that was a mixture of sadness and satisfaction, I said my goodbyes to the space shuttle Atlantis, clicked off my computer, and went back to bed for a couple hours. And as I was drifting off, the DJ in my head served up a fragment of an old song, Bob Seger's "Against the Wind," a line about deadlines and commitments, and a mood of being resigned to an unadventurous adulthood even while your spirit is still yearning for something else...

Do you suppose the real reason why NASA granted Atlantis an extra day in space was so the shuttle program wouldn't end on the 42nd anniversary of the first moon landing? Hmmmm.

The sign says it all:

I've learned that Atlantis had one final job to perform after undocking from the ISS and before returning home. Earlier today, the crew deployed a tiny satellite called PicoSat from a canister in her payload bay. Weighing in at only eight pounds, PicoSat's function is to send back data on the performance of its own solar power cells, in hopes of learning something that could be useful for future space hardware. PicoSat is, of course, the last payload that will ever be deployed by a U.S. space shuttle, the 180th over the last three decades.

Atlantis looks to be in good shape and the weather forecast is favorable for a deorbit burn following her 200th orbit for this flight, leading up to a scheduled landing at 5:56 tomorrow morning, Eastern time (that'll be 3:56 here in Utah). If something goes wrong, she'll try again at the end of her 201st orbit, coming down at 7:32 AM Eastern (5:32 Mountain time). I've been thinking I shouldn't even try to get up for the event -- after all, I don't sleep enough as it is, and this past week has been worse than usual in that regard, and I have a job to get to and plans for tomorrow evening that will probably result in yet another late night -- but like I've been saying all along, this is important. Odds are I'm going to be very bleary-eyed when I stagger into work tomorrow...

Photo source.

I don't buy a lot of books anymore -- long story -- and Salt Lake is lucky enough to have a handful of good independent shops that somehow survived the corporate incursions of the '90s, but I still thought this cartoon was deadly accurate:

Atlantis in the light of the rising sun, shortly after casting off from the space station last night:


Photo source.

Earlier this morning, the connecting hatches between shuttle Atlantis and the International Space Station closed for the last time.

I know I keep writing variations on the same theme, "last this" and "final that," and it's probably starting to get a bit tedious for Readers who don't share my fascination with human spaceflight. But please understand that I have to do this. Each and every one of these landmarks is important. We need to mark them, because these last two weeks are the closing words of a chapter in a future history book. And very possibly, they're the end of several generations' dreams as well. I'm trying to be optimistic about the future of the space program, I really am. I know of four separate private-industry groups that are working on manned vehicles capable of reaching low-earth orbit, including one spaceplane that's designed to land on a runway like the shuttle, and there are probably more I don't know about. But with news that Congress is looking to cut NASA's annual budget -- which, by the way, is not the outrageously high percentage of the federal budget most people believe it is, but is in fact smaller than the amount we're spending every year to air-condition military tent cities in Afghanistan -- as well as rumblings that some folks want to deorbit the just-barely-finished station as soon as 2015... with a cultural zeitgeist that no longer seems to have much interest in the Final Frontier, and a nagging, dread-filled sense that the whole damn country is falling apart while we surf for porn on the InterWebs... well, it's hard to keep telling myself the United States is going to be launching people into space again anytime soon, let alone going back to deep space. American robots, maybe... but actual Americans? I just don't know anymore. Once upon a time, I thought it was simply, logically inevitable that human beings -- Americans, to be precise -- would explore and settle and spread out across space. It seemed as natural a progression to me as manifest destiny must've seemed to people in the 19th century. And of course, I figured the progression would never falter, but just keep going ever higher, ever farther. But now I'm wondering, with a big tablespoon of bitter disappointment, if perhaps these ideas were only the naive thinking of a kid who watched too much Star Trek and was dumb enough to believe.

Before the crew of Atlantis returned to their ship for good this morning, they assembled with the crew of the ISS for a little ceremony, in which the station commander was formally presented with a model of a shuttle orbiter and a small American flag. The model will stand in for a more impressive monument, commemorating the winged spacecraft that assembled the outpost in space. It was immediately mounted on a bulkhead alongside the forward hatch in the station module known as Node 2, where 35 shuttle missions have docked. The flag, meanwhile, is something of a sacred NASA artifact. It flew with astronauts John Young and Robert Crippen on board shuttle Columbia during the very first mission, STS-1, 30 years ago. It will now live on the ISS, fastened to the Node 2 hatch cover itself, with the idea that it will remain there until the next American crew on board an American spacecraft comes up to retrieve it. And then if all goes well, it will fly again the next time a manned American spacecraft ventures beyond low Earth orbit, bound for the moon, or Mars, or the asteroids.

I only hope that it's not still there, forgotten, when the ISS comes back down to Earth...

Atlantis is scheduled to undock shortly after midnight tonight, Mountain time.

The trailer for Pixar's adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs' classic Barsoom stories, John Carter, made its online debut two days ago, so probably everybody and their cat has seen it by now, but just in case you haven't:

I'm very, very pleased and excited by what I'm seeing here. Oh, I could quibble about some of the details. I don't remember any magic blue glowing rocks from the books (although it has been decades since I've read them, so maybe they've just slipped my mind), and the airships of Helium are far different than I imagined them (which was pretty much like Jabba's sail barge in Return of the Jedi), and Tars Tarkas  (the green guy at about 1:09) is neither as tall nor as buff as he ought to be... but I don't want to be another damn Comic Book Guy griping about an otherwise enjoyable movie because it doesn't take into account the critical events of issue #327 or whatever. The fact is, this trailer is showing a lot more things that are faithful to the books than not: the opening scenes with Edgar Rice Burroughs himself as a character; John Carter's origins as a Confederate veteran and a cowboy; Barsoom being a dying planet kept alive by great machines; Carter's ability to make superhuman leaps (Mars has lower gravity than Earth, so his Earth-trained muscles are more powerful there); and most of all, the grandeur and brutality of an alien word populated by ancient, decadent civilizations. And even if Dejah Thoris isn't walking around mostly naked as she was described in the books, the costumes nevertheless look right. Consider, for example, the harness and breast plate Carter is wearing in some scenes, and then look at Michael Whelan's definitive cover art from the 1970s paperback edition of A Princess of Mars (i.e., the one that I read as a kid). Based on this trailer, at least, the people behind the movie get it. They understand what was cool in the books, what appealed to the 12-year-old boys who loved them. And if they had to change some details to match modern sensibilities -- remember, A Princess of Mars was first published in 1912, a full century ago -- well, I'd rather they get the overall spirit right than make a slavish but lifeless adaptation, or one that rips off a few key ideas and bears no real resemblance to the source material.

I've been cautiously optimistic up until now. Now I'm downright giddy... I want to see this in a way that very few movies of the past few years have appealed to me...

You'd never know it based on my recent posting habits, but believe it or not, I really am interested in things other than space shuttles. No, really! I'm serious... stop laughing! I'm interested in all sorts of things! There's movies and old cars and pin-up art and Googie architecture and neon signs and toys and travel and animals and historical subjects of all kinds... And I'm positively fascinated by old photographs. I love looking at them, even photos of people I don't know or have no real connection to. To invoke a cliche'd idea, the images are like windows to the past, and if you stare long enough and hard enough, you start to feel as if you can slip right through them and enter that other time, talk to these long-dead people, and generally experience... some place else.

The problem with old photos is that they're often in pretty bad condition: dirty, scratched, faded... sometimes, in the case of paper prints, they've been creased or stained, or they're missing pieces. And all that of course makes it difficult to see the very details that are so fascinating. Fortunately, technology has made restoring old photos much easier. Even laypeople with consumer-level equipment can do things with images that would've been downright impossible only a few years ago. And if you put a professional on the job, the results can be nothing short of astounding.

Consider, for example, this before-and-after comparison:


The image on the left is a tintype, a photo printed on a thin sheet of metal, dating to the 1870s. The image on the right is the restored version. The restoration brought back so much detail that the photo's owner can now date it using the wedding ring on her ancestor's hand -- a ring that was virtually invisible in the original, discolored version.

It's no secret that I am somewhat uncomfortable with many aspects of our modern digital age, and especially with the ease with which movies and photographs can be altered. You can no longer trust that what you're seeing is what was originally captured, and images no longer have a sense of permanence... although I suppose you could argue they were never permanent anyway, considering what simple time did to that tintype. But in any event, this sort of restoration is one aspect of digital technology that I am completely onboard with. I just hope the owner of that image above kept the original tintype as well; the actual artifact is as important as the image, in my opinion, as much a link with the past. Perhaps moreso, since it is the traveler that's brought the image down through the years.

You can read the full details of this restoration here, if you're interested, and check out some of this man's other restoration work here. Simply amazing stuff...

Oh, on a somewhat related note (in the sense of old photography), did you hear about the lost Charlie Chaplin film purchased in a UK junk shop last week for the equivalent of about five bucks? The movie is a propaganda piece from 1917 called Zepped -- it was apparently intended to calm Londoners' fears of zeppelin attacks during World War I -- and there's only one other known copy of it. It never fails to astound me when stuff like this turns up in such prosaic settings.You never know what's out there hiding in people's attics and garages, and oftentimes, they don't know either. You can read about the find here, and more about Zepped here.

Attribution where it's due: I found the tintype restoration story via Boing Boing.

First, I got choked up over the video from the close-out crew, now I'm actually a little moist-eyed over this:

That's a composite photo of a guy named Chris Bray and his father attending the first and last shuttle launches, three decades apart. Or, as he called it, "The picture we waited 30 years to complete." What an amazing honor it must've been for him to be present at not just one but two such historic events, to be able to say you bookended an era. And to be able to experience both events with your dad... well, I'm not too proud to admit that I envy this guy.

My father and I have never been what most people would consider close. We've had our moments, like those times I rode along with him when he was driving truck, and more recently in the mornings, when he's gotten in the habit of dropping by my house with a cup of coffee before I leave for work, but for the most part, we've just never clicked in that Hallmark Channel kind of way. I don't blame him for that. The culprit was more a matter of circumstance than anything. When I was a young schoolboy, he worked afternoon shifts from 2 to 11, so he rarely got to see me while I was awake. And later, when I started to grow up, we just seemed to lock horns over damn near everything. My mom's theory is that our respective temperaments were too much alike, and we both wanted to be the alpha. Which I suppose is probably true.

But one thing we've always shared is an interest in the space program, especially the hardware. Back in the early days of the shuttle program, when the orbiters were landing at Edwards Air Force Base in California, Dad used to suggest we load up the camper and take a family road trip down there to see one. And then the primary landing site shifted to Florida, which made the logistics of attending a landing far more difficult, and we stopped talking about it so much. And now the program is just a heartbeat from being over, and it's too late. We missed our chance, just never got around around to doing it, and I really wish we had. I suspect there are a lot of fathers and sons out there who could tell a similar story.

I wonder if Chris Bray appreciates what he and his dad managed to pull off. For his sake, I hope he does.

Via.

Atlantis made its "backflip" maneuver earlier this morning, allowing the crew in the International Space Station to take high-resolution photos of her belly to check for any damage to the heat-shield tiles. The actual Rendezvous Pitch Maneuver, its formal name, takes about nine minutes. Here's a time-lapsed version:

The RPM was instituted, of course, following the Columbia disaster, when a damaged section along Columbia's leading wing edge allowed superhot plasma generated during re-entry to melt delicate systems and structures inside the wing. So there is a certain grim overtone to the proceedings. But it is nevertheless a beautiful sight, like a woman turning 360 degrees to show off her new dress. But once again, the voice of Mission Control reminds us... this is the last time this woman will ever show off for us. Savor every moment with her, because soon she'll be gone.

Atlantis docked with the station at 11:07 EDT, about one hour after this maneuver began, and the hatches between them were opened at 12:47, only about 10 minutes ago as of the time of this writing. If you're keeping track of the trivia, this is the 12th time Atlantis has docked with the ISS, and the 46th time a space shuttle has docked to any space station. Nine of those occasions were to Russia's old Mir station,  37 to the ISS.

And now I think it's time for breakfast...I really should have eaten before I went down the rabbit-hole of mission updates and related videos!

Given the events of this morning, I think there's really only one possible song I can post tonight:
 

Ah, Rush. The Canadian prog-rock so beloved of nerdy, intellectual fourteen-year-old boys and Ayn Rand fans (often the same people, now that I think about it). And also, weirdly, by the mullet-and-muscle-car set I used to hang on the fringes of. I was never a huge fan of these guys -- a greatest-hits compilation is all the Rush I require, thank you, and then I really only like about two-thirds of the songs on the disc -- but this particular song raises the hair on my arms. The throbbing synthesizer is very 1981, but also very dramatic and futuristic... at least in terms of how we used to imagine the future. Nobody in '81 anticipated Auto-Tune. I'll happily take the synths over that thing.

Anyhow, this song was obviously inspired by STS-01, the first shuttle flight made by the lost Columbia. The voices you hear layered over the music -- part of what makes the song so awesome, in my opinion -- are the real thing, taken directly from the tapes of that historic launch. And all the non-Rush clips in this video are authentic to the first flight as well. If nothing else, this song and video should demonstrate just how prominent the early days of the shuttle program were in the North American zeitgeist, as reflected by our pop culture. People were excited about the shuttles back then. It's sometimes easy to forget just how excited. There was so much hope and optimism about where we were going, so much national pride generated by our achievements in space. Healthy, non-militaristic, non-jingoistic, non-partisan pride, I might add. The '80s usually don't seem that distant to me; I can clearly remember so many of the textures of everyday life back then. But tonight... well, things have changed so much in this country that the '80s may as well have happened in the Cretaceous Era.

And now, to bed, I think. It's been a long damn day. But first, maybe I'll just click over to NASA TV and watch a few minutes of the earth slipping by beneath Atlantis on the live feed... so peaceful... Goodnight, kids...

Photo Credit: (NASA/Dick Clark)

"A sentimental journey into history." That's what the Houston flight controller called it as Atlantis soared into a clearing sky laced with thin, patchy clouds this morning. In the end, the weather that had everyone worried last night caused only a slight delay, a couple of minutes, and the shuttle lifted off at 11:29 Eastern time. I missed seeing it live, as I feared I would. Stupid commute. I've been feeling vaguely guilty about it all day, as silly as that sounds. But you know, I saw the very first launch live. I was late for school that day so I could see it. I guess I feel like I should've done the same to honor the final launch as well. To bring everything properly full circle. But duty called, and like a good little corporate drone, I obeyed. Needless to say, my heart wasn't really into looking for misplaced commas today.

Fortunately, the Internet provides in a way that Walter Cronkite never could, so I've been able to watch the replay, at least. If you didn't see it live yourself, you can catch the full 10-minute clip, covering main-engine start to external tank sep, here. Some of those "POV" videos in the past have been pretty washed out and uninteresting, but this one is superb, especially right at the end when the orbiter is getting ready to drop the external tank. The lighting is perfect; you can make out every tile on the shuttle's belly, every ridge on surface of the tank. You can even see a bolt sliding open on the tank's forward mounting bracket at the moment of separation. Truly magnificent.

This somewhat ominous photo of Launch Pad 39A was taken earlier today:

An iconic shot of Columbia standing on the pad prior to its launch on the first-ever shuttle mission, STS-01, in April of 1981. Notice anything different about the Columbia's appearance compared to more recent shuttle stacks?

The external fuel tank was only painted white for the first two missions before the engineers realized they could save several hundred pounds in weight by leaving it off. The more familiar orange coloration is the natural appearance of the spray-on insulation that coats the tanks. It's funny, though... the painted tank was only used for two out of 135 missions, and 30 years ago to boot, but this is how I imagine space shuttles -- spaceships in general, really -- ought to look: clean and white, sparkling beneath the sun (or the floodlights, as the case may be). In fact, I was kind of hoping the paint might make a return for the final launch, just to bring everything full circle, but I suppose engineers aren't as sentimental about such things.

Incidentally, it's starting to look as if the final launch might be delayed. The forecasts are showing only a 30% possibility of favorable weather tomorrow, and I've just read of a lightning strike this morning within a third of a mile of the pad, which may have damaged Atlantis or the equipment around the pad itself...

Photo source.

Here's a sight we haven't seen much since the shuttles began landing regularly at Kennedy Space Center, the same place they're processed and launched from, instead of on the other side of the continent at Edwards Air Force Base:

This was the way the shuttle orbiters first entered the public consciousness during the Enterprise's ATL flights, before we civilians ever got a look at the now-familiar "stack" of solid-rocket boosters and external fuel tank, and it's how the orbiters get home if they have to land somewhere other than at Kennedy. Basically, we're looking at a tow-truck operation. It's a tow of staggering statistics, a roughly 90-ton spacecraft physically anchored to the top of a 159-ton airliner, but a tow, nevertheless. If you don't know your airplanes, the "tow truck" is a Boeing 747, still one of the largest airliners in the world even after 40 years of operation. NASA has two of them (technically referred to as the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, or SCA) that have been specially fitted out for shuttle-hauling duty. Interestingly, the first was purchased from American Airlines and was still sporting the AA livery -- red, white and blue stripes running horizontally down the length of the fuselage -- during the early days with Enterprise. And here's another fun bit of trivia: on both planes, the mechanism the orbiter mounts to sports hand-painted instructions to "Attach Orbiter Here... Black Side Down."

One of the SCAs came through the Salt Lake area with an orbiter on its back about a decade ago, circling the valley several times before landing at SLC International, where it was on display to the public overnight. As I recall, I caught a glimpse of it flying along the eastern mountain range, but like a damn fool I didn't make the time to go to the airport and actually see it. Now in the waning days, I'm kicking myself hard for that. It'd be nice if the orbiter destined for the California museum stopped by here on its way west, but I'm not holding my breath...

Photo credit: Ken Kuhl

McSweeney's Internet Tendency has posted an incisive and terribly important piece of psychological insight: a list entitled "What Your Favorite '80s Band Says About You." But while many of the items on this list are right on target -- if your fave is Big Country, for example, you probably have a Highlander poster in a tube in the back of your closet; get it? Big Country was a Scottish band, Highlander is about an immortal Scotsman -- I have to confess that I'm utterly baffled by the one that best applies to me. Here it is:

Rick Springfield: Your wallet weighs over a pound.

Huh? WTF is that supposed to mean? Anyone? My wallet... weighs... over a pound. Why would it weigh so much? And what does liking Rick Springfield have to do with that? Sometimes, I feel very dense...

As we count down to the final ever space shuttle mission, I thought I'd post a few photos from the early days of the program, just to remind myself and my Loyal Readers of a time when the world was young and these vehicles were revolutionary, and we couldn't wait to get them up there because we knew it was going to be a glorious adventure. First up, the official rollout of the prototype shuttle Enterprise on September 17, 1976 (two days after my seventh birthday), with some very special guests in attendance:


If you don't recognize them, that's the cast of the original Star Trek television series, minus William Shatner who was apparently too important to show up. (Actually, I don't know why Shatner wasn't there, but it's no secret that he frequently behaved like a colossal jerk during the '70s and '80s.) From left to right, we're looking at Dr. James D. Fletcher, NASA Administrator; DeForest Kelley (Bones); George Takei (Sulu); James Doohan (Scotty, hard to recognize with the beard); Nichelle Nichols (Uhura); Leonard Nimoy (Spock, of course); Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek's creator and chief promoter); some unidentified dude, probably a NASA official; and Walter Koenig (Chekov).

When the Movable Type software that underlies this blog got upgraded a few months ago, I was hopeful that one of my most persistent and maddening problems -- an unrelenting flood of comment spam -- would finally be a thing of the past. Sadly, no. The sick bastards who create that shit must've had a uproarious laugh at my naivete. Their effluent started trickling back in within a few days of the upgrade. While my friends struggled to figure out how to navigate the new sign-in protocol, the bots were somehow slipping right past the hurdles and creating fully authenticated user identities for themselves, from which they could spew their annoying garbage with impunity. Yes, that's right: several of my Loyal Readers still can't leave a comment to save their own lives, but the spammers are able to set up pre-appoved accounts and publish their crap instantly, without even being held for moderation. And, just like it did before, the amount of spam I've been receiving has been inching up day by day. I've just spent several hours this evening manually clearing out a couple thousand phony comments accumulated over a mere two-day period.

It isn't just the volume of spam that's increased, either. The actual spam messages themselves have gotten larger, too; many of them are very, very long, essay-length strings of badly translated Engrish that appear to be masquerading as a some kind of epic folk tale but ultimately come down to a shill for knock-off designer shoes, or some damn thing. Sometimes the bots don't even bother with the translation, and leave behind a big block of Chinese characters. At least I know where this shit is coming from, I suppose. But due to the way my back-end blog interface is constructed, I end up having to do a lot of scrolling to get past these huge tumorous things just so I can mark them for deletion. Sometimes I'm able to delete them in batches, which speeds things along, but just as often, the spammers publish a single message from each of a hundred identities, so I have to take them out one at a time.

Well, tonight I've reached the end of my rope. Again. The whole time I was wading through this stuff, removing it from my sight click by tedious click, I kept hearing a line from the classic Cold War movie WarGames: "After very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks." Indeed, sir, indeed.

I'm still hoping to find a solution to all this. A couple of helpful people have asked why I don't install a Captcha module, one of those things that ask you to re-type the characters you see in a little box in order to prove your humanity; others have suggested I abandon Movable Type and migrate Simple Tricks to another blogging platform altogether. Unfortunately, neither of those options work for me, for various reasons. (The Captcha thing is especially frustrating. I know that system works well for those who have it, but for some ridiculous reason, Movable Type -- at least the instance of it that I'm dealing with -- isn't set up to work with it.) So in the meantime, I've come to the unhappy decision to once again just shut down commenting altogether. As I'm sure I said the last time, I really hate to do this. The conversation with my friends and readers has been one of the great pleasures of having a blog. But I just can't put up with this anymore. Lately, I've been spending more time dealing with spam than actually blogging.

I don't know... maybe it doesn't matter. There hasn't been much conversation in a very long time anyhow. The last legitimate comment I received was over a month ago. And as much as I hate to say it, blogging itself seems to be on decline. Out of the little circle of non-professional bloggers I've enjoyed reading, only the indomitable Jaquandor still seems to be producing with gusto. Even my own habits have slacked off in recent months. I really hope I'm wrong, because blogs and blogging have been a pretty big deal to me over the past decade, but maybe it was just another passing fad whose time has come and is now rapidly going. Like I said, I just don't know. And right now, it's late and I'm tired and frustrated and more than a little depressed about all this, so I'm probably not thinking too clearly anyhow.

If anyone out there would like to talk to me about something I write here, I invite you to send a message to jason (at) jasonbennion.com. You can also find me on Facebook, where I post links to every entry that appears on this blog. I know these options are sub-optimal, but they're the best I can offer at this time...