Jimmy Doohan died this morning at the age of 85. It’s hardly a shock — he’s been suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease and made his final public appearance slightly under a year ago — but it still hurts. My beloved Scotty has beamed off to whatever adventure awaits us all beyond this life, and another piece of my childhood is gone. I’m fighting back tears as I type this at an all-too-public computer.
Hey, kids — sorry about the relative paucity of activity around here lately. Real Life gave me the old one-two punch a couple weeks ago, which means I got too busy to blog as much as I wanted to. That wouldn’t be a big deal, except that I’ve continued to run across interesting topics that I’ve wanted to blog about. The end result is a very frustrated blogger, who is currently feeling very behind and more than a little overwhelmed. I hope to churn out quite a bit of content in the next week or two, but chances are I’ll have to abandon some of the ideas I’ve been wanting to play with in the interest of staying current. C’est la vie, I guess. We’ll see how it goes.
In the meantime here’s a little something for you to chew over: it seems that a 19-year-old Australian moviegoer lost the tip of his nose this past weekend in a brawl outside a movie theater. The fight escalated from a disagreement over whether the film Sin City was any good.
Now, I’ve gotten into some pretty heated discussions about the relative merits of particular movies before, but hot enough to resort to mutilation? That’s just… well, I’m really not sure what it is, but it’s a whole lot of something. I can’t begin to imagine being so worked up about a piece of entertainment. If your opponent’s facial features are starting to look tasty because he didn’t like a movie you thought was great, I really think it’s time to seek counseling. Or at the very least you need to learn the phrase “agree to disagree.” After all, it’s only a movie…
I’ve always had a thing for a car without a roof. There’s nothing I like better than driving through a balmy summer’s twilight with the top down and the wind fluttering through what’s left of my hair.
I come by it naturally enough, I suppose. My dad is an Old-Tyme Car Guy who still gets a kick out of souping up engines and burning rubber. He’s owned motorcycles, hot-rods, antiques, classics, and clunkers over the years; I grew up surrounded by his collection and not realizing that it was unusual for one family to own a dozen or more cars. I never did acquire Dad’s passion for tinkering — I’m sorry to say I’m the sort who doesn’t like to get his hands dirty — but I love driving a stylish car and, thanks to my dad’s collection, I’ve been fortunate enough to have access to some very stylish cars indeed.
Just thought my three loyal readers would like to know that Anne dropped into the offices of her apartment complex this afternoon and got the skinny on that accident I described earlier.
It seems the woman who piled her Grand Cherokee into the canal was taking a newly prescribed medication, which either put her to sleep or otherwise affected her mental functions. (She has no memory of what actually happened.) A resident of the complex who witnessed the crash said it was much as I speculated: the Jeep drifted into the driveway, rolled up onto the sidewalk and hammered through the fence without any sign that the driver tried to brake or steer away. The vehicle went airborne across the canal, flipped over, and slid down the bank into the water. I’m not sure if it was this witness or someone else, but someone from the complex earned their good-deed merit badge by plunging into the canal and holding the driver’s head above water until help arrived. The woman’s legs were pinned in the Jeep and she had to be cut out of the wreck, but her injuries were relatively minor, considering: a few broken bones and a lot of bruises.
She got lucky, and I’m glad for her. This story easily could’ve had a much worse ending…
So, to set the scene for today’s Tale of Action and Intrigue, let me explain that my Significant Other lives in a large suburban apartment complex that’s fronted by an irrigation canal. This canal is enclosed on both sides by a six-foot-tall wrought-iron fence, which is presumably intended to keep the neighborhood children out, since it doesn’t do much good at keeping the neighborhood ducks in. Because this canal is so thoroughly segregated by the fence from normal day-to-day activity, I tend to forget it’s even there, or at least I forget that it’s a genuine hazard, and not just some kind of decorative flourish. I drive over it a dozen times a week on my way into or out of the complex, and I pay it no more mind than I do a fire hydrant or a telephone pole. Neither do the hundreds of other drivers who enter and leave through the complex’s driveway every day.
But I can think of at least one person who will be painfully aware of that canal the next time she passes by. That would be the woman whose Jeep Grand Cherokee punched through the fence on Friday and tumbled end-over-end into the water.
It never fails to amaze me how people can be absolute shits to each other during normal, non-apocalyptic circumstances, but they become so heartwarmingly, heartbreakingly human when something bad happens.
I was planning to write a brief, light-hearted entry today to explain why I haven’t been posting much this week, but that doesn’t seem terribly important after seeing the headlines about the London terror attacks. This kind of madness makes me sad no matter where it occurs, but seeing it blacken the heart of one of my favorite places in all the world really hurts.
Hi, kids — I hope everyone out there in InternetLand had a good Fourth of July. The folks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory certainly did. Their Deep Impact space mission (which I previewed for you a month ago) went off without a hitch, slamming its impactor probe into the comet Tempel 1 just before midnight Salt Lake time on Sunday, July 3rd. The boom resulting from an object the size of a washing machine connecting with an object half the size of Manhattan Island at roughly 23,000 miles an hour apparently surprised even the people who designed the probe:
The collision was photographed by the Deep Impact “fly-by spacecraft” (which, conveniently enough, is also the vehicle that released the impactor) as well as the Hubble telescope and a number of other probes, satellites, and observatories. As a result, the Internet today is awash in cool images like the one above. There’s even video taken from the impactor as it approached its final destination. Think back to those missile-cams that so impressed us back during the ’91 Gulf War and you’ll get the idea. If you’re interested in this stuff, you’ll want to start with the mission home page, which includes a gallery of images, video, animation, and artwork. There’s also lots of information about the impactor and the flyby spacecraft, Tempel 1 and comets in general, the technology used to make this happen, and the reasons why scientists thought it would be a good idea to deface one of the other objects in our solar system.
I see in the paper this morning that another local landmark, the old Geneva Steel mill, has fallen in the name of progress.
Now, before you start thinking my unquenchable sense of nostalgia has finally gotten the better of me and caused me to abandon all sense of perspective, let me state for the record that I’m not especially sentimental about decaying old industrial sites. Geneva was ugly when it was in operation, filling the skies of Utah County with orange haze and dumping god-only-knows into Utah Lake, and it was twice as ugly after it ceased operation and commenced to rotting. In addition, it was located in the next valley south of mine, so it’s not like I was seeing it every day and acquiring the affection that comes through constant familiarity. Still, it was familiar, if not intimately so, and its demolition is just one more step in the on-going process that is erasing the landscape I grew up with.
Sandra Day O’Connor announced this morning that she’s retiring from the Supreme Court. I am now filled with dread anticipation for what the tone of the rest of this summer will likely be.