Usually when I hear that some bluenose bureaucrat is getting all uptight over something the average grown-up wouldn’t even notice, it’s happening right here in my own backyard. So imagine my surprise to learn that it isn’t Utah’s state liquor board that’s banned a particular brand of wine because its label features an image of a naked woman and a bicycle. No, it is in fact Alabama that has a problem with a century-old Art Nouveau illustration of a curiously nippleless nymph. The winemaker is naturally developing an ad campaign based on the ban, and I suspect that more people have seen the “offensive” label in the last 24 hours — because of the news coverage and blogs like mine — than would have in months or even years if the prudes had just kept their tut-tutting to themselves. The sorts who worry about this sort of thing never, ever learn the lesson that making a fuss only attracts more attention to the thing they don’t want people to see.
I’ve been pondering something tonight… I like to alphabetize my music collection, but some bands make that difficult for me by naming themselves after the lead singer plus the backup group, e.g., Tommy James and the Shondells, Diana Ross and the Supremes, etc. So, should “singer + backup” names like Huey Lewis and the News go under “H” (treating the entire band name as a single unit) or “L,” as in “Lewis and the News, Huey,” which I believe is how the Library of Congress would probably do it?
Any of my Loyal Readers have any thoughts on this?
Hey, kids… sorry for the long silence, for which I was thoroughly excoriated in an email from one of you netcrap-cravin’ Loyal Readers earlier today. To explain, I was out of town for a couple of days this weekend. Before that, I was preparing to go out of town. After that, I was recovering from being out of town. You get the idea.
I’m afraid I still don’t have too much to offer my poor audience this afternoon, but since some of you are apparently feeling abandoned — again, my apologies — here’s a neat-o self-portrait of what I would’ve looked like if I’d been an agency proofreader about 45 years ago:
Not too different, really, although I haven’t worn a tie in years. If I had to wear a tie to work, though, a skinny vintage one with a cool diamond design would be just the ticket.
I built this little amusement at MadMenYourself.com, a promotional site for the AMC television series Mad Men. I don’t have cable myself, so I’ve been unable to follow the show on any kind of regular basis, but I have caught a few episodes and, I have to admit, my day job is frighteningly similar to what you see on this series, just with less smoking and lunchtime drinking. Well, less smoking anyhow…
I found the link to the MadMen-izer via my friend Karen. If you go over there, make sure you have your speakers or headphones on so you can soak in the lounge-tastic background music…
Via Wil Wheaton, a little tidbit that ought to be of interest to some of my Loyal Readers, particularly Cranky Robert:
It seems that the prog-rock band Pink Floyd performed live instrumental music during the BBC’s coverage of the Apollo 11 landing, something I’d never heard before. David Gilmour refers to it as a “jam session” in his remembrance today in the Guardian newspaper. The piece was called “Moonhead,” and, if I’m understanding correctly, they played it during cutaways when the NASA action slowed down. The entire 12-minute piece was played uninterrupted later in the broadcast. You can hear it on YouTube, naturally; according to the notes on the video clip, it’s never been officially recorded but has turned up on a couple of bootlegs.
Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon
July 1969 A.D.
We came in peace for all mankind
(The Lunar Module Eagle touched down at 14:17:40 MST on July 20, 1969, if you didn’t get the significance of the time code on this entry. The text above comes from a plaque mounted to one of the Eagle‘s landing legs. It’s still there at Tranquility Base, along with the descent stage Armstrong and Aldrin left behind. The photo is, of course, Buzz Aldrin, as photographed by Neil Armstrong. If you look closely, you can see Neil and part of the LM reflected in Buzz’s visor.)
The image above is something I meant to comment on Friday, when it was first released, but obviously I didn’t get around to it. What you’re looking at there, if you haven’t already seen and heard about it, is a photo recently taken by a spacecraft called the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently circling the moon. Similar to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that took that awesome photo of the Martian rover a couple years ago, the LRO is a mapping probe equipped with a powerful camera. When the probe’s system check-out is complete and it has entered the proper mapping orbit, it’s going to start photographing the entire surface of the moon at a high resolution, theoretically as preparation for the return of humans to our nearest neighbor. Regardless of whether that actually happens in our lifetimes, though, the LRO promises to send back some astoundingly detailed images of the lunar landscape… and naturally some of the first pictures it’s taken during this check-out phase are of places we’ve already been, namely five of the six Apollo landing sites.
They all show exactly what you’d expect to see, the squarish, reflective, obviously artificial shapes of the descent stages that were left behind when the astronauts returned to their Command Modules. And yet these fuzzy low-rez photos — the LRO’s camera isn’t operating at its full capabilities yet; better-quality photos of the Apollo sites are promised for later on, after the calibrations are complete — raise the hair on my arms and fill me with pride. Those shiny little objects were made by human hands and sent across a void of a quarter-million miles — think about that, a quarter-million miles — and they’re still there, untouched in the vacuum of space, silent testimony to the inventiveness and determination of the silly hairless apes swarming across the face of the blue planet next door. They’re still waiting for us to come back, you know, those abandoned artifacts.
You can see the rest of the LRO Apollo photos here. The image of the Apollo 14 site is especially fascinating; on that one, the lighting conditions were such that you can see the foot trail left by the astronauts who carried a scientific package out away from their Lunar Module. I can’t wait to see the full-rez shots.
In the meantime, if you haven’t been listening to that time-capsule audio stream of the Apollo 11 transmissions, now is the time to tune in. The Eagle has just cast off from Columbia, and Armstrong and Aldrin are getting ready for their descent… exciting stuff, even if I already know how the story turns out!
When the late Walter Cronkite said that at the conclusion of each of his broadcasts, people believed him. There was no automatic assumption of partisan bias in the media, and if anyone ever accused him of spinning a story to the advantage of one political cause or another, I’m not aware of it. Of course, things were different in his heyday, the 1960s and ’70s. Newsmen of Cronkite’s generation strove, for the most part, to deliver the impartial facts, and that’s what viewers and readers expected to receive. Not the phony-baloney “balance” of today, when both sides of any debate are given equal credibility and weight, even when one of them is clearly wrong, ignorant, or batshit-crazy. Not reporting that reinforces the viewer’s own ideology and view of the world. But facts, carefully gathered through good old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism, research, and vetting. On the rare occasion when Cronkite did offer his personal opinion — as in his well-known 1968 editorial statement that the Vietnam War was unwinnable — he spoke with an authority that was earned from a thorough understanding of the subject. The anchorpeople today are mostly just reading copy written by someone else.
Walter Cronkite was one of a small handful of men I find difficult to describe in any meaningful way beyond saying, “he was a neat guy.” Like Johnny Carson or Ricardo Montalban, two other “neat guys” I grew up instinctively admiring, Cronkite emanated a particular sort of very appealing masculinity. It wasn’t a macho thing. It was based less on physical prowess or good looks than on intelligence, kindness, a sense of fair play, the confidence of one who knows his job and loves doing it well, and above all else, an air of dignity. Just try to imagine Cronkite reading the superficial pap that passes for news today… can you picture him discussing Jon and Kate What’s-Their-Names, or who’s likely to win American Idol? Or hosting one of those sexual-predator entrapment hours or talking day after day about Michael Jackson’s death? Can you hear his voice running down the more tawdry details of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal? No? I’m not surprised. His definition of journalism wouldn’t have included that sort of tabloid nonsense.
There’s an empty storefront on Main Street here in downtown SLC, just across from the light-rail station where I get off in the mornings, in which someone has set up two big video displays in the windows, one on either side of the door. These displays run an endless loop of PSAs and promos for the Salt Lake Film Society, presumably for the purpose of informing and entertaining the captive audiences who are standing around waiting for their trains. Or something. Personally, I don’t find the vids all that entertaining or informing most of the time. Moreover, I find I’m increasingly annoyed by the ubiquity of video screens in our environment. Ironic, I know, given my primary interests and hobbies, but honestly, there are times when I’d really rather not have the distraction. At least the loop changes every couple of days so I don’t have to see and hear the same damn thing day after day. And every once in a while, something will turn up that actually catches my interest.
Today, for example, the screens were running the original trailer for 2001: A Space Odyssey. (I have no idea if this has anything to do with all the Apollo anniversary stuff going on, or if it’s pure coincidence.) Well, naturally I had to stand and watch that iconic footage before heading on into the office.
Somehow, though, the experience of watching scenes from 2001 projected onto the window of an empty storefront in the year 2009, with a dreadlocked homeless guy reflected in the glass, is curiously lacking in magic…
So, for the past several hours, I’ve been listening here at work to that Apollo audio feed I wrote about last night. It’s something of a strange experience, to be honest… I’m very conscious of the fact that this is a recording, that I’m sitting in my cubicle in the year 2009 and that everything I’m hearing happened two months before I was even born, and yet it all seems so immediate. I find myself feeling genuine anxiety as I wait for the next exchange, wondering what’s happening up there and what the astronauts and controllers are doing right now. And then I remember that I ought to be thinking in the past tense, that there is no spacecraft currently zooming outward from the earth at 11,000 feet per second, that some of the voices on this feed belong to people who aren’t even alive anymore, and I feel a little silly. But I keep listening anyhow.
Only a few hours from now, we will mark the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11, the spaceflight mission that delivered Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins to the moon. I personally consider the Apollo program the greatest achievement of the human species, a feat of engineering, scientific know-how, and technological advancement that has yet to be matched or surpassed, as well as a testament to humanity’s perseverance and courage. It breaks my heart that so few people today seem to care that once, not so very long ago, mankind found a way to actually leave our planet and go somewhere else. In person, not by robotic proxy. To stand on soil that had never felt a human footprint and just… experience it. To fulfill our heritage and our destiny as explorers, just like the first hunter-gatherers who decided to walk over the hill and see what was over there. How can people not find that absolutely thrilling? And let’s not even speak of those who don’t believe we went. I never will understand how those folks can be so cynical or hold such a dim opinion of their fellow humans as to think we couldn’t possibly have figured out how to do it.
I’m just a tad too young to have experienced this amazing moment in history as it unfolded. I wouldn’t be born for two more months after Armstrong made that giant leap. And even though I’ve seen the documentaries, read the books, and grew up just generally knowing about all this stuff, it’s hard for me to imagine what it must’ve been like for my parents and other people living at that time. Fortunately at times like these, we at least have the Internet.
I’ve learned that NASA is going to begin streaming actual audio recorded during the mission, starting tomorrow morning at 6:32 central daylight time, two hours before the giant Saturn V booster rocket launched the Apollo spacecraft out of the atmosphere. The idea is that we’ll be hearing the transmissions between astronauts, ground teams, and Mission Control at the exact same moments they were broadcast in 1969. It’ll be just like being there… almost…
Details on this nifty simulation can be found in this press release. The audio will be streaming here.
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library is hosting another similar, but more visually punchy site called WeChooseTheMoon, a reference to JFK’s famous speech that set the ball rolling inexorably toward Tranquility Base. And if you’d like a visual to go with the audio, here’s a video recording of the actual TV coverage that you would’ve seen had you been watching the tube on this morning four decades ago. The quality isn’t great, sadly, but I still defy you not to feel a tingle down your back when those mighty engines start to rumble…
